• Work At Home Opportunity for Seniors

Over at Amazon.com someone posted:

I’m a healthy 78 yr. old, financially sound but loaded with energy and ideas on changing things; make them easier, more profitable, beneficial to others, etc. Where to go? What to ask for? Am I alone is detesting “rocking-chair” mentalities who feel “entitled” to retirement and non-functioning behaviors? Not for me. But what do you suggest?

An answer and a question occurred to me:

Answer first:

The e-work trend offers a real solution to just the situation described. Companies are finally waking up to two things: (1) we seniors offer considerable knowledge, experience, and even wisdom, and (2) product not process—results, not “face time”—are what counts. So telecommuting jobs and freelance opportunities are becoming more available, especially with energy and economy concerns acting as a further stimulus. At least that’s what the 250 people we interviewed told us in one way or another.

Undress For Success (the book, you can pre-order here, it comes out in mid-March) is about making money from home, just like this website. We wrote the book and built this site after asking ourselves the same questions as the person on Amazon, and after rummaging around the web only to discover that 9 out of 10 “opportunities” were scams—which is why the subtitle is The Naked Truth About Making Money From Home.

Now the question:

We cover all kinds of existing jobs that people can do at home in the book, but we’re left with a nagging question: What revolutionary task/project is there that smart, eager people like us could do at home using an Internet connection? Cloud computing is all the rage these days in the IT world, but I’m talking about ‘cogger computing’ to coin a slightly offensive but funny phrase. Something engaging, interesting, helpful . . . and remunerative. Not just for fun, something you’d be paid to do, something people could do when it suits them, as much or as little as you’d like at any given time.

Home-based telephone operators can log-in and work for periods as short as 15 minutes, or work 12 hour days if they need the money and have the stamina. Is there a need out there that is important enough that someone would pay a good wage for good work so that we can use our energy and ideas productively and profitable on the same flexible schedule? I’d love to have something that I could do around my retiree hours—log-in at 10 and work till noon, log-off for lunch and maybe a nap, and the back to it from 2 till 5. Then, when I wake up at 2am, instead of staring at ceiling I could get up and contribute another hour or two of my experience and education.

Some kind of history project comes to mind, but I can’t tease out the economic incentive there short of a government or philanthropic grant. Pouring over satellite images looking for a lost sailor and a missing pilot made headlines briefly, but that work was done by unpaid volunteers and wasn’t intellectually very satisfying. Perhaps we need an inventory of what humans are good at that computers aren’t? Maybe readers here can think of those traits or better yet skip that step and just suggest what the task/project could be? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was something anyone in any country, in any language, could do and everyone would benefit from?

Thoughts anyone?