It's Quarter to Five, There's No One in the Place Except Working Parents Online

Posted by: Cathy Arnst on December 13

It is 5 am on a Saturday morning, and I am on my computer, doing research for a story, cleaning up email, all the stuff that I didn’t get time to do during the week. If that’s not crazy enough, I just got an email from another McGraw-Hill night owl asking me to forward her a clip of a recent BusinessWeek story (Hi Kenya! Shall we meet for coffee?).

What’s up with us? Well, I’d say we are keeping working parent hours.

It’s a common lament in our online age—the Internet has turned us into 24/7 workers, never able to leave our jobs behind. But I also think it has made it possible to be both a conscientious employee and a parent, though possibly a sleepy one. I need to be home by 6:30 every night to relieve my sitter, and during the holidays I often have to hit the train earlier, for all the various performances and class parties my daughter is involved in. On top of that, I am currently looking at middle schools (you are not zoned for schools in NYC, you must choose the one you want) so I’ve had to take off in the middle of the day frequently in recent weeks for school tours.

So when else to do work, but at 5 a.m.? Luckily, I’m an early riser, but it catches up with me at night. More than once my daughter has tucked me in. I’m also, I admit, a bit of a procrastinator, and the Internet is my enabler. Is this a bad thing? There are lots of studies that link lack of sleep with weight gain, that too few hours of shut eye can affect memory and attention span, contribute to diabetes, even slow down wound-healing. According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night, and some 30 million Americans suffer from insomnia.

I’d better be careful not to cut myself, because I think I average 6 hours a night (as for weight gain and memory impairment, it’s too late for me, I fear). But perhaps the Internet is speeding biological evolution, just as it has rapidly changed work and social habits. Maybe our bodies will quickly adjust to less sleep, odd working hours, sending emails at 5 am. Now if only we could get the real world to adjust to our schedules. I like the suggestion Late Night Business Hours For Working Parents from the always-fun blog CareerandKids:

I decided that there are certain businesses that would make a killing from the coffers of working parents if they were open late at night.

Heck, it doesn’t even have to be 24 hours, just being open from, say, 10pm to 2am would make me patronize those businesses in a heartbeat:

1. Dentists
2. Doctors
3. Hairdressers
4. Banks
5. Dry Cleaners
6. Target (actually, I’d settle for Target opening at 7:30 am instead of 8, so, I could go on the way to work)

Those things may already exist, but, I’ve never seen them, so, I’m going to pretend like it was all my idea.

Anyone else have some time-shifting suggestions that would allow us to sleep, work, run errands, and parent, all in 24 hours? Or has my sleep-deprived mind propelled me to fantasy land?

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/