Why Part-Time Work Can Be a Trap
It’s a tempting option, especially in the early years of parenting, when everyone feels one piece of Jenga from a catastrophic collapse: “I’m going part-time,” you tell yourself. You decide to speak with your manager and discuss a plan to cut your full-time position as well as your salary. You think this setting will allow you to spend more time with your family and stay at the top of your career. Seems like a win-win.
Be careful. As Michelle Obama writes in her memoir Becoming , part-time work “can be a bit of a trap.”
A few months after the birth of her daughter Malia, the former first lady agreed to return “part-time” to her position as deputy dean at the University of Chicago. She thought (like many parents) that it made sense: “Now I could be both a professional woman and an ideal mother, having achieved the balance of Mary Tyler Moore and Marian Robinson that I have always hoped for,” she writes.
But she soon realized (like many parents) that the ideal is bullshit. This is how it happened, as she describes in her book:
At work, I still attended all the meetings I had, while doing the same duties at the same time. The only real difference was that I was now getting half my original paycheck and was trying to squeeze everything into a two-hour work week. If the meeting had dragged on, I would have rushed home at breakneck speed to pick up Malia so that we could arrive on time (Malia is impatient and happy, I was sweating and panting) for an afternoon wiggleware class at a music studio on the North Side. … To me it was like a double bond that distorts sanity. I struggled with feelings of guilt when I had to answer calls from work at home. I struggled with a different kind of guilt as I sat in the office distracted by the thought that Malia might be allergic to peanuts. Part-time work should have given me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling like I was only doing half of it, that all boundaries in my life were blurred.
First, let’s recognize that the ability to explore part-time work opportunities is a privilege that many, many Americans do not have. Choice is fantastic, and I admire any company looking to improve the work-life balance of their employees. And it’s not that part-time work is never going to help – it can certainly lighten the burden if your position consists of easy shifts where the job mostly stays at work. If, for example, you are an emergency doctor.
But many jobs, as Obama describes, are not created that way. I once had a part-time job as social media editor – I thought it would be a great performance as a mom to a young child, but struggling to get only 25 hours a week that I was paid to do has disappointed me. To be worthy at my job, I needed (and also wanted) to always be “included” in some capacity, search for relevant content and interact with the audience. “Do you know what it really is?” I said at home once. “Full time job!” You may have a better grasp of boundaries than I do, but I predict that it will be more difficult to draw clear boundaries between your partial responsibilities than you think.
Time management expert Laura Vanderkam tells Forbes that part-time work often “does more harm than good.” She recommends working part-time only if you need to “completely dip down to, say, 50%,” according to Forbes. “Trust me,” she says. “You can work 80% on schedule, but other people work 80% of the time and the other 20% procrastinate and say nothing about it.” In addition to saving 20% of your time yourself (a trick I don’t recommend), you can try to find more balance by working out a four-day work week (for example, four 10-hour days), by changing your schedule in other ways, using outsourcing. more household chores, or talk honestly with your boss about what you can realistically achieve. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. Having it all is one big myth .
But consider taking a part-time job to improve your work-life balance. Obama saw this as a trap, writing that this lesson “will go on my list of things that many of us learn too late.”