The Benefits of Time Budgeting While Working from Home During COVID-19

COVID-19 has created one of the most challenging working-from-home experiments in history. Overnight, most tactics that employees use to manage work-nonwork boundaries have been removed. Drawing on boundary theory, we introduce a new boundary management tactic––time budgeting––that involves creating temporal separation between work and nonwork domains as well as within work and nonwork activities. Survey data from 568 employed adults working from home as a result of COVID-19 provided support for our prediction that time budgeting was associated with better work-from-home experiences in terms of well-being and task performance. However, contrary to prior work and our prediction, the benefits of time budgeting were not moderated by employees' preference for work-home segmentation (vs. integration). Follow-up interviews with 16 survey respondents provided additional insights about time budgeting, including the role of sense of control as a potential mediator. Overall, our paper broadens theory by introducing time budgeting as a new boundary management tactic that can help employees cope with blurred boundaries.