Working from home! Oh my goodness, what a blessing in so many ways. I know for me personally, at the beginning of 2014 when I was in my burnout recovery, it was my number one ask of my manager. I wanted to work from home on Fridays, and I saw it as a way for me to get just a little bit more sleep, see my family a little bit more, and really stay hyper-efficient and focused on my work without the distractions.
That way I could go into the weekend feeling like it was my personal time. But I shared not too long ago that unfortunately, working from home has had some negative impacts – primarily for women in the workplace. On a personal level, we’re seeing that women’s stress level is rising because they’re thinking, “Oh, I’m at home. Why don’t I just take on more household responsibilities?”
That’s not the point.
We’ve also seen some professional negative impacts for women, which is a lack of visibility. kind of swinging the pendulum, if you will, of instead of the schedule I had (working from home one day a week), it’s let me work from home all the time and have no face time, no visibility, and limiting the professional growth opportunity. There’s something new that just came out in research.
The New York Times published an article about how working from home for women, it seems that they’re also filling that time by taking on a second job. While it’s great news, women hold an all-time record, 79 million jobs, which is fantastic! But this work from home, this flexibility, many women are seeing it as an opportunity to take on a second job.
Now, look, if you have capacity, if you have drive, if it aligns with the values and the agreement with your employer, great, go for it. Love that for you! But, I’m really going to challenge that working from home should allow us to be amazing at our current job and make sure then that you also have fun and recovery built in.
What I hate for not just women, but to see men do the same thing, which is, great, I now work from home so I have some spare time. I’m now just going to fill it with even more responsibility that potentially increases stress and potentially drives to burnout.
So take a look right now – is there opportunity for you to do things that maybe fulfill passion and that you want to do? Great, go for it. But what should we really be leveraging our time for? Make sure that you are not driving yourself to that burnout by taking on the additional job, just because on the face of it, it looks like you have more time.
I would challenge you, what is your energy, what is your mental health? What are your surroundings, your environment, and the people and the relationships that you have in them? Are you taking care of that first, before filling in this extra time with another job?