Please, Account For Shadow Work
If you give up WFH, how much shadow work are you introducing into your life?
It’s spring, and it feels like the first spring after a year of frustration. Pandemics, masks, working from home — all of it has blurred the line between “work time” and “free time.”
But now, with most workers getting vaccinated (at least in the United States, where I work in a large and fairly liberal city), there are discussions ongoing about what will be the eventual fate of Work From Home (WFH). Will offices open back up? Will we adopt a hybrid schedule of only spending some portion of the work week in-office?
I’m paying close attention to the suggestions and ideas coming out of our Human Resources department — and I hope that, when they announce the company’s new policy, they account for shadow work.
I only learned about this concept recently, but it immediately clicked for me. Shadow work explains so much of why I feel like, even though I only work 40 hours per week, there’s never enough time for me to get to everything that I want to do in my personal life.
Here’s what shadow work is, how we have been given more and more of this work to do as consumers, and how WFH impacts the balance of shadow work.
