Don't buy time to do lower paid work

There might be smarter ways to get more margin in your life

Since I write and speak about work/life balance, I often hear from people who are thinking of going part-time. A busy professional feels like there aren’t enough hours in the week for their job and everything else in their life. So they consider cutting their work hours.

On the surface, this seems like a smart idea. Work a little less, be paid a little less, and have more time for family, other relationships, and life maintenance. That’s the best of both worlds, right?

But I think there are potential wrinkles in this plan.

Hours can be nebulous

First, going part-time makes more sense for some types of work than others. A nurse who is scheduled to work 24 hours a week is probably going to work about 24 hours a week. Her patients aren’t randomly showing up at her house on her days off. A knowledge worker who gets client calls, on the other hand, is probably going to take a call from her biggest client on a day she’s not in the office if it seems important — and she’s not going to be able to guarantee that her colleagues will only deal with her projects at the times she’s supposed to be working. When the workload is more nebulous, many people who go part-time find they definitely get paid less, but they don’t always work less.

(Fun fact: For my book, I Know How She Does It, I collected time logs from hundreds of professional women who also had kids. Sometimes I got logs from multiple people at the same company. In one case, I saw a woman with a part-time schedule working more hours than one of her colleagues with a full-time schedule!)

But the second issue, and the one that’s the topic of today’s essay, is that people don’t always go part-time for reasons that make economic sense. If you want to cut your work hours to have adventures with your kids, write your novel, train for a triathlon, or have meaningful conversations with your aging parents, that can be wonderful. These are things that don’t really have a dollar value — because they are all about the meaning that you assign to them.

But if you’re going part-time because the laundry isn’t getting done, and you still haven’t gotten a contractor in to fix that broken shower, this is a different matter. Much housework can be assigned a dollar value, and may not be about any sort of deeper meaning.

Outsource what you can

What if you continued to work full time and used the income you’re not giving up to pay someone else to take on some of these tasks? Rather than going part-time because you can’t find time to clean your house, hire a cleaning service. Rather than going part-time to create time to grocery shop, have your groceries delivered or use a meal prep service. Rather than going part-time because you feel overwhelmed by all the life maintenance details, hire a household manager to come in a couple of mornings a week and attend to them.

If you are a highly paid professional, as I know many people reading this are, the amount of money it takes to outsource household tasks is likely a lot less than you would be giving up by going part time. If you stay full time but outsource some tasks, you’ll still get more margin in your life because you’ll have more time without a task assigned to it. Plus you’ll continue to get paid more and get retirement contributions based on that higher salary. You may also advance in your career faster than if you were part-time.

Buying back time can be great, but you want to be sure the time you’re buying back is worth it. You want to use this time to do something you enjoy or find more meaningful than your work. Is that laundry or vacuuming? Maybe, but I’m guessing for many people that is not the case.