I love the practicality of this piece, but I believe there's a subtext at play as well, which is that for most of us, there's a natural energy dip in the late afternoon. I think even people without caregiver concerns find themselves less mentally alert in the 'dead zone.' The 9-5 (or 8-6) is just a construction from the industrial revolution when people NEEDED to be at a factory. But it has never matched most of our innate rhythms. I think that's why so many people are finding 4-6 to be an ideal time for other pursuits like working out (studies show peak performance occurs at 4pm for many athletes) or doing other, non-cerebral activities. How could things not improve in the workplace if we allowed employees to work WITH rather than against their natural periods of peak concentration? (With the added benefit of greater satisfaction, nervous system regulation and family needs met to boot?)
The energy dip is REAL. Even when I was 22 and had just started my first office job (one that required butts-in-seats until 5pm on the dot (never mind we all were “encouraged” to come in before 7am and not take lunch), I would come home exhausted from work. I remember telling my boyfriend (now husband) that I don’t know how I could ever be a working mom because I couldn’t imagine having to care for small children after a full day of work (I was about two years removed from a summer nanny gig for two toddler boys and was under no delusions about the work involved caring for young kids).
Anyway, at my peak energy levels I was still exhausted at 5. I wonder when as a society we are going to let this whole 9-5 workday go.
I’m about to be promoted to manage two women. Both of them have some sort of caregiving responsibilities. One of them is fully remote. I’ve worked with her for 6 years and she is always on top of her workload, never misses deadlines. But she isn’t always available. She takes her elderly mother to doctors appointments and goes with her adult daughter to yoga mid-morning. I’m here for it. My hope is as millennials (of which I am an elder) can help change work culture for the better.
I think you've hit on something really important by acknowledging and accepting that your colleague/future direct report "isn't always available."
There are relatively few office jobs that genuinely require an immediate, drop-everything-and-complete-this-task approach to the work. But every workplace I've ever worked in valued and rewarded having a "sense of urgency" even when what you were doing wasn't urgent.
If managers are thinking ahead to what needs to be done and when, most assignments aren't urgent. But if managers aren't being proactive and are frequently scrambling because they overlooked a project or didn't allow enough time to complete all the steps (or because the person above them dumped something in THEIR lap unexpectedly), then they need their teams to be available immediately to make up for lost time. Rather than seeing this as a management problem, work culture blames employees for not responding to messages within minutes or for stepping away from their desks before 5 PM.
The expectation of constant availability is unnecessary, infantilizing, and in my experience is a burden that workers eventually come to resent, and that will eventually burn them out. Kudos to you for resisting the status quo!!
Yes!! I've had the same thing!! But I also know that when I work at my peak times I'm probably 2-3x as effective as when I try to work when I'm in a dip. Trusting your people will have such profound implications for them and for you!!
I'm glad you said this, as I am the same way. As I've gotten older I have become very much a morning person, and I am fairly useless after 3PM. I come in early and leave early and try to get as much done in the morning as I can, but I do get the sense that some of my colleagues don't approve. Whatever, that's the point of flex time, and I don't exactly perform brain surgery in my job so anything that comes up after 4PM can wait until tomorrow.
For me it wasn't even an age thing! When I was in my TWENTIES working at an office I used to start to itch like there were bugs under my skin. It was literal torture. My body hated it. Always around 4pm. When I had my first child I used to have a non-negotiable stop time at 5pm for the childcare turnover and I found myself incredibly productive in the front half of the day. I did not understand my colleagues who loafed around, chatting having several cups of coffee, hour long lunches etc. If we work with an urgency because we know our own rhythms or obligations we can be plenty productive with the early hours and frankly, over time, the work speaks for itself :)
When I read that WSJ piece, it once again reminded me that so much of corporate America is stuck with the idea that the 9-5 construct is the only way to work. I freelance, so I’m here to get my teenager from one place to another, which is often at some point in the afternoon. When I worked in an office, the stress of getting home & making it to a school or sporting event was exhausting. The 9-5 construct has not been effective for a long time. Some people work best during non-traditional hours, and that should be widely accepted. Conversely, someone could be in the office from 9-5 and be completely ineffective.
Your point about how it was at Buzzfeed late in the day is similar to what it was like in a book publishing office during the same hours. Nothing got done because we were all exhausted!
It's arbitrary, and also designed for a society where a man working a 9-5 office job earns an income that can support a nuclear family, while his wife stays home and does all of the unpaid household labor and childcare. We don't live in that society anymore, and bosses who cling to "traditional" structures of work are delusional to think that they're relevant in a reality where more adults are single and live alone, and where both parents in most families with kids HAVE to work to pay their bills.
This is not a dead zone issue directly, but related to how the workday does not need to be that long for us to be productive: A few weeks after my kid was born, I went back to work half-time. We were going to be moving across the country and I was trying to stretch my parental leave until we got to the new place. Working half days made a lot of sense because I worked from home, so I wasn't losing time to a commute. We hired a babysitter who had the baby in the next room.
Anyway, after a couple weeks I realized that in my half day, I was very measurably producing more like 75% of a normal full day's work, because I was just head down, working, and around the time I might have had an energy dip I was off for the day anyway. So I asked if we could count me as working more than half time so I'd get longer leave. My supervisor had no problem with it. I didn't have the impression the department head had a problem with it. But they talked to HR who talked to a lawyer who said there could be some kind of legal problems if they allowed it. So there I was, doing 75% of the work on half the time, and my parental leave not reflecting it.
I work slightly less than full time on an hourly wage. I'm the only manager level person who is still hourly but it has made sense while my kids were young and my schedule was funky. My boss brought up moving me to salary, which is fine with me, but I pointed out that salary implies defining a job and the amount you will pay for the job to get done and I don't think I am actually doing any less than if I was given a 40 hours salary like the other managers even if I continue clocking 35 hours a week. Unfortunately she countered with the fact that she works 50 hours a week (I wish she didn't have to) and she feels like she gets a lot done in the extra 10 hours so she did not pick up my vibe because she's in a really stressful spot with her own job. Your comment is exactly what I'm talking about and I think is true of most people!
During the pandemic I was only working 5 hours a day and the same boss thought I was under-reporting my hours because my productivity was so high, so...
One thing I have learned in life is that if your boss works overtime, they tend to assume that everyone does (or ought to). The more they work, the more unreasonable their expectation becomes. Someone who works 80-hours per week thinks NOTHING of expecting their subordinates to work 60 hours, to them it might even seem generous...
I realized this productivity issue when I went back to work with young children and i job-shared with another mother of young kids. We provided our boss two brains for the price of one as we worked on issues together, albeit sequentially, and problem-solved and moved on so much faster. We also put our heads down and just worked when we were in because we had those days at home too. It worked for everybody and I truly wondered why it hadn’t been taken up by all employers.
OMFG yes. The corporate workday, office design, and whole culture are designed for and by the people who "succeed" in that kind of environment, and that's not most of us.
Back in the eighties, my employer ran an ad showing a picture of a guy in a diner doing paperwork while the cleaner leaned on her mop staring at the clock hitting midnight. "Customer commitment means missing your kid's birthday party".
In 1990 I had missed too many birthdays; I was in the middle of a divorce and about to have my kids for six weeks of summer. When offered money to leave, I took the money and left. That's the last time I worked for a corporation.
When most "jobs" are producing nothing but carbon dioxide and billionaires, the whole concept of "work" is fundamentally unsustainable.
This reminds me of my first job out of college at a big 5 accounting firm. One of the partners was telling us about commitment and the example that he used to the mostly female group of us was this female manager who had gone back to work 3 days after a c-section. At the time, here in Canada, mat leave was 6 months. He made the point of saying that if you are committed to the job, you would never even consider taking 6 months away from the office. All but 1 of us looked at each other like.. well, I guess that I am out of here before I even think of having kids!!!
I was home alone (in Chicago) and riding my bike alone to other friends' houses/public parks/the forest preserve bike trails (this seems especially wild to me now -- sure, go be alone in the woods in a major city all day without a bike helmet or a cell phone, have fun!) from the age of 8, so...when did the 14 age limit thing start? Definitely post-'80s!
Yeah, that’s nuts. But some people are nuts. My kids went to elementary school 1/2 mile from our house. The school did two open houses a few weeks after school started, one for K-2 and one for grades 3-5. When our daughter was in fourth grade, she wanted to skip her little brother’s open house, so we let her stay home. Another mom with kids in the same grade as ours freaked out when she heard our daughter -- age 9 -- was home alone for 30 minutes, with a phone and with us 1/2 mile away. Very overprotective of her own kids.
This makes me think of some of the best eavesdropping I've ever done:
In line at Trader Joe's (in an affluent Chicago suburb), the woman in front of me told the checker "I really want him to learn how to cook before he moves out, but I'm not sure can I trust him with the stove. He's 14."
Barring some significant developmental issues not implied by the rest of their conversation, that is a SHOCKING lack of confidence to have in a young adult.
Kids want to learn how to be members of their society. They need trust, support, training, and space to try things to make that happen.
We do them (and our society) no favors by swaddling them in bubble wrap and then expecting them to somehow intuit how to function as adults.
Right?? That law is truly WILD! We're in MN and have started leaving our 9-year-old twins (pretty mature, responsible kids) home for 30-60 minutes or so at a time. 14 is still 5 years away!!
I don’t know about y’all, but some of my own personal afternoon gap comes from working on a HIGHLY distributed team. In order to catch my Indian and Jordanian colleagues I’m frequently online starting at 7 am. Most of my US team is based on the east coast, which for me in Mountain time means their two o’clock meetings take over my lunch hour, but they’re all gone by about 3pm. When no one is on the same time, the performative work day loses all meaning, and pretending it still matters just seems insane.
It's funny, some of the argument for keeping people in the office/available for meetings from 4-6 (or longer) is to catch the other end of a distributed team need.....as in, you should be available from 6/7 am all the way to 6/7 pm, instead of thinking about how you can take advantage of the 1-2 hours of overlap and using it well. These new problems demand new solutions, and that's what's intimidating for so many orgs.
This is exactly what my husband's workday is like! We live in California and he works with a team in India. It's not unusual for him to have meetings at 7:30 AM *and* PM. He usually logs off around 3 or 4 PM to go play pickleball for a couple hours.
Can we please stop saying "at least for anyone with caregiving responsibilities"? The rest of us still have to care for ourselves and doctors, dentists, post offices, banks, etc also "assume availability during those times."
I know things are more complex for caregivers, but it feels like it just fuels the "us vs them" mentality to keep caveating like this when in actuality so much of the "traditional workplace norms" don't work for ANYONE.
I hear you, but at the same time: caregivers also need doctor’s appointments, dentist appointments, post office access, etc. We should be making it possible for everyone to do the things they need to do, but there is a very real sense in which caregiving is additive - we don’t stop being humans with ordinary non-caregiving needs when we become caregivers.
Yup, acknowledged that care-giving is even more complex, but focusing on that (IMO) undermines what we both seem to agree on, which is that the system doesn't work for any humans.
If AHP had framed it at "especially for anyone with caregiving responsibilities" I think she would have been making our point (sucks for everyone, worse for caregivers). But to say "at least for anyone" seems to imply that it does work for everyone else, which it doesn't.
That makes sense. Where I’m coming from is that during the pandemic, at my institution, there was a constant silencing of any claim of need for accommodation for those of us who were parents, because it wouldn’t be “fair”, and we were *always* being reminded that non-parents had responsibilities and challenges, and I always just sat there thinking: do these admins think that those of us who are parents of school-age children do not *also* have parents, pets, chronic illnesses, etc? We were dealing with all of those things PLUS not having any childcare. It was so baffling to me.
But at the same time, as I think we’re both saying, these sorts of zero-sum, “us vs. them” arguments are really counterproductive. Everybody needs flexibility, some seasons of life require more of it than others, and there is a sense in which caregiving is gonna add demands.
I have been a parent for a decade now and I still really clearly remember the decade of work I performed before I ever had a child. I remember working in an organization that had exactly ZERO parents or caregivers on staff, long before the pandemic - maybe even before the Great Recession honestly - and I remember very clearly that this dead zone existed then as well!! Every damn day!
As a parent now, I appreciate and celebrate the flexibility that some work has created to allow parents to tend to the impossibility of caregiving in modern society. But also, I wish that we could focus more generally on the fact that equally, caregivers and non caregivers alike, we are not computers to plug into a terminal at 9 am until... ??? unclear on the end time.
Productivity has skyrocketed and working hours have only gotten longer and fuzzier. It is unreasonable to expect that anyone will have a full 10 hours at one high level of productivity throughout the day, regardless of your age, marital status, parental status, etc. Allowing for downtime to cool your brain computer off and potentially engage in something that means something to you reminds me a bit of AHP's recent newsletter pointing out the lack of measured rest in the game-ification of fitness. Let your employees close their restoration rings, caregivers and non-caregivers alike. Or deal with the fallout and cost of high turnover, lower quality work, and a general ick vibe at your organization. Which I guess is what a lot of CEO's are doing right now.
Ugh! We should all be allowed to work less and then we'd get more done when we are working! Four day weeks! Or 5-6 hour workdays!
Employers just like to have control. They want to control their employees' lives, and they can do that best when they have them in the same physical work environment for long stretches of time.
I agree with what you’re saying. As someone who has worked in house as a lawyer with HR matters - so much of the rigidness is because companies have not figured out how to manage employees in a way that measures actual productivity and contributions. No one has figured out how to treat everyone fairly without treating people exactly the same. I don’t have the answer, but when I think about why there are strict policies around work, it’s because companies want to be able to say you violated something when they want to fire you. It sucks.
Also - and this is by the by - but I had an old torts professor that once told our class that if the country had universal healthcare, most tort litigation (think personal injury/ambulance chasers) would disappear. No one *wants* to spend 3 years of their life suing someone. But people get injured and there is no safety net and they have to somehow pay their medical bills! This probably applies to work too. If we had better social safety nets, we’d have a lot fewer lawsuits against employers. No one wants to sue people (seriously, get 3-6 months into a lawsuit and you’ll understand. It’s awful) but when people have no other option, that’s what happens. This is why we have such a litigious society.
This is such a good point — instead of doing the hard work of figuring out what management looks like, they want to figure out how to measure and manage as before. It's just not happening!
Oh gosh, that is SUCH a good point about the link between healthcare and this situation. I truly never thought of that, but this is yet another reason that healthcare should not be linked to employment in any way!!!
Truly sometimes for me, a person w/ flexible schedule, the discipline is to stop working and go to something else so that I am able to work (and indeed make any kind of good choices about my life) again the next day.
That Fortune article is a real rehashing/repackaging of the WSJ article, so it feels like it's probably someone who's underpaid and overworked and putting on a headline that does best in A/B testing (aka, one that kind of pisses people off, like this one)
It’s funny because my “Covid era habit” was my kids’ school keeping the building closed for 17 months. That was the only BREAK I get from school runs over the course of two decades.
Ugh that last point about the four day workweek really struck home. From 2020-2022, my employer gave some of us ONE Friday off a month. Everyone in the org took it off, so there was no pressure to not take it. Folks, I LIVED for that Friday, especially as a caregiver who just needed a break or a chance to catch up on sleep. It’s been a struggle in the months since it was taken away. Way less happy. I’m convinced it went away bc of power and someone seeing it as a “problem,” just like people keep insisting that the 4-6 dip is a problem.
You reminded me that my bosses would usually let us leave "early" -- like 2 or 3 p.m. -- on the Friday of a long weekend -- which was nice (theoretically), especially in the summertime. But -- it wasn't a given -- you had to wait until you got the word from them, either via the management grapevine or an email to everyone -- and if an executive was waiting for something, that always came first. And while the regular office day was 8:30 to 5 p.m. (and a lot of people stayed longer, of course), I had a flexible arrangement where I came in at 8 & left at 4:30 -- a small tweak, but it meshed better with my husband's hours and our commuter train schedule. So we'd get the call that we could leave just before 2 -- but my train left at 2:13, and for most of my working years, the trains only ran hourly in non-rush hours -- so I'd have to wait for the 3:13 p.m. train, I'd wind up getting home an hour earlier than usual -- big deal. Although the train would be less crowded, so that was nice.
It's wild how many articles like this legitimize hand-wringing about flexible work, and how many commenters/people on social media respond as if they're gospel! It really looks like those folks don't care about what their employees get done. They care that their employees are holding up the performative norms about work that they are used to and comfortable with. If what actually mattered was that I completed my tasks by their deadlines, then no one would care what I was doing between 4-6 PM. So many corporate jobs don't actually *do* much of importance. They *exist* to justify budgets and hierarchies...and resistance to flexibility reveals that pretty starkly.
Read Bullshit Jobs: the Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It by David Graeber. He comes at it from a Marxist lens but basically -- many of us have bullshit jobs where managers insist we need to be tied to 40 hours a week because if we didn't, we might do a revolution or too.
If you need an optimistic take on this observation: AI is never coming for our jobs because the billionaires need us all to have jobs or else we might get ideas.
I find myself reading a lot of career advice content and I find it fascinating how many people, both managers and non-managers, still seem to think that you need to be tied to your desk for 40+ hours a week in order to be a good employee. It's like some sort of Stockholm syndrome. If you are getting the job done, good lord, who cares where you are at 4PM? In most jobs very few things are actual emergencies, and if there is an actual emergency, there are several different ways you can reach someone. Why have Slack and Teams and all of the "productivity tools" and still require people to be sitting in the office at all times?
After a two hour presentation today, I spent 10 mins getting water and going to the bathroom, 10 mins sending meeting notes and catching up with emails and then nearly 15 mins lying head down on the floor. The ruthlessness of 8 hour timesheets meant that time came out of the ‘end’ of my work day and will stretch into tomorrow am. There’s no give or recovery- just endurance.
Ugh I am sorry. This recovery is 1000% part of the work, you cannot have the 2 hour presentation without the rest, or actually the presentation was 2h35 min long.
No matter how interesting the subject matter, a couple of hours sitting in a meeting room is incredibly draining. I always found, whenever I went to an all-day event (a seminar or training day, etc.), that by 2-3 p.m., I was DONE. (And that's after lunch hour & coffee breaks too!) I just wasn't absorbing any information after that.
Thank you for this topic! I’ve been questioning the 9-5, 8hr work day long before COVID. In my privileged, managerial, salaried, white collar job I usually don’t have tasks that can consistently fill 8 hours in a row. A lot of times I send an email, make a call, have a meeting, delegate. Then wait for something to happen. Put out a fire. Repeat. There are times where there is literally nothing I can do until someone gets back to me. Where is the benefit to sitting in a cubicle vs. sitting at home and maybe tossing in a load of laundry? Yes, there are plenty of times when I need to be in person but overall the 9-5 concept is so outdated and ridiculous. I mean really, who made up 40 hours a week?! Why not 36, why not 42 (not to say we need more, ha).
One of my students (I teach writing to college students) wrote a paper last year about how new technologies allow companies to track how many hours you are actually working vs breaking, thinking, conversing, staring off into space, etc. His take on it was that generally it was a good thing, and it would increase productivity. But I think that's an easier argument to make if you've never worked in an office before.
Yeah, that’s definitely coming from someone who doesn’t understand psychological safety and the intensely uncomfortable/unproductive feeling of being watched.
As a corollary, did you see the Bloomberg column in WaPo, essentially saying that we all need to go back into the office to preserve the vitality of cities.? LOL. The comments excoriated him for trying to guilt us all into preserving his bank balance and placing the burden of urban planning on the backs of office workers. So much of the call for in person is rooting in greed and the rest in bad management. It's in everyone's best interest not to listen and for those of us in management to retool our thinking. To paraphrase Jim Wright, if we want a better society, we need to be better citizens.
I didn’t read that, but I did see a CNBC piece (recommended on YouTube -- I don’t watch CNBC) about how “it’s more complicated than you think” to adapt unused office spaces into much needed residential spaces. It claimed only 5% are “easily adaptable” (sounds like a good start to me) and builders will of course need lots of government subsidies to make things pencil out. And look, I’m not opposed to government financial support for that kind of change but there better be affordability requirements or maybe the math changes for developers if we continue to resist returning to offices and they’ll pencil out once their investments have truly cratered.
I love the practicality of this piece, but I believe there's a subtext at play as well, which is that for most of us, there's a natural energy dip in the late afternoon. I think even people without caregiver concerns find themselves less mentally alert in the 'dead zone.' The 9-5 (or 8-6) is just a construction from the industrial revolution when people NEEDED to be at a factory. But it has never matched most of our innate rhythms. I think that's why so many people are finding 4-6 to be an ideal time for other pursuits like working out (studies show peak performance occurs at 4pm for many athletes) or doing other, non-cerebral activities. How could things not improve in the workplace if we allowed employees to work WITH rather than against their natural periods of peak concentration? (With the added benefit of greater satisfaction, nervous system regulation and family needs met to boot?)
The energy dip is REAL. Even when I was 22 and had just started my first office job (one that required butts-in-seats until 5pm on the dot (never mind we all were “encouraged” to come in before 7am and not take lunch), I would come home exhausted from work. I remember telling my boyfriend (now husband) that I don’t know how I could ever be a working mom because I couldn’t imagine having to care for small children after a full day of work (I was about two years removed from a summer nanny gig for two toddler boys and was under no delusions about the work involved caring for young kids).
Anyway, at my peak energy levels I was still exhausted at 5. I wonder when as a society we are going to let this whole 9-5 workday go.
I’m about to be promoted to manage two women. Both of them have some sort of caregiving responsibilities. One of them is fully remote. I’ve worked with her for 6 years and she is always on top of her workload, never misses deadlines. But she isn’t always available. She takes her elderly mother to doctors appointments and goes with her adult daughter to yoga mid-morning. I’m here for it. My hope is as millennials (of which I am an elder) can help change work culture for the better.
I think you've hit on something really important by acknowledging and accepting that your colleague/future direct report "isn't always available."
There are relatively few office jobs that genuinely require an immediate, drop-everything-and-complete-this-task approach to the work. But every workplace I've ever worked in valued and rewarded having a "sense of urgency" even when what you were doing wasn't urgent.
If managers are thinking ahead to what needs to be done and when, most assignments aren't urgent. But if managers aren't being proactive and are frequently scrambling because they overlooked a project or didn't allow enough time to complete all the steps (or because the person above them dumped something in THEIR lap unexpectedly), then they need their teams to be available immediately to make up for lost time. Rather than seeing this as a management problem, work culture blames employees for not responding to messages within minutes or for stepping away from their desks before 5 PM.
The expectation of constant availability is unnecessary, infantilizing, and in my experience is a burden that workers eventually come to resent, and that will eventually burn them out. Kudos to you for resisting the status quo!!
"rewarded having a "sense of urgency" even when what you were doing wasn't urgent." YES.
Yes!! I've had the same thing!! But I also know that when I work at my peak times I'm probably 2-3x as effective as when I try to work when I'm in a dip. Trusting your people will have such profound implications for them and for you!!
I'm glad you said this, as I am the same way. As I've gotten older I have become very much a morning person, and I am fairly useless after 3PM. I come in early and leave early and try to get as much done in the morning as I can, but I do get the sense that some of my colleagues don't approve. Whatever, that's the point of flex time, and I don't exactly perform brain surgery in my job so anything that comes up after 4PM can wait until tomorrow.
For me it wasn't even an age thing! When I was in my TWENTIES working at an office I used to start to itch like there were bugs under my skin. It was literal torture. My body hated it. Always around 4pm. When I had my first child I used to have a non-negotiable stop time at 5pm for the childcare turnover and I found myself incredibly productive in the front half of the day. I did not understand my colleagues who loafed around, chatting having several cups of coffee, hour long lunches etc. If we work with an urgency because we know our own rhythms or obligations we can be plenty productive with the early hours and frankly, over time, the work speaks for itself :)
When I read that WSJ piece, it once again reminded me that so much of corporate America is stuck with the idea that the 9-5 construct is the only way to work. I freelance, so I’m here to get my teenager from one place to another, which is often at some point in the afternoon. When I worked in an office, the stress of getting home & making it to a school or sporting event was exhausting. The 9-5 construct has not been effective for a long time. Some people work best during non-traditional hours, and that should be widely accepted. Conversely, someone could be in the office from 9-5 and be completely ineffective.
Your point about how it was at Buzzfeed late in the day is similar to what it was like in a book publishing office during the same hours. Nothing got done because we were all exhausted!
There is nothing natural about 9-5 — it's all arbitrary! We can and should work when it makes sense!
It's arbitrary, and also designed for a society where a man working a 9-5 office job earns an income that can support a nuclear family, while his wife stays home and does all of the unpaid household labor and childcare. We don't live in that society anymore, and bosses who cling to "traditional" structures of work are delusional to think that they're relevant in a reality where more adults are single and live alone, and where both parents in most families with kids HAVE to work to pay their bills.
This is not a dead zone issue directly, but related to how the workday does not need to be that long for us to be productive: A few weeks after my kid was born, I went back to work half-time. We were going to be moving across the country and I was trying to stretch my parental leave until we got to the new place. Working half days made a lot of sense because I worked from home, so I wasn't losing time to a commute. We hired a babysitter who had the baby in the next room.
Anyway, after a couple weeks I realized that in my half day, I was very measurably producing more like 75% of a normal full day's work, because I was just head down, working, and around the time I might have had an energy dip I was off for the day anyway. So I asked if we could count me as working more than half time so I'd get longer leave. My supervisor had no problem with it. I didn't have the impression the department head had a problem with it. But they talked to HR who talked to a lawyer who said there could be some kind of legal problems if they allowed it. So there I was, doing 75% of the work on half the time, and my parental leave not reflecting it.
This happens all the time and I really think corporations take advantage of it!!!!!
I work slightly less than full time on an hourly wage. I'm the only manager level person who is still hourly but it has made sense while my kids were young and my schedule was funky. My boss brought up moving me to salary, which is fine with me, but I pointed out that salary implies defining a job and the amount you will pay for the job to get done and I don't think I am actually doing any less than if I was given a 40 hours salary like the other managers even if I continue clocking 35 hours a week. Unfortunately she countered with the fact that she works 50 hours a week (I wish she didn't have to) and she feels like she gets a lot done in the extra 10 hours so she did not pick up my vibe because she's in a really stressful spot with her own job. Your comment is exactly what I'm talking about and I think is true of most people!
During the pandemic I was only working 5 hours a day and the same boss thought I was under-reporting my hours because my productivity was so high, so...
One thing I have learned in life is that if your boss works overtime, they tend to assume that everyone does (or ought to). The more they work, the more unreasonable their expectation becomes. Someone who works 80-hours per week thinks NOTHING of expecting their subordinates to work 60 hours, to them it might even seem generous...
This is a correct statement.
I realized this productivity issue when I went back to work with young children and i job-shared with another mother of young kids. We provided our boss two brains for the price of one as we worked on issues together, albeit sequentially, and problem-solved and moved on so much faster. We also put our heads down and just worked when we were in because we had those days at home too. It worked for everybody and I truly wondered why it hadn’t been taken up by all employers.
OMFG yes. The corporate workday, office design, and whole culture are designed for and by the people who "succeed" in that kind of environment, and that's not most of us.
Back in the eighties, my employer ran an ad showing a picture of a guy in a diner doing paperwork while the cleaner leaned on her mop staring at the clock hitting midnight. "Customer commitment means missing your kid's birthday party".
In 1990 I had missed too many birthdays; I was in the middle of a divorce and about to have my kids for six weeks of summer. When offered money to leave, I took the money and left. That's the last time I worked for a corporation.
When most "jobs" are producing nothing but carbon dioxide and billionaires, the whole concept of "work" is fundamentally unsustainable.
This reminds me of my first job out of college at a big 5 accounting firm. One of the partners was telling us about commitment and the example that he used to the mostly female group of us was this female manager who had gone back to work 3 days after a c-section. At the time, here in Canada, mat leave was 6 months. He made the point of saying that if you are committed to the job, you would never even consider taking 6 months away from the office. All but 1 of us looked at each other like.. well, I guess that I am out of here before I even think of having kids!!!
Anyone else looking at that Illinois law saying kids can't be left alone until age 14 and thinking "but I was babysitting before I turned 14?"
I was home alone (in Chicago) and riding my bike alone to other friends' houses/public parks/the forest preserve bike trails (this seems especially wild to me now -- sure, go be alone in the woods in a major city all day without a bike helmet or a cell phone, have fun!) from the age of 8, so...when did the 14 age limit thing start? Definitely post-'80s!
Yeah, that’s nuts. But some people are nuts. My kids went to elementary school 1/2 mile from our house. The school did two open houses a few weeks after school started, one for K-2 and one for grades 3-5. When our daughter was in fourth grade, she wanted to skip her little brother’s open house, so we let her stay home. Another mom with kids in the same grade as ours freaked out when she heard our daughter -- age 9 -- was home alone for 30 minutes, with a phone and with us 1/2 mile away. Very overprotective of her own kids.
This makes me think of some of the best eavesdropping I've ever done:
In line at Trader Joe's (in an affluent Chicago suburb), the woman in front of me told the checker "I really want him to learn how to cook before he moves out, but I'm not sure can I trust him with the stove. He's 14."
Barring some significant developmental issues not implied by the rest of their conversation, that is a SHOCKING lack of confidence to have in a young adult.
Kids want to learn how to be members of their society. They need trust, support, training, and space to try things to make that happen.
We do them (and our society) no favors by swaddling them in bubble wrap and then expecting them to somehow intuit how to function as adults.
Right?? That law is truly WILD! We're in MN and have started leaving our 9-year-old twins (pretty mature, responsible kids) home for 30-60 minutes or so at a time. 14 is still 5 years away!!
That law is BONKERS. I had no idea!
Yup!
I don’t know about y’all, but some of my own personal afternoon gap comes from working on a HIGHLY distributed team. In order to catch my Indian and Jordanian colleagues I’m frequently online starting at 7 am. Most of my US team is based on the east coast, which for me in Mountain time means their two o’clock meetings take over my lunch hour, but they’re all gone by about 3pm. When no one is on the same time, the performative work day loses all meaning, and pretending it still matters just seems insane.
It's funny, some of the argument for keeping people in the office/available for meetings from 4-6 (or longer) is to catch the other end of a distributed team need.....as in, you should be available from 6/7 am all the way to 6/7 pm, instead of thinking about how you can take advantage of the 1-2 hours of overlap and using it well. These new problems demand new solutions, and that's what's intimidating for so many orgs.
This is exactly what my husband's workday is like! We live in California and he works with a team in India. It's not unusual for him to have meetings at 7:30 AM *and* PM. He usually logs off around 3 or 4 PM to go play pickleball for a couple hours.
Can we please stop saying "at least for anyone with caregiving responsibilities"? The rest of us still have to care for ourselves and doctors, dentists, post offices, banks, etc also "assume availability during those times."
I know things are more complex for caregivers, but it feels like it just fuels the "us vs them" mentality to keep caveating like this when in actuality so much of the "traditional workplace norms" don't work for ANYONE.
I hear you, but at the same time: caregivers also need doctor’s appointments, dentist appointments, post office access, etc. We should be making it possible for everyone to do the things they need to do, but there is a very real sense in which caregiving is additive - we don’t stop being humans with ordinary non-caregiving needs when we become caregivers.
Yup, acknowledged that care-giving is even more complex, but focusing on that (IMO) undermines what we both seem to agree on, which is that the system doesn't work for any humans.
If AHP had framed it at "especially for anyone with caregiving responsibilities" I think she would have been making our point (sucks for everyone, worse for caregivers). But to say "at least for anyone" seems to imply that it does work for everyone else, which it doesn't.
That makes sense. Where I’m coming from is that during the pandemic, at my institution, there was a constant silencing of any claim of need for accommodation for those of us who were parents, because it wouldn’t be “fair”, and we were *always* being reminded that non-parents had responsibilities and challenges, and I always just sat there thinking: do these admins think that those of us who are parents of school-age children do not *also* have parents, pets, chronic illnesses, etc? We were dealing with all of those things PLUS not having any childcare. It was so baffling to me.
But at the same time, as I think we’re both saying, these sorts of zero-sum, “us vs. them” arguments are really counterproductive. Everybody needs flexibility, some seasons of life require more of it than others, and there is a sense in which caregiving is gonna add demands.
Yes! My HR dept did the same, constantly lumping "pets and kids" together like raising the next generation of humans was just like having a cat?!
And weirdly erasing those of us who have both kids AND cats!
Yes, love that seasons of life framing! And I'm sorry that your institution responded like that.
I have been a parent for a decade now and I still really clearly remember the decade of work I performed before I ever had a child. I remember working in an organization that had exactly ZERO parents or caregivers on staff, long before the pandemic - maybe even before the Great Recession honestly - and I remember very clearly that this dead zone existed then as well!! Every damn day!
As a parent now, I appreciate and celebrate the flexibility that some work has created to allow parents to tend to the impossibility of caregiving in modern society. But also, I wish that we could focus more generally on the fact that equally, caregivers and non caregivers alike, we are not computers to plug into a terminal at 9 am until... ??? unclear on the end time.
Productivity has skyrocketed and working hours have only gotten longer and fuzzier. It is unreasonable to expect that anyone will have a full 10 hours at one high level of productivity throughout the day, regardless of your age, marital status, parental status, etc. Allowing for downtime to cool your brain computer off and potentially engage in something that means something to you reminds me a bit of AHP's recent newsletter pointing out the lack of measured rest in the game-ification of fitness. Let your employees close their restoration rings, caregivers and non-caregivers alike. Or deal with the fallout and cost of high turnover, lower quality work, and a general ick vibe at your organization. Which I guess is what a lot of CEO's are doing right now.
Ugh! We should all be allowed to work less and then we'd get more done when we are working! Four day weeks! Or 5-6 hour workdays!
Employers just like to have control. They want to control their employees' lives, and they can do that best when they have them in the same physical work environment for long stretches of time.
I agree with what you’re saying. As someone who has worked in house as a lawyer with HR matters - so much of the rigidness is because companies have not figured out how to manage employees in a way that measures actual productivity and contributions. No one has figured out how to treat everyone fairly without treating people exactly the same. I don’t have the answer, but when I think about why there are strict policies around work, it’s because companies want to be able to say you violated something when they want to fire you. It sucks.
Also - and this is by the by - but I had an old torts professor that once told our class that if the country had universal healthcare, most tort litigation (think personal injury/ambulance chasers) would disappear. No one *wants* to spend 3 years of their life suing someone. But people get injured and there is no safety net and they have to somehow pay their medical bills! This probably applies to work too. If we had better social safety nets, we’d have a lot fewer lawsuits against employers. No one wants to sue people (seriously, get 3-6 months into a lawsuit and you’ll understand. It’s awful) but when people have no other option, that’s what happens. This is why we have such a litigious society.
This is such a good point — instead of doing the hard work of figuring out what management looks like, they want to figure out how to measure and manage as before. It's just not happening!
Oh gosh, that is SUCH a good point about the link between healthcare and this situation. I truly never thought of that, but this is yet another reason that healthcare should not be linked to employment in any way!!!
Truly sometimes for me, a person w/ flexible schedule, the discipline is to stop working and go to something else so that I am able to work (and indeed make any kind of good choices about my life) again the next day.
That headline that refers to school runs as a "COVID era habit" like wtf?! That makes no sense. Who writes this stuff?
Who writes this stuff? People without kids, or with the resources to make “school runs” someone else’s problem to deal with, I’m guessing.
(I did the same boggle at that line. Like...that’s not a habit, that’s just life? And kids existed before COVID, too?)
That Fortune article is a real rehashing/repackaging of the WSJ article, so it feels like it's probably someone who's underpaid and overworked and putting on a headline that does best in A/B testing (aka, one that kind of pisses people off, like this one)
Fair, but during COVID schools were closed and no one was doing "the school run". So it isn't even logically sound! Sigh.
It’s funny because my “Covid era habit” was my kids’ school keeping the building closed for 17 months. That was the only BREAK I get from school runs over the course of two decades.
Ugh that last point about the four day workweek really struck home. From 2020-2022, my employer gave some of us ONE Friday off a month. Everyone in the org took it off, so there was no pressure to not take it. Folks, I LIVED for that Friday, especially as a caregiver who just needed a break or a chance to catch up on sleep. It’s been a struggle in the months since it was taken away. Way less happy. I’m convinced it went away bc of power and someone seeing it as a “problem,” just like people keep insisting that the 4-6 dip is a problem.
You reminded me that my bosses would usually let us leave "early" -- like 2 or 3 p.m. -- on the Friday of a long weekend -- which was nice (theoretically), especially in the summertime. But -- it wasn't a given -- you had to wait until you got the word from them, either via the management grapevine or an email to everyone -- and if an executive was waiting for something, that always came first. And while the regular office day was 8:30 to 5 p.m. (and a lot of people stayed longer, of course), I had a flexible arrangement where I came in at 8 & left at 4:30 -- a small tweak, but it meshed better with my husband's hours and our commuter train schedule. So we'd get the call that we could leave just before 2 -- but my train left at 2:13, and for most of my working years, the trains only ran hourly in non-rush hours -- so I'd have to wait for the 3:13 p.m. train, I'd wind up getting home an hour earlier than usual -- big deal. Although the train would be less crowded, so that was nice.
It's wild how many articles like this legitimize hand-wringing about flexible work, and how many commenters/people on social media respond as if they're gospel! It really looks like those folks don't care about what their employees get done. They care that their employees are holding up the performative norms about work that they are used to and comfortable with. If what actually mattered was that I completed my tasks by their deadlines, then no one would care what I was doing between 4-6 PM. So many corporate jobs don't actually *do* much of importance. They *exist* to justify budgets and hierarchies...and resistance to flexibility reveals that pretty starkly.
Read Bullshit Jobs: the Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It by David Graeber. He comes at it from a Marxist lens but basically -- many of us have bullshit jobs where managers insist we need to be tied to 40 hours a week because if we didn't, we might do a revolution or too.
If you need an optimistic take on this observation: AI is never coming for our jobs because the billionaires need us all to have jobs or else we might get ideas.
I have read it and recommend it to others often!
I find myself reading a lot of career advice content and I find it fascinating how many people, both managers and non-managers, still seem to think that you need to be tied to your desk for 40+ hours a week in order to be a good employee. It's like some sort of Stockholm syndrome. If you are getting the job done, good lord, who cares where you are at 4PM? In most jobs very few things are actual emergencies, and if there is an actual emergency, there are several different ways you can reach someone. Why have Slack and Teams and all of the "productivity tools" and still require people to be sitting in the office at all times?
After a two hour presentation today, I spent 10 mins getting water and going to the bathroom, 10 mins sending meeting notes and catching up with emails and then nearly 15 mins lying head down on the floor. The ruthlessness of 8 hour timesheets meant that time came out of the ‘end’ of my work day and will stretch into tomorrow am. There’s no give or recovery- just endurance.
Ugh I am sorry. This recovery is 1000% part of the work, you cannot have the 2 hour presentation without the rest, or actually the presentation was 2h35 min long.
No matter how interesting the subject matter, a couple of hours sitting in a meeting room is incredibly draining. I always found, whenever I went to an all-day event (a seminar or training day, etc.), that by 2-3 p.m., I was DONE. (And that's after lunch hour & coffee breaks too!) I just wasn't absorbing any information after that.
Thank you for this topic! I’ve been questioning the 9-5, 8hr work day long before COVID. In my privileged, managerial, salaried, white collar job I usually don’t have tasks that can consistently fill 8 hours in a row. A lot of times I send an email, make a call, have a meeting, delegate. Then wait for something to happen. Put out a fire. Repeat. There are times where there is literally nothing I can do until someone gets back to me. Where is the benefit to sitting in a cubicle vs. sitting at home and maybe tossing in a load of laundry? Yes, there are plenty of times when I need to be in person but overall the 9-5 concept is so outdated and ridiculous. I mean really, who made up 40 hours a week?! Why not 36, why not 42 (not to say we need more, ha).
One of my students (I teach writing to college students) wrote a paper last year about how new technologies allow companies to track how many hours you are actually working vs breaking, thinking, conversing, staring off into space, etc. His take on it was that generally it was a good thing, and it would increase productivity. But I think that's an easier argument to make if you've never worked in an office before.
Yeah, that’s definitely coming from someone who doesn’t understand psychological safety and the intensely uncomfortable/unproductive feeling of being watched.
Whoa big brother alert! That takes all the trust out of the manager-employee relationship.
As a corollary, did you see the Bloomberg column in WaPo, essentially saying that we all need to go back into the office to preserve the vitality of cities.? LOL. The comments excoriated him for trying to guilt us all into preserving his bank balance and placing the burden of urban planning on the backs of office workers. So much of the call for in person is rooting in greed and the rest in bad management. It's in everyone's best interest not to listen and for those of us in management to retool our thinking. To paraphrase Jim Wright, if we want a better society, we need to be better citizens.
I didn’t read that, but I did see a CNBC piece (recommended on YouTube -- I don’t watch CNBC) about how “it’s more complicated than you think” to adapt unused office spaces into much needed residential spaces. It claimed only 5% are “easily adaptable” (sounds like a good start to me) and builders will of course need lots of government subsidies to make things pencil out. And look, I’m not opposed to government financial support for that kind of change but there better be affordability requirements or maybe the math changes for developers if we continue to resist returning to offices and they’ll pencil out once their investments have truly cratered.
In Boston they just announced a big tax incentive to convert offices downtown into housing. I’m interested to see how that goes. Here’s the article from the city: https://www.boston.gov/news/mayor-wu-announces-residential-conversion-program-downtown-offices