Who Juggles Work and Home at the Same Time—and Why

What we studied

Work–family multitasking means trying to handle job tasks and home tasks at the same time while you are at home—answering a work email while helping a child with homework, or taking a client call while cooking dinner. It sits at one of the most contested edges of modern working life: the border between job and family. When that border blurs, stress tends to follow. Yet before asking whether multitasking is good or bad for workers, it makes sense to ask who does it at all.

The researchers drew on two nationally representative telephone surveys: the 2011 Canadian Work, Stress, and Health Study (CAN-WSH; n = 5,809) and the 2002 U.S. National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW; n = 3,484). Both asked the same core question—how often respondents tried to work on job and home tasks simultaneously while at home—and coded frequent multitasking as doing so at least sometimes. Roughly 31 percent of Canadian workers and 33 percent of American workers cleared that bar.

The study tested four broad clusters of predictors: social statuses (gender, age, education, income, parental status); employment type (occupation tier, business ownership, self-employment, supervisory authority); work location and schedule (home-based work, flexible shifts); and job-related demands and resources (job pressure, long hours, a second job, work contact outside regular hours, schedule control, job autonomy, challenging work). In each country the researchers layered these predictors in step by step, which let them see which factors explain the education and income gradients in multitasking.

Two competing predictions were on the table. The resource hypothesis—drawn from the Job Demands–Resources model—predicted that attributes like schedule control and autonomy should reduce multitasking by giving workers more control over boundaries. The stress of higher status hypothesis predicted the opposite: that the same high-status resources often come bundled with heavier demands, ultimately pushing multitasking up rather than down.

What we found

The headline result is that frequent multitasking is not randomly distributed—it clusters sharply among workers who already carry the heaviest job demands. In both countries, education and income were positively associated with multitasking before any other factors were accounted for. In Canada, workers with a college degree were 1.70 times as likely to multitask frequently as those with only a high school diploma; those with a graduate degree were 2.71 times as likely. The U.S. figures were nearly identical: about 1.78 and 2.68 times as likely respectively. Once job demands were taken into account, however, those income-based gaps disappeared entirely in both countries, and the education gaps shrank substantially. The demands doing most of that explanatory work were job pressure and work contact outside regular hours.

Employment structure mattered too. Executives and professionals, business owners, and the self-employed all multitasked more often than wage-and-salaried workers in routine occupations—in both countries and across every model. Working at home was the single strongest predictor in both surveys: in Canada, home-based workers were 4.63 times as likely to report frequent multitasking as those at a fixed outside location, and in the U.S. they were about 6.6 times as likely. Working a flexible or variable shift—rather than a regular daytime shift—also raised the odds, though this effect weakened once demands were added to the Canadian models.

The resource hypothesis did not hold up in either country. Of the three job resources tested, only challenging work was independently associated with multitasking, and it was associated with more multitasking—the opposite of what the resource hypothesis predicted. Schedule control was either unrelated (Canada) or modestly negatively related (U.S.) to multitasking, and job autonomy was unrelated in both countries. Supervisors were more likely to multitask than non-supervisors before demands were taken into account, but once demands entered the picture that gap essentially disappeared—confirming that the supervisory effect was carried almost entirely by the heavier demands supervisors face. The stress of higher status hypothesis therefore received strong support: resources like challenging work and authority over others tend to arrive alongside elevated demands, and it is those demands—not the resources themselves—that drive more frequent multitasking.

What this means

The study's cross-national consistency is striking: the same groups multitask frequently, the same demands explain why, and the same so-called resources fail to protect workers in both Canada and the United States. That convergence suggests structural features of jobs—not cultural quirks—are doing most of the work. When demanding conditions follow workers home through technology and long hours, the boundary between job and family erodes regardless of which side of the border you live on. Employers and policymakers who want to reduce role-blurring and its downstream stress costs need to look at the conditions that generate demands, not just at flexibility programs that may paradoxically increase exposure to them.