![]() The overwork of the professional class, meanwhile, does seem like more of a choice. While people in low-income professions are less likely to work more than a standard 40-hour week, this can be due to a lack of job opportunities. Wealthy workers’ long hours of course don’t mean they have it tougher than poor workers do. The most consistent work characteristic predicting imbalance is hours worked.” Another study states it plainly: “The most consistent family characteristic predicting imbalance is being a parent. In a study, Milkie and her colleagues found that people who work more than 50 hours a week actually have more, not fewer, work-life conflicts if they set their own hours-a concept called “schedule control.” Rather than a salve, “schedule control may be indicative of ‘work that never ends,’” Milkie and her co-authors write. Having the freedom to “make their own hours” doesn’t necessarily help Americans who work long hours, either. Melissa Milkie, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, has found that people with college degrees have more “work-nonwork interference” than those with less education. That is, both people in the house have jobs, so there’s no one whose job it is to exclusively manage the household. The people most stricken by work-life-balance issues are, perhaps expectedly, dual-earner families, says Marcus Butts, a management professor at Southern Methodist University. To many Americans, reading the research on work-life balance would feel like reading their own diary. ![]() In fact, some researchers think that rather than beat yourself up striving to balance work and life, it might be better to simply embrace the imbalance. In the end, the pursuit of balance can itself be exhausting: After an arduous workday, people feel as if they “should” dice up vegetables and Instagram their smiling toddlers. “The fear is you’ll be overlooked by your overworking bosses and seen as a threat by everyone else.” Balancing work and life “is such an act of subversion, of resistance, that it’s really difficult for individuals to do,” Schulte said. This fruitless cycle suggests that work-life balance is not independently achievable for most overworked people, if not outright impossible. Check emails during the kids’ swim meet, they say, or pick up a hobby to “take your mind off work”-and take up even more time you don’t have.īusy workers have been trying and failing at these types of hacks for decades. The solution from career gurus has historically been to try to squeeze both work and life into the overpacked Tupperware that is your day. Women are often the default chore-doers and child-tenders, even in relationships that strive for egalitarianism. American workers-especially those in white-collar professions-are working longer hours. The reasons behind this “madness,” as Schulte put it, are familiar, and they’re not specific to journalism. ![]() I once made my boyfriend pay me for the hours I spent booking flights and hotels for our vacation. Constant pressure in my profession has made me go to great lengths to minimize how much labor I perform outside of work. On a recent cross-country trip to see my parents, I spent a day doing my work expenses. I’ve timed calls from PR people to coincide with my commute home, since that’s the only “free” time I had to talk. ![]() My career as a journalist similarly requires odd hours. When I read Schulte’s book, I found myself nodding along vigorously. I felt like I was falling apart at the seams.” At home, I felt like I couldn’t be the kind of mother that I thought I should be. ![]() I always felt behind, that I wasn’t doing enough. “It was madness,” Schulte, who is now the director of the Better Life Lab at New America, told me recently. When she described her time troubles to a fellow reporter, the reporter said, “I don’t know how you single mothers do it.” Schulte has a husband. At night, she would wake in a panic thinking of all the stuff she didn’t get done. At work, she would get started on an article only to have to take a break to call her kids’ school. “I have held what I hope were professional-sounding interviews sitting on the floor in the hall outside my kids’ dentist’s office,” Schulte writes. Her unforgiving schedule had no free time and left her constantly torn between her family and professional life. In 2014, when she wrote Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, a book about the hunt for work-life balance, Schulte was a reporter for The Washington Post and a mother of two young children. Brigid Schulte has baked Valentine’s Day cupcakes until 2 a.m. ![]()
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