Is part-time work the best option?

Working fewer hours doesn’t always improve work/life balance

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.
Good Morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
This week, we're talking about broad issues related to work
and how we feel about it. Today's tip is to
be where the part time solution to work life balance issues.

(00:24):
Sometimes working part time can be a great choice, but
it's not the perfect option many people seem to think
it is. Since I've written extensively about work in life,
including a book called I Know How She Does It,
which is about how women succeed in big careers while
raising families, I've long pondered the question of part time work.
I know it remains an attractive idea. Indeed, various surveys

(00:48):
have found that, depending on how you ask the question,
a majority of women with children would prefer to work
part time. I imagine that these days, a reasonable number
of fathers might feel the same way. I think out
of the appeal lies in the semantics. The phrase part
time makes it seem like the best of both worlds.
People don't want to imply that work consumes the full

(01:09):
amount of their time, so they don't want to work
full time. By working part time, we can show that
work only gets part of Us and Family gets Part two.
But anyone who listens to this podcast knows the problem
with this mindset. Full time work consumes nowhere near the
full amount of people's time. At this point. I suspect

(01:31):
many listeners can recite after me, there are a hundred
sixty eight hours in a week. If you work forty hours,
so a standard full time amount, and sleep eight hours
per night, so fifty six hours per week, that leaves
seventy two hours for other things. It's hard to see
what's more balanced about working twenty hours and leaving nine
two hours for other things. But the bigger issue I've

(01:52):
found is that in many organizations with salaried positions, there's
no accountability for hours. People working part time schedules can
wind up working fairly similar hours to their colleagues with
full time schedules. They're just getting paid a lot less.
This isn't a hypothetical possibility, for I know how she
does it. I collected time logs representing one thousand and

(02:13):
one days. In some cases, I collected logs from more
than one person who at the same company, and at
least one case I found a woman on a part
time schedule working more hours than a colleague on a
full time schedule. Broadening this up to look at the
same industries, this happened more times than I care to count.
It's hard to know what's going on in any given situation,

(02:35):
but I think that what happens broadly is that people
in competitive industries like to talk about their eight or
work weeks, but they generally aren't logging hours that long,
or at least not consistently. One study comparing people's estimated
work weeks with time diaries found that people claiming seventy
five plus hour work weeks were off by about twenty
five hours. People in these industries sometimes decide to go

(02:59):
part time in order to exert some control over their schedules.
People in these industries sometimes decide to go part time
in order to exert some control over their schedules, and
to go part time down from this theoretical number of
eighty hours a week to say, fifty hours per week.
But if people working full time in these fields are

(03:19):
actually working fifty five to sixty hours a week, taking
a fifty percent pay cut and then working fifty hours
a week is not a great financial move, In particular,
if there's no accountability for hours then taking a twenty
percent pay cut and working an eight percent schedule is
a questionable tactic. In many fields, It's quite possible to

(03:40):
get the same during the week time off that an
eight percent schedule would enable without actually going to this
official schedule, or, to be more blunt, lots of people
waste of their work hours and still get paid for
this time. I really don't like the idea of only
some people playing by the rules and bearing the full
fine financial and career cost. In general, I think that

(04:03):
people are better off seeking out or negotiating for flexibility
in full time jobs. If you can work at home
occasionally and make up hours at night or on the
weekend if you need to, then it's quite possible to
work long hours without having any sort of work family conflict.
This is what I try to do. I work about
forty hours a week, but because I control these hours,

(04:24):
if I see I have a complicated week of kid
related stuff coming up, I'll find other spots to work
those hours. Yes, I work for myself, but I saw
a lot of similar strategizing on the time logs I
collected for I know how she does it, believe it
or not. I saw one person working sixty hours during
her logged week who was still there for dinner and
her kids sports practices every day. She just worked a

(04:48):
few hours every night after they went to bed, and
did some Saturday work while her partner was in charge. Now,
there are definitely some jobs where part time truly means
part time. If you get paid by the hour, then
a work week means a twenty hour work week. Likewise,
some careers, such as doing medical procedures, are pretty clearly

(05:10):
on or off. Electing to do a three day work
week will in fact mean you work two days less.
If you'd prefer to do other things on those days
and you can afford the pay cut, then this is
really just a question of how you choose to spend
your time. But I do think there's something to be
said for choosing work that's exciting enough that you want
to work full time. Yes, the financial payoffs are good,

(05:32):
but even more so, challenging meaningful work can be a
source of great joy. If that work is flexible enough
to allow for a full family life too, then that
really is the best of both worlds. In the meantime,
this is Laura, Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Hey everybody, I'd love to

(05:57):
hear from you. You can send me your tips, your questions,
or anything else. Just connect with me on Twitter, Facebook
and Instagram at Before Breakfast pod. That's B the number four,
then Breakfast p o D. You can also shoot me
an email at Before Breakfast podcast at iHeart media dot

(06:18):
com that Before Breakfast is spelled out with all the letters.
Thanks so much, I look forward to staying in touch.
Before Breakfast is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(06:39):
favorite shows.