I keep kind of weird hours. If you’re the sort of person who looks at time stamps on emails, you may have noticed that these Substack posts are mostly sent out in the 8am hour. That’s not because I write them late at night and schedule them to go out in the morning; it’s because I’m writing them in the 7am hour.
I get up between 5 and 5:30 almost every day, get breakfast for myself, then take Charlie the pupper (who I suppose technically ought to be a “doggo” since he’s five now, but we still call him “pupper”) for his morning walk. The Pip tends to get up at around the same time I do— if he’s not up by 6, I’ll wake him, because he gets grumpy if he doesn’t get his morning video-gaming time. During the school year, The Pip’s bus came around 7:20, at which point I’d go to Starbucks then come home and write for a while before going to campus; this summer the kids have a camp drop-off at 9:00, so I’m just writing at home then hitting Starbucks on the way to campus. Either way, I usually get a solid hour and a half of writing time in before 9am.
This sometimes creates the impression that I’ve got a work-life balance problem, when people see me answering emails at 6:30am. In fact, though, it’s just basically shifted my work day forward by a couple of hours. Because I’m up writing early, I’ve generally pretty much exhausted my capacity for useful mental work by around 3pm. Which worked out well during the school year, because SteelyKid would get home then on in-person days, and I’d usually pick up The Pip from his after-school program around that same time so he could game before dinner. We tend to eat on the early side (dinner by 5:30 most nights) so the kids have a reasonable amount of time to do homework, play games, or read in the evening and still get to bed at a reasonable hour. I tend to be in bed myself somewhere in the 9:30-10:00 range.
This schedule would be really surprising to 18-to-25-year-old me, who was a champion snooze-alarm oversleeper, but I’ve been settled in something like this routine for quite a few years at this point. It’s a bit career-limiting for any attempt to be a social-media #influencer— I’m in bed during the peak active hours for US-based Twitter, so it’s hard to be part of the conversation there. (I suppose I could cultivate an interest in Australian politics, because they’re all fired up when I have free time in the morning, but life is just too short…) On the whole, though, this schedule works well for me, in that it allows me to be productive at work and also be free when the kids need me to be.
My weird schedule is part of why I’m more than a little dubious when people offering advice to younger academics make blanket statements about work hours— things like “never respond to work email outside of business hours.” (There’s a bit of irony in that many of the people I see offering this as an iron rule are also prone to bemoaning the baleful influence of neoliberal corporatism on academia…) Like most bad advice, it’s well-intentioned— the idea being to set firm boundaries so as to protect work-life balance— but a little misguided. The right solution isn’t a fixed schedule that everyone has to hold to, but treating everybody as adult professionals who can be trusted to set their own boundaries in whatever way makes the most sense for them.
If we’re going to use “balance” as a metaphor for keeping up with both work and personal life, it’s important to remember that, for people at least, balancing is an active process. It’s not a matter of finding one perfect arrangement that’s always the same, it’s a constant feedback process of small adjustments, and the details will change from situation to situation, and person to person.
My schedule isn’t extended— I’m not some crazy workaholic toiling from 6:30am to 8pm— it’s just time-shifted, so I start earlier than many colleagues, but I also knock off early (or take an hour in mid-afternoon to nap). It’s not reflecting a lack of work-life balance— on the contrary, I keep the schedule I do because it’s better for keeping my work and family responsibilities both on track.
This is, of course, yet another area where I’m enormously fortunate to be a professor. As long as I show up to teach my classes, and for whatever other in-person obligations crop up, I’m free to set my own hours. Even in academia, there are a lot of people forced to work more rigidly set hours, let alone out in the business world.
(This is an area where some blue-collar positions actually fare better— a fair number of our facilities staff work a 7-3 schedule that’s a little closer to what I do than what the office staff are bound to.)
I think, though, that scheduling freedom is something that ought to be extended to a much wider range of occupations. This ought to be (but sadly probably won’t be) one of the lessons we take away from the pandemic year: people can be productive without needing to be physically present for a rigidly set range of times. And I think that giving more people the freedom to choose to work weird hours would do a lot more good for work-life balance than setting hard limits on when people can do things.
This is the kind of stuff I end up thinking about when I’m walking the dog at 6:15am and wondering whether it’s going to start raining. If that’s something you’d like to have in your inbox, here’s a big button:
If you think somebody else ought to read this, here’s a different button:
If you’d like to point out that this particular post was sent out an hour later than what I describe in the post as the typical range, the comments are open for your pedantry.
I think every parent ends up doing what you're doing. When mine were still little, at least one of them would be up every morning by 6:00am and needing attention, so I started working a 4:30am-3pm workday to have some uninterrupted time in the mornings and family-focused time in the late afternoon. The early start time stuck, and I still do this during the school year even though I don't need to because that dark, quiet time is magical for getting things done (just add coffee). 100% agree that more people need to have the choice to work hours that fit their needs. I'd include school kids among those.