Split your shifts
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Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to try a split shift. If you need to commute and need to be at your workplace five days a week, it can be hard to find weekday family time.

particularly with young kids who go to bed early. But it is not impossible. You just need to rework your schedule a little bit. Today's tip, like some others this week, comes from my book, 168 Hours. That book was first published in late May of 2010, which means that it is 15 years old this month. A lot has changed in the world since then, but we do in fact still have 168 hours in a week.

And so I am revisiting some of the tips in that book that I think can still be helpful. One is to try a split shift. So when 168 hours came out, remote work was still relatively rare. Sometimes people could work from home on Fridays if they had been with a company for years and had proven themselves. But most of the time, working meant commuting and going to an office.

Some jobs also have a reputation for requiring longer hours. This is a problem if you have young kids who go to bed relatively early, because getting home at, let's say, 7 p.m. on a weekday means you will have very little time with a child who goes to bed at 7.30 p.m. Indeed, this scenario has been mentioned as a reason why women will never ascend to the upper ranks of organizations, or so the story goes, because they will want to seed their kids.

Now, if you have been listening to me for a while, you'll know that I find some holes in that story. For starters, not all kids go to bed early. There were times in my children's babyhoods when I would have paid good money for them to go to bed at 7.30 p.m., let alone the 6.30 p.m. that some people seem to experience. I could have worked until 8 p.m. every night and still have seen my kids for a reasonable chunk of time.

But let's say you don't have night owl children or children like mine who don't actually seem to require sleep. Just because you need to work 50 hours a week and have a commute doesn't mean that the extra hours all need to be logged at your office into the evenings. Another approach is to work a split shift. Here's what this means. A few days each week, you leave work on the early side, even if all the work isn't done.

Let's say you get out of there at 5 p.m. and have a 30-minute commute. You are home at 5.30 p.m. If your kid goes to bed at 7.30 p.m., you now have two hours to gather versus 30 minutes if you left at 6.30 and got home at 7. But then, after your child goes to bed at 7.30, what do you do? Rather than watch TV, which is what a lot of people do, you go back to work remotely. Log the 90 minutes you didn't do earlier

starting at 7.30 p.m. You will be done at 9, which gives you time to watch TV for an hour or so if you'd like. You trade off work time for TV time rather than work time for kid time. And that is a trade-off a lot of people are more willing to make. Now, of course, in the intervening years since 168 Hours came out, a lot more people started working remotely with the pandemic. So I sort of shelved this advice for a while.

But now, as more places have return-to-office policies, I think it's becoming relevant again. You can do the required 9 to 5 in the office and then do any extra work outside that time in a window that works for you. If you have young kids, it is almost always better to do this second shift later at night, after they go to bed, versus during time you could be with them in the evening.

So I have seen this strategy on tons of professional women's logs over the years, but there is zero reason men can't do it too. I know many do. I would also encourage more men to try it out. Even if your partner is largely responsible for childcare, because that is your arrangement, I'm guessing that you do, in fact, want to see your kids. At least I hope you do. And if you do, working a split shift

is a way to both put in the hours and make that happen. So why not give it a whirl? Maybe not every night a week, but a few could make it possible to have the best of both worlds. I am all about remembering that everything does fit into 168 hours. We just have to be smart about our time, and then the trade-offs start to disappear. 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. 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.

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