It's not that I don't have time

My issue is that I don't have time I can count on.  I never know when toddlers are going to become unsatisfied with whatever they are doing and suddenly be on me, pulling my hands away from the computer, upset that it's taking 2 whole seconds to climb into my lap.

I feel like I spend my whole day sitting at my desk, just waiting to be needed for something.  I don't feel like I can get up and actually do anything, because the moment I do, toddlers are really upset that I'm doing something.  It's like a receptionist job, the kind where you have nothing to actually do all day, but you have to be there the moment the phone rings.  Then at the end of the day, you look at all of the time you spent playing solitaire and you feel like crap that you weren't doing something productive.  But how can you when you need to be sitting right there waiting for the phone to ring?

Right now, I would love to spend some time in the laundry room getting some pottery glazed so it can go into the kiln for final firing.  It's been sitting there for months.  I don't feel like I can leave the main part of the house long enough to do anything.  If it's not absolutely necessary to the function of the house (like getting some dishes done or food prepared), I don't feel like I'm allowed to leave them to their own devices long enough to actually do it.

Are we allowed to do that with 2 year olds?  Let them play in a safe space alone while being in a different room?  Am I making this too hard?

I've been working on getting a work at home job doing search engine evaluation work.  In the last few weeks that I've been trying to qualify, I've found how hard it is to even get started.  Any time I try to log in and do a little work, I get a child grabbing my arms to pull them away and then crying when I resist.  So I log out and get up to interact with the child, and now the child doesn't want anything to do with me.  So I log back in, rinse and repeat.  Then I'll sit here and do something to waste a little time just waiting for the next toddler call, like facebook or something, and that toddler call will never come.  I'll realize that 45 minutes has gone by in which I COULD have been accomplishing something but I never even got started because I kept expecting to be interrupted immediately if I did.

At the end of the day, I look back on it and feel like all I did was waste time.  How many facebook hours have I logged because I didn't think my kids would allow me the attention span to do anything else?  Far too many.  What can I do differently to be more productive?  I have no idea.

Our financial situation is becoming dire again because our lives cost approximately twice what we bring in.  My video jobs have dried up (the company I was getting jobs through seems to have switched their business model so I'm no longer getting notices of one day jobs I could claim like I did before) and as I've been job hunting, I haven't found anything that worked the correct hours so I could actually take some of my paycheck home rather than just pay for the daycare necessary to get to the job.

I'm frustrated, feeling useless and pointless, scared about money, and feel completely unable to change anything to make it better.