Flexible work provisions are justified as enabling workers to manage their personal lives, including their health, around work. This study deploys social theories of practice to investigate how the temporal characteristics of flexible work can produce, alter and disrupt the health improvement efforts of workers, concentrating on healthy eating and keeping physically active. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 Australian workers, the study explores the temporal mechanisms linking flexible work to health practices, focusing on routines, rhythms and rituals (the three Rs). This research finds that work-time arrangements can provide the temporal scaffolding necessary for health practices (through routines, rhythms and rituals), but only when there is day-to-day, mid-term, and long-term work predictability. Australia’s flexible work policies do not provide this requisite temporal predictability. Health promoting employment provisions would have to reinstate employment standards from the 1970s, providing the desired predictability for flexible provisions to benefit workers.

灵活的工作规定被证明可以使工人在工作期间管理自己的个人生活，包括健康。这项研究运用社会实践理论来研究弹性工作的时间特征如何产生，改变和破坏工人的健康改善工作，集中精力于健康饮食并保持身体活跃。通过对12名澳大利亚工人的深入访谈，该研究探索了将灵活的工作与健康实践联系起来的时间机制，重点是常规，节奏和礼节（三个R）。这项研究发现，工作时间安排可以为卫生实践提供必要的时间支架（通过常规，节律和仪式），但仅有日常，中期和长期工作的可预测性。澳大利亚的灵活工作政策没有提供这种必要的时间可预测性。促进健康的就业规定将必须恢复1970年代的就业标准，从而为使工人受益的灵活规定提供所需的可预测性。