Where Does The Time Go? Or, Parkinson's Law In Action

In the weeks and months before I retired, my employers engaged an outside company to provide help with our transition from full time worker bee to full time retired sloth and one of the key things that kept coming up was how would we fill all of those extra hours? I imagine that anyone on the brink of retirement wonders what they will do with this newly freed up time and whether they will get bored, having too little to do? Yet conversations I had previously had with friends who had already retired were frequently along the lines of them now  having too little time, in fact they all wondered how they had previously found time for work.

Now the division of labour in various households will differ, but a recent study by Thomas Leopold at the University of Amsterdam and Jan Skopek at the European University Institute found that in homes where men worked, they did about two hours of housework per day but this only increased to 3.9 hours after retirement. Women's contributions to housework fell only 0.8 hours (from 6.8 to 6 hours) following the man's retirement. What I'd like to know is who are these retired men only doing 3.9 hours housework a day and where can I get a piece of that action?

Considering that pre-retirement I was trying to cram a whole load of household chores into the weekend it occurred to me then that these could in future be spread throughout the week, but it never crossed my mind how much they would spread. It now seems that I have become an embodiment of Parkinson's Law, the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" because there always seems to be something to do. Far from finding myself bored and with little to do, quite the opposite is the case. Actually I do find I get bored from time to time but it is rarely through having nothing to do, and with a wife who works from home, any admission that I am bored and have nothing to do would surely be greeted by her saying, "Well I've got some jobs you can do."

So then, 3.9 hours of housework per day? I don't know how the household tasks are divided up in your neck of the woods, but in ours, pre-retirement I did the cooking, the cleaning (kitchen, bathrooms, vacuuming but not dusting), gardening, shopping, chauffeuring and general odd jobs; Val's responsibilities lay with dusting and the laundry. As you might expect with one party working full-time and the other retired, the division of labour shifted a bit and I now have added laundry and dusting to my repertoire. So 3.9 hours per day seems a little on the low side except for two things. One is that there are some days when I seem to be on the go all day; the laundry in our house tends to get done twice a week and when it is done it takes probably eight hours end to end. Now granted on the days I do the laundry I'm not working for eight hours, the washing machine and the tumble drier are, but that's eight hours of the day that mean I can't stray very far. But then there are other days when I don't have to put so much effort in; probably over the week 3.9 hours may just, on average be about right. So how do people spend six hours a day doing housework? If you do the laundry every day, clean every day and so on I suppose one might stretch it to six hours (especially if you include cooking and shopping).

But how many hours a day count as "work" anyway? Is shopping work (and here I'm only thinking of essential shopping, like groceries and the like)? Is cooking really work? A lot of cooking could be thought of as a hobby; any cooking can be a creative experience and might not really be a chore. A key difference between housework when one has retired, and one which I think makes the Leopold/ Skopek study a bit misleading, is that when one is in full-time employment, then housework is clearly defined as an activity that you cram into the hours when you are not pursuing your paid employment. Once you have retired housework expands, or rather the time available to accomplish household chores increases; and of course given more time there is the opportunity to undertake tasks with greater care and with more rigour than when it all had to be done over a weekend.

Now that winter is over and the weather is improving, albeit with its normal unpredictability and occasional totally unseasonal outbursts, I need to change the pattern of the housework into fewer days and free up some spare time to do some more frivolous and entertaining things since the effects of Parkinson's Law seems to have taken over. Instead, I need to adopt Horstman's corollary to Parkinson's law, which is to say, "Work contracts to fit in the time we give it." I'm going to see if I can reduce that 3.9 hours a day, or at least not do 3.9 hours every day.