Moment: 5 Reasons Part-Time Fails, and How to Fix Them

Going part-time might seem like the solution to burnout and imbalance, but without specific strategies in place, it often makes things worse by cutting your pay while you continue working the same hours. We explore why so many part-time arrangements fail and the key skills needed to make flexible work actually work for you.

• Holding boundaries is essential - without them, you'll work unpaid hours and experience guilt in both directions
• Learning to disconnect mentally prevents work from following you during personal time
• Developing focus skills is crucial as workloads rarely decrease proportionally with hours
• Emotional awareness helps prevent "vomiting" work stress onto family and friends
• Perfectionism and procrastination become even bigger problems with reduced hours
• Success in part-time work requires setting guilt-free boundaries around your decisions

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• 0:00 Introduction to Balance and Beyond

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to Balance and Beyond Moments. Your weekly dose of insight, wisdom and mindset shifts all in 10 minutes or less, whether it's a powerful truth, a fresh perspective or a spark of inspiration, this is your space to pause, reflect and reset. Let's dive in. Don't go part time. I know you think it might be the answer to getting better balance and stopping burnout and looking after your health, but I promise you, unless you put some specific strategies in place, it is only going to make things worse. Now, before you try to burn me at the stake, I'm a big supporter of flexibility and making sure that work and life are all in balance. However, I have seen time and time again that unless you understand what really happens when you go part-time, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Speaker 1: 1:03

The reason most people want to go part-time is they feel like life is completely out of whack. Working too much, crazy hours, too much stress overwhelm your relationships with kids breaking down. Same goes relationships with partner. No time for you, health suffering and in all of this mess, it feels like the only option. The only thing that can really give is work. The kids don't go back. Most people would like to stay married or with their partners. You know there's life admin. Kids still need to be taken to sport and dropped off and fed. So, in a world where it feels like there is no other choice, it feels like work is the one thing that has to drop choice. It feels like work is the one thing that has to drop.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Now, in my experience, there are five key reasons why part-time is not going to work for you. To be clear, part-time will work if you solve all of these. So I'm going to run you through these five reasons why I have seen, time and time again, countless, countless reasons and examples about part-time doesn't work, so let me share with them, with you. Now, to clarify when I say doesn't work, what I mean is that it's not working for you. And as I go through all of these examples, you're going to see what I mean. So one of the first reasons that part-time work is not going to be successful is if you haven't learned how to hold boundaries yet, and by this I mean you've dropped your days or you've reduced your hours and yet you are still working in the time that you are not meant to be, that you're not being paid for it. So all you've done? Let's say you go from five days to four and think I need to get some space for me. I need to get those appointments in. Well, if you are working on those days in any way, shape or form, you've just docked yourself 20% pay.

Speaker 1: 3:04

And what's even worse is that when you do do some work on your day off that usually you are doing other things, whether it's childcare arrangements or whatever else you then feel guilty about it because you know you shouldn't be working and maybe your partner goes nuts at you because, like, this is your day off, you shouldn't be working. Or you feel guilty because you don't want to let the team down and you feel bad because you've had a day off and other people are working and you're letting you know you're not getting to a deadline or the team needs you. So you have this constant pull for oh my God, it's urgent, they need me. And the time that is meant to be boundaried for you, which is the reason why you're not working on that day or boundaried for the kids, which is the reason why you're not working on that day, or boundaried for the kids, or whatever it is that you've chosen to do with your time, ends up being draped in shame and guilt, and nobody wants that and that's not fun, and this is why so many women I know try part-time and then, because of this lack of boundaries, end up going oh stuff it, I'm going to go back up to full-time, because at least I'm going to get paid for the time I'm working. So you must learn how to hold boundaries and, really importantly, you also must learn how to not feel guilt around your decisions. Whatever you've chosen, however you want to structure your work time, hours, locations, whatever it is you've got to be strong enough to know who you are and to say no in the times that you're not working.

Speaker 1: 4:38

A second reason that part-time doesn't work and you'll start to see that all of these are going to stack on one another, they all work together is you haven't learnt to disconnect yet. What this means is that, even though you might not be working on a day when you are not technically paid to work, you're thinking about it on your day off and once again you beat yourself up. And then let's say that you've got kids around you or you're picking them up. You then yell at the kids because somebody from work contacts you who technically shouldn't have. You're angry at them for putting an unreasonable demand on you and for then having to get on your laptop when you shouldn't. Let's say, you go and do the work because you don't have any boundaries and then you're thinking about it for the rest of the day.

Speaker 1: 5:30

I often call this emotional pollution, when the thinking just follows you and maybe it's the resentment or it's the anger or it's the frustration that someone's always meant to do it and now it's left to me. And even if you're not doing the work, like right, no, I'm not going to do it till Monday. They can wait. We're not changing lives here. We're not saving lives. You think about it all day, you think about it all weekend and you worry and you stress and the overwhelm. And on Monday, the first thing I'm going to do is this, and this is what I'm going to say to that person about my boundary. And then what happens is the kids come home from school and drop a water bottle in the hallway and you absolutely lose it at them because you're still thinking about work and you haven't understood your emotions enough and you're not emotionally aware so that you, in essence, vomit your emotions over and you're not emotionally aware so that you, in essence, vomit your emotions over anybody who happens to bump into you. And this is when we're carrying work with us and we don't know how to be present and enjoy this day off whether it's a day off to spend with children, whether it's a day off to spend with family or even sometimes a day off for you, when we aren't holding boundaries and we haven't learned to disconnect. Another reason that part-time doesn't work is because you haven't learned to focus yet.

Speaker 1: 6:49

When most people I know drop a day it's pretty rare that their workload drops by anything close to 20% and this is another piece that we'll come to and what often happens on those days is that they usually pick up other stuff because they've got quote unquote more time, whether it's having a child not in daycare, whether it's they're going to help out. Maybe part of them not working is they want to volunteer their time, so they pick up more stuff. Or, from a relationship perspective, it's like look, I'll go part-time because we're not coping as a family and I'll take the dog to the vet and I'll do the groceries. And so they're going and doing all these extra things when work hasn't dropped and while their perfectionist is still ruling the roost, and if they don't know how to tame their procrastinator. They will spend this day and others jumping from task to task and then feeling even more behind because now they've got even more staff on. And so the idea is that if you've dropped your hours in whatever capacity, all right, well, I'm only going to work four days and I've got three to focus on the family or on me.

Speaker 1: 8:10

But if you're not able to disconnect and then learn how to focus on you and either get the stuff that you need to get done from a life, admin perspective or whatever it is that you're doing, well, everything is going to bleed and you're going to have this crazy pollution where all you've now done is you've got four days worth of, let's say, you're working four days, you've got four days worth of tabs open from work, and now you've got three days of tabs of personal stuff.

Speaker 1: 8:29

Maybe you're renovating, maybe you've got, you know, medical stuff you've got to do, and so you have disappointment and that and you cannot get it all done, and so your focus is completely dispersed and then you end up running around like a headless chicken, and that is not the idea of part-time work. Part-time work is meant to be about balance, but just because you have more time doesn't mean that you should allow everything to take longer. So this is why focusing is a really, really important skill that you must develop if you want to be successful in any kind of reduced hours. I mean, generally, this is just a life skill that we need anyway. Thanks for taking this moment for yourself. If this resonated, share it with a friend who needs to hear it today, and don't forget to subscribe to Balance and Beyond for full episodes and more of these bite-sized breakthroughs. See you next time.