Full Time, All the Time
with Britt and Robyn
I'm Britt. I work full time as a mom, wife, blogger and salesperson with a fancy management title. And I'm Robyn. I work as a project manager and between corporate meetings manage to cook a home-made meal every day. This blog is about our experiences of juggling full-time work with family.
Check out our personal blogs:
Miss Britt and Who's the Boss?
As working parents, we talk a lot about work/life balance.
We discuss ways to get the most out of our family time. We make decisions about things we’ll give up and things we’ll learn to live with. We talk to each other about taking better care of ourselves so that we’ll be better equipped to handle all of life’s demands and responsibilities.
But the comments on a recent post at the Work It, Mom blog made me stop and think.
Is the answer to finding a better work/life balance simply to work less?
The original post that Nataly wrote was about whether or not parents get special treatment at work. She defended her need to take time for her children, and talked about how she made sure to never take advantage of the fact that she had a family. She could work just as much and as hard as anyone else, she argued.
The point that a lot of people in the comments made was unexpected:
Parents AND single people have a right to a personal life.
Of course we do. We would all, I’m sure, nod our heads vigorously in agreement with that idea. But are we living our lives that way? Do the companies we work for understand the importance of a life outside of work?
The fact is, in the United States especially, work has become much more than one part of our lives.
What do you do? we ask each other. And we respond with our job title.
What we do is work. And we desperately try to squeeze in the rest of our lives into whatever time is left over.
My husband answers work calls on his personal cell phone at all hours of the day, 7 days a week. The only time that phone goes on silent is during the one hour a week that we’re in marriage counseling. Suprisingly, the world does not fall apart without him during that hour. The problem, I think, is that the more he makes himself available, the more he’s expected to be available all the time. He is, in effect, always working.
When I was negotiating my contract for my current job, I asked about hours. My future boss made a comment that “I don’t expect people to just run out the door because it’s 5 o’clock.” I explained that I had kids that needed to be picked up at a set time and so, yes, actually, when work ended I had to be done. I got the job anyway, but I felt guilty for setting an end time to my work day.
We tell ourselves that we need to demonstrate a commitment to the companies we work for. We talk about work ethic and a willingness to get the job done. We want to be team players and reliable employees.
But at what cost?
American workers seem to operate under the idea that we’ll work as much as we can to make as much money as possible until retirement age. Then we’ll have lives. Then we’ll travel and read and explore our hobbies. We’ll give everything we have to the workforce until we’re 65, and then we’ll enjoy our reward.
What if you die?
What if you get sick?
What if your retirement account bottoms out in a market crash and you have to work until you’re 70 or 80?
Would you be OK with the fact that what you did your whole life was work?
I wouldn’t. I love my job and I’m not afraid of hard work, but the imprint I want to leave on the world is not “great employee, reliable co-worker”. I want more than that. Now the question before me becomes, how do I work less and live more?
Are you working too much?
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when people ask the inevitable “what do you do” question i always smile and reply, “when?” most people get all confused by my response, some actually get a little angry, like i should assume they mean what employment do i have, but i don’t care.
and when i want to know how someone earns a living (which really, it is pretty rude to ask if you think about it), i simply ask, “what type of work do you do?”
or better yet, “do you work outside of the home?” (that one is great to ask a guy in a business suit. freaks them the fuck out.)
i love my job and have great friends here so i do tend to put in longer hours than some. that being said, when i want time off, i take vacation without feeling guilty. life is just too short to not live it!
hello haha narf | November 11th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Thank you Miss Britt! What a thought-provoking blog post. I would definitely say that we work too much. I left a very cushy corporate job with a great salary and great benefits almost 4 monts ago. I now work part-time as an independent contractor. I made the decision so that I could work less and enjoy my life and my family more. Things were moving along great until about a month ago the company started to pile more and more responsibilities on my plate and asked if I could work more hours. I was faced with a choice - let them slowly creep my hours up to full-time status or take a stand. I chose to take a stand and calmly explained that I have no desire to work any more than the hours than I was hired to work, which is 20-25 hours a week. It felt great! I say to he#% with wating until we are 65! Live everyday as if it is your last, because it just might be.
Again, Thank you Miss Britt.
Theresa B. from Atlanta | November 11th, 2009 at 10:09 am
I think we’re digging for problems again. There is nothing wrong with choosing to work. The act of work itself meets many human needs. And I don’t just mean the need for money to pay for other things we need. If a person is happy working 15 hours a day, and there are no important commitments / kids being neglected as a result, then I don’t see a problem with that.
I think of the people (with and without kids) who devote 9 hours a day to their jobs, then devote 2 more hours to watching nonsense on TV. Are they living better lives than people who choose to devote 11 hours to their jobs? And if 11 hours of not being hands-on with family is too many, then what should go first - the TV or the work? Is work somehow more detrimental than TV, or for that matter, reading romance novels, surfing porn, playing video/online games, gambling, drinking, etc.? I guess to some extent it depends on the individual, but why do we just assume that work beyond hour 8 is terrible?
It would do us more good to demand of ourselves the following: we will work at something that betters us and our families. For me, that may mean doing client work or working with my kids on their literacy skills. For another person it may mean charity work or cleaning out a closet. It’s up to each individual to figure out what it means, with no judgment from others necessary.
I do have to comment on the point that childless people need personal time too. That is true and it sounds fair. But when I was childless, my “breakfast” time was about 5 minutes per day, including prep and clean-up. Now, “breakfast” is a whole drawn-out process. Surely childless people need to eat breakfast just as I do, but it’s undeniable that an hour of childless “personal time” is a lot different from an hour of “with kids” personal time. I’m not saying employers should have to subsidize my personal time more than the norm, but childless people ought to be considerate of the struggles/intensity of this season of life.
SKL | November 11th, 2009 at 11:00 am
I think a major part of this answer will depend on how you view your job. If you’re one of the lucky few who are doing exactly what they want to be doing and getting paid for it, perhaps it makes you happier to work more. If you’re doing a job you like but that doesn’t consume you, you’d probably want to be working less.
I like my job, but I when I leave, I’m gone. Once in a great while I will bring something home if I’m on deadline and the little one is sick or whatever, but usually not. They have my cell number if they need me, which is a rarity. I am fortunate to have an arrangement where I have flexibility and to work for a small organization that cares about each of its employees. I’ve been told, when needing to take time off to attend to my son’s needs, “Family comes first.”
The caveat is that I’ve outgrown the job and would love to make more money, but I still need the flexibility and freedom I have and it can be hard to come by.
Finn | November 11th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I want to print this out in large type and paste it up everywhere. I agree SO wholeheartedly. I have long thought that the “American work ethic,” which was valid and important when the nation began, got blown out of whack somewhere along the way. I think technology has a lot to do with it, as you mention with cell phones 24/7. But it has to do with money and greed, too. I’m not someone who works 60-hour weeks, or even has to clock-in, but I still think my mentality suffers because of the work culture surrounding us. If I take a 2-hour lunch, for instance, I feel guilty. That is skewed.
Bravo for this post.
Lee | November 11th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I just receieved this year, a Blackberry. In our company it is both yeah and ugh simultaneously.
Yeah because I now am considered more “essential” and ugh, because I SPECIFICALLY, have been deemed the one able to do this job and therefore monitor things off hours and on vacations. It is not the constant of a work day, but my mother commented that I always seemed to be on it.
She was exaggerating, but still, never before did I check email 4 times a day while on vacation. It was once or twice if I was out for a week.
It does give you pause to realize that even a vacation, for many, is no longer a vacation.
Mich | November 11th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
SKL - I don’t think this is digging for problems. I think the fact that Americans work more than anyone in the world is a real issue.
I definitely see your point about working less so that you can watch more TV - but I hope that’s not the goal.
The sad thing is, I think so many turn to TV because we’re not used to free time anymore. Or by the time we get it, it’s late and we’re exhausted and we have no idea what to do with ourselves except for watch TV.
Miss Britt | November 12th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Britt, if Americans read the classics more than anyone else in the world, would you consider it a problem? If we exercised more, would that be a problem? If we played musical instruments more? On what basis, then, do you determine that it’s a problem that we allegedly work more than “anyone in the world” (which I doubt takes into account people in less-developed countries, particularly women)? It seems to me that for most Americans, it’s a choice to go beyond the sacred 40-hour work week.
And it’s undeniable that even Americans “work” a lot fewer hours per week than most humans have throughout most of history. Especially if you take into account the domestic chores that have been greatly simplified for most Americans.
According to a book I read on Hinduism, one of the ways to move ahead on the journey toward nirvana is to work - to really devote yourself to doing the best work you can do. Your work is an image of yourself. If you think about it, really think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Of course, it’s not for everyone (it’s only “one” of several alternate paths). But people need to stop demonizing “work” and blaming it for their problems and society’s problems.
I find your comment about TV kinda sad. It makes me wish that people just didn’t have TVs. TV watching, by the way, is known to be linked to depression.
SKL | November 12th, 2009 at 8:35 am
SKL - valid points. Also - the TV comment was general and yes, totally sad. And not about me personally, FYI.
I think maybe the problem is that a lot of people aren’t devoting their lives to things that build themselves up. A lot of people are devoting their lives to earning an income, hoping that the rest falls into place.
Miss Britt | November 12th, 2009 at 8:39 am
I have written about this before as well. Most companys and bosses expect people to work way too much. My father is always making the comment on how sorry he feels for people my age because the demands that jobs put on us nowadays is outrageous. Some people do like to work all of the time and this is okay. My boss is one of them. However, he doesn’t expect everyone to be that way, which is the good news for me. When I am on my death bed, I don’t want to remember how much I worked, I want to remember all the good times I had with my friends and family. I think that the American culture puts way too much emphasis on work-life and not family life which is why there has been such a deterioration of family life in this country and its very sad. Not only do people work harder, wages have not gone up accordingly. Before my job now, I had a job for almost a year at a corporate real estate office processing transactions. They offered everyone a cell phone and laptop - but if you took them, the VP’s would expect you to be avail 24/7 and I was given the heads up by my direct supervisor so I refused them both. Most of the people in my department also worked at least 3 hours extra per day, I left on time every day. Strange part was that I not only got paid the same but when I quit, the owner of the company begged me to stay and said I was the best processor that they had. One of the agents did not answer her company cell at 11pm one night and was told that if she did that again, she would be fired. She had actually been called just in a round of calls made by the VP to see if people were answering their company cells 24/7 like they were supposed to.
Oceans Mom | November 12th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
SO relevant to my life right now!! I seriously logged 109.5 hours in two weeks (that period ended 11/12)… I wholeheartedly agree that people work too much! I feel like I’m the only one at my workplace willing to work so hard. It sucks. I’m making a conscious effort to have more of a personal life. Thankfully, it sounds like my new administrator appreciates this concept. Great post!
Bre | November 14th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I just finished reading a book called Your Money or Your Life, which examines the history of work in America since the Industrial Revolution. And what I learned is we are caught in a nasty, inhuman cycle in which we are consumers first, workers second (so we can be consumers) and human beings last of all.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I love stuff and experiences and travel–all things that take money. But I have never been one who likes to work 50+ hour weeks, as seems to be required of me. I’ve done it, don’t get me wrong, but I hate it. I once worked 24 hours a week and when I went full time, I didn’t get any more work done. I just became less efficient. I read a statistic on another blog on this same topic that mentioned research showing the average American office worker only did about 15 to 20 hours of actual work a week and spent the rest of their time hanging out.
Lynn @ human, being | November 14th, 2009 at 9:31 pm