Second Cup: Don't buy time to do low paid work

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is don't buy time to do lower paid work. If you are highly paid, it doesn't make a lot of sense to cut back on your working hours, to free up space for something you could pay someone else to do, for less. It might be worth it to do high-quality activities in your personal life, but not for the laundry. Since I write and speak about work-life balance, I often hear from people who are thinking of going part-time.

0:51Speaker 1:A busy professional feels time poor, that there aren't enough hours in the week for their job and everything else that's going on in their life. so they consider cutting their working hours. And on the surface, this might seem 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 is the best of both worlds, right? But I think there are some potential problems with this plan. First, and people who've listened to this podcast for a while have heard me say this before, 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 on a day she is 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 time she is supposed to be working.

2:05Speaker 1:When the workload is more nebulous, many people who go part-time find they for sure change their salaries, but only maybe change their hours and their workloads. But the second issue, and the one that's the topic of this episode... is that people don't always go part-time for reasons that make a lot of economic sense. If you want to cut your work hours to have adventures with your kids or write your novel or train for a triathlon or have meaningful conversations with your aging parents, be my guest. These are things that don't really have a dollar value because they are all about the meaning that you assign to them.

2:48Speaker 1:But if you are going part-time because the laundry isn't getting done, This is a different matter. Much housework can be assigned a dollar value and may not particularly be about any sort of deeper meaning. What if you continued to work full-time and use the income you are 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.

3:27Speaker 1: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 listening to this podcast are, the amount of money it takes to pay for a cleaning service or grocery delivery 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 will still get more margin in your life because you will have more time without a task assigned to it. And you'll continue to get paid more and get retirement contributions based on that higher salary.

4:13Speaker 1: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 are buying back is worth it. So really think about what you plan to do with your time off. Make sure it's something you enjoy or find as meaningful or more meaningful than your work. Otherwise, you might be substituting one kind of labor for another, but not in a way that makes any sort of economic sense. Don't buy time to do lower paid work. Buy time to do things that feel, to you, like they are priceless. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening. And here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.

5:15Speaker 1:If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.