Please, Account For Shadow Work

If you give up WFH, how much shadow work are you introducing into your life?

It’s a cool car, but she’s still going to have to account for the time it takes to drive that to work. Maybe, if she didn’t spend so many hours working, she could manage to darn those pants. Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

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.

Shadow Work is the Dark Matter of a Job

Physicists have calculated that much of the mass of the universe exists as dark matter; it’s all the matter that doesn’t reflect light back, so we don’t detect it when we look out at our universe.

Similarly, shadow work is an economics term that describes all of the unpaid additional labor that is necessary for us to keep our society, our lives, running.

Consider, for example, if you work in an office for 40 hours per week. You are paid for the time that you have your butt in the office chair at your desk, at your computer and doing your work.

But in order to hold that job, you probably also have to consider the following:

• Transportation. You probably drive a car to work, which requires regular stops at the gas station to refuel. You also need to either take it for regular check-ups, or perhaps spend some time doing repairs…