In an always-on culture, employees try ‘microshifting’ to reclaim personal lives

A new way of scheduling work time is remaking the typical nine-to-five routine

NEW YORK -- Before the house is humming and her teenagers ask her to whip up breakfast or chauffeur them to school, Jen Meegan reads her company emails and revisits ideas she drafted the night before.

She works for an hour or so, then after the school run shops for groceries or gets gas before returning to focus deeply on her job as head writer and cofounder of Sheer Havoc, a creative services agency.

And so goes the rhythm of her day: working in targeted chunks for a few hours, breaking for an hour or two to tend to family and personal needs, and repeating the pattern until she finishes her work late at night.

Meegan is among the wage earners engaging in “microshifting,” a flexible scheduling approach that involves tackling job duties in short, productive bursts instead of a single nine-to-five stretch. The paid labor fits around and between non-work responsibilities and priorities. Performance is judged primarily by output, with less emphasis on the number of hours logged behind a screen.

“Sometimes the break’s when most of the work will get done in your head, because you’re not sitting in front of a laptop just staring at a screen going, ‘I can’t come up with anything,’” Meegan said.