Feeling the squeeze? : why our experience of working time matters

It has taken me a little while to write this piece for the Work After Lockdown blog. Writing it has been on my mind and on my to-do list for quite a few weeks, although never quite rising to the top. Blog writing and similar important-but-extra activities have often been relegated below more pressing work tasks and home-schooling as, week after week, the UK’s third national lockdown rolls on.

Carving out quiet time to think and to plan and to produce 500 words has been difficult. Significantly more difficult than it used to be before lockdown when my children went somewhere else for their education, and our family didn’t squabble over devices, desk space and stable WiFi.

Part of the problem relates to the quality of time available to us parents who are working from home and simultaneously looking after young children. Our Work After Lockdown research found that for this group, work time is broken time; often fragmented and frequently interrupted. Work days are no longer confined to weekdays and working hours are pushed to the extremes of daytime and beyond. It is no surprise that complex and cognitively effortful activities like writing, are not best achieved under these conditions.

There is little doubt from our research that working from home is most productive for people with access to adequate desk space, technology, privacy, and uninterrupted time. People in formerly office-based jobs who have freedom to control and adjust their personal work schedules and re-order their work tasks fare better at home than people who are obliged to fit their work in to someone else’s schedule. In other words, they have high levels of task and schedule autonomy and it makes a material difference to well-being and work performance.

We found that not only were parents and carers less likely to work from home under conditions conducive to high productivity, they were also more vulnerable to anxiety, stress and burnout. The burden of broken time weighs disproportionately heavily on women, and its effects are evident in the astonishingly high levels of stress recorded in the TUC’s recent survey of 50,000 working parents and worsening parental mental health reported in a recent University of Oxford study.

While having the freedom to re-order tasks and flex personal work schedules helps make work manageable under these testing conditions. Rolling incomplete work tasks and projects forward from one week to the next adds to women’s time burdens and compounds the crushing sense that one Work After Lockdown interviewee described as “…feeling like I am failing on all fronts”. 

The rapid switch made by some 30% of the UK’s employed population from predominantly office-based jobs to working to home was characterised by impressive adaptability. However it is clear that maintaining work performance through successive lockdowns and school closures has come at high cost to women’s cognitive, emotional and financial resources. One in five working mothers in the UK are actively considering quitting according to a new Mumsnet poll.

It is no coincidence that today is the day these 500 words made it on to my page and your screen. Today, International Women’s Day, is the first day in months of restrictions that my children and every other returned to school. Five and a half uninterrupted hours became available to me and I am deeply relieved to have spent a few of them writing about it.