Review
------
“As an entrepreneur and mother, I’m invested in
honing time management strategies that enrich my life instead of
taking any enjoyment or flexibility out of it—and Laura Vanderkam
understands that. In her new book, she shares how busy people
build full, productive careers and happy homes as well. You’ll
find lot of tools that can help you make time for everything
that’s important and cut out what’s not.”
— Angela Jia Kim, founder of Om Aroma & Co. and Savor
“I’m a longtime fan of Laura Vanderkam’s inful work—her
recommendations for getting the most out of every day are often
counterintuitive but always realistic and manageable. In her new
book, she reveals the time management strategies that highly
successful mothers use to build lives that work. Thanks to her
findings, I’ll never look at my weekly the same way
again.”
—GRETCHEN RUBIN, author of Better Than Before and The Happiness
Project
“For many years I’ve wanted to see reflected in our collective
conversation what I know to be true in women’s lives: that many
of us are happily combining work and motherhood, and loving both.
Laura Vanderkam has written the book that’s been sorely missing,
and she does so with an impassioned, eloquent voice, important
new research, and the warmth of a dear friend.”
—TARA MOHR, author of Playing Big
“An empowering guide for professionals who want to figure out how
to become superstars in their fields while building satisfying
lives.”
—DORIE CLARK, author of Reinventing You and Stand Out
“This book could have been titled How to Be a Superhero, because
that’s how it makes you feel and act after reading it.
Vanderkam’s curiosity for high performance and what makes it
possible is infectious. Packed with research from real lives and
tips for real change, this book is sure to help women around the
world discover their own path to success.”
—JON ACUFF, author of Do Over
“In this engrossing and eternally helpful book, Laura Vanderkam
shares valuable ins from women who have mastered their most
vital resource: time. I Know How She Does It stands apart thanks
to Vanderkam’s nuanced understanding of what it takes to become
an efficient-yet-balanced individual.”
—TIM SANDERS, author of Love Is the Killer App
“As a busy CEO, I was inspired by the hundreds of people
Vanderkam studied who found ample time for career, family, and
self in the same 168 hours available to everyone, each week. If
my entire team read this book, we would all benefit.”
—RICHARD SHERIDAN, CEO and chief storyteller, Menlo Innovations,
and author of Joy, Inc.
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About the Author
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LAURA VANDERKAM is the bestselling author of What
the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, All the Money in
the World, 168 Hours, and Grindhopping. She is a frequent
contributor to Fast Company’s website and a member of USA Today’s
board of contributors. Her work has also appeared in The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, and other
publications. She lives with her husband and their four
children outside Philadelphia.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Introduction
“Remember the berry season is short.”
I came across this poignant thought the other day in the most
pedestrian of places: on the basket our local pick-your-own
strawberry farm gives visitors before they hit the fields. I was
there on a sunny June day with my seven-year-old, Jasper, and
four-year-old, Sam. My husband, Michael, had taken our
two-year-old daughter, Ruth, fishing at a nearby pond. I was
woozy on the hay ride to the fields, from the heat and the bumps
on the rutted road, and also from what was then still a new
secret: another baby on the way, joining the crew when all this
hilly green in southeastern Pennsylvania would be covered with
snow. As I fought back my dizziness, I stared at the found poetry
on this empty box: “Remember the berry season is short. This box
holds approximately 10 lbs level full, 15 lbs heaping full.”
It is a metaphor for life, perhaps, in that everything is a
metaphor for life. The berry season is short. So how full,
exactly, do I intend to fill the box? Or, if we slice away the
metaphor, we could just ask this: what does the good life look
like for me?
I think about this question frequently, writing in the genre I
do. While self-help gets a reputation for flimsiness, at its best
it takes a practical look at this eternal question, with a bonus
not all philosophers offer: ideas and strategies for figuring it
out.
I write about the good life through the lens of time, because a
life is lived in hours. What you do with your life will be a
function of how you spend the 8,760 hours that make a year, the
700,000 or so that make a life: at strawberry farms, rocking
toddlers to , and pursuing work that alters at least some
corner of the universe.
The good news for those often told to limit their aspirations is
that the box will hold all these things. It can hold all these
things and more.
This book is about how real people have created full lives. It is
about how you can borrow from their discoveries to do so too. It
is about how you can move around and rethink the hours of your
weeks to nurture your career, your relationships, and yourself,
and still enjoy more open space than most people think is
possible. It is, in short, about how to enjoy and make the most
of your time, by which I mean investing as much as you wish in
everything that matters: work, family, community, leisure. It is
about celebrating abundance rather than lamenting choices or
cling that no one can have it all.
I find the subject of how we spend our time fascinating. I
approach time management as a journalist, studying data sets and
interviewing successful people about how they use their hours. In
my previous books (168 Hours and What the Most Successful People
Do Before Breakfast), I’ve tried to share these discoveries and
tips for making readers’ lives work. But as I wrote these books,
I realized two things. First, I was most drawn to the stories and
strategies of women like me, who were building careers and
families at the same time. Second, for all I probed my subjects
to describe their lives, I was mostly relying on their anecdotes
and storytelling. I wanted to see people’s schedules in all their
messy glory. I wanted to look at their time logs and see the
curious places the data led. That’s why I wrote this book, adding
a researcher hat to my journalist one, trying to understand what
1,001 days in the lives of professional women and their families
really look like.
There is much to learn from seeing how people use their hours to
achieve their goals. Learning their strategies can be empowering;
it reminds us that we have the power to shape our lives too.
Years ago, when I filled out my first 168-hour (one week) time
log, I thought that it seemed strange to view life as cells on a
spreadsheet. But over time I came to see that I could view myself
as the artist deciding on those cells. I became a mosaic maker,
carefully placing tiles. By thinking about the arrangement, and
watching others, and trying different strategies, over time I
could create an intricate and satisfying pattern. I could create
a mosaic that embraced new things: new rtunities in my
working life, the new children whose lives I’ve loved watching
unfold. Sometimes the larger world delights in telling people
that a full life will be harried, leading one to being maxed out,
or torn. But while it is the rare artist who can create a
perfectly blissful mosaic, focusing only on the stressful moments
ignores the other sweet moments, like making strawberry
shortcakes with those bright red berries, and getting a note from
someone who tells you your book has changed her life.
Life is simultaneously complex and compelling. It is stressful
and it is wonderful. But if you believe, like I do, that the good
life can be a full life—a level full life or even a heaping full
life—then I invite you to study how you place the tiles of your
time, energy, and attention. I invite you to think about the
pattern with the goal, over time, of making an even more
satisfying picture.
After all, the berry season is short. I believe in filling it
with all the joy that is possible.
CHAPTER 1
The Mosaic
Life is not lived solely in stories. Yet this is the way we talk
about our lives: in moments that must impart a lesson.
Consequently, in much of the literature on work and life, our
tale would begin with a Recitation of Dark Moments: a snowstorm
threatening to maroon me in Los Angeles while my husband is in
Europe and my three young children are with a sitter in
Pennsylvania who wasn’t planning on keeping them for several
snowy days straight. Or, perhaps, I am in New York City overnight
in order to be on a morning show at dawn. I am trying to turn in
early when my husband calls to report that, after taking the kids
to the circus, he’s realized they’re locked out of our new house.
He’s in problem-solving mode, calling me to get the numbers of
people with a spare key, and when they don’t pick up the phone,
letting me know that the locksmith will be there in two hours. I
shouldn’t worry. They have adequate bottles! But of course the
net result is that I am pacing around my hotel room, picturing my
five-month-old baby out in the car in the middle of the cold
night. How am I supposed to after that?
I could begin with such tales, and then lament the craziness of
modern life, and the impossibility of having it all. Ever since
The Atlantic put Anne-Marie Slaughter’s manifesto on this topic
on the cover, and scored millions of reads, it’s a truth in media
circles that the phrase “can’t have it all” lures women in. Tales
that let us be voyeurs to such foibles draw clicks. People hunt
for more extreme examples. An editor seeking submissions for a
book of such stories suggested, as an example of what she wanted,
“getting a text message from a child while flying an F-16
over Afghanistan.” In 2012, the legal world posted reams of
comments in response to a widely circulated departure memo from a
Clifford Chance associate with two young children. In it, she
chronicled an awful day, describing middle-of-the-night wake-ups
from the kids, a colleague who sat on a note until day care was
closing, a bad commute, a not-exactly-helpful husband, and a long
to-do list waiting for her after she wrestled the kids into bed.
“Needless to say, I have not been able to simultaneously meet the
demands of career and family,” she wrote her colleagues, and so
the only choice available, the choice we all seem to understand,
was to quit.
But in this book, I want to tell a different story. The key to
this is realizing that life isn’t lived in epiphanies, and that
looking for lessons and the necessity of big life changes in dark
moments profoundly limits our lives.
I came to see this not in an aha moment but in an accumulation of
conversations that convinced me that my research into time use
might be giving me ins that the larger world was missing. As
one example, in summer 2013, I talked with a young woman who’d
formerly worked at a consulting firm. She was thinking of
starting a coaching company that would counsel women like our
Clifford Chance heroine to negotiate for part-time or flexible
work arrangements. It was a perfectly good business idea, but her
explanation for why she liked the concept stuck in my mind: I
looked at the senior women in my firm, she told me, and there was
no one whose life I wanted.
Normally, I might have let that go as background noise, the sort
of thing young women say to one another, but I had been reading a
lot of Sheryl Sandberg. So I began formulating a response that I
eventually realized needed to become its own treatise.
It starts like this: Several years ago, I wrote a book called 168
Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. One happy result of
releasing the book was that numerous companies asked me to come
speak about how people should manage their time. To make my
workshop more useful, I started asking a few audience members to
keep track of their time before our session. These time logs,
which are half-hour-by-half-hour records of an entire week,
revealed what issues people in the audience cared about, and how
much time they spent at work, at home, and on personal
activities.* I’d analyze these logs with my audience guinea pigs
so I could talk about the challenges people faced. These audience
members could then tell their colleagues how they dealt with
them. Our sessions were interactive and, I hoped, enlightening.
I speak to all sorts of audiences, but often the women’s
networking group at whichever company I was visiting decided to
sponsor my talk. Many of the time logs I collected for my talks,
therefore, would come from the female executives who ran these
networking groups. Many of these women had children. And, over
time, I noticed something.
Their lives didn’t look that bad.
Perhaps it speaks to the pervasiveness of those Recitations of
Dark Moments that I thought I’d see perpetual chaos, or at least
novelist Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It scene of
an executive distressing pies to make them look homemade, but
nope. There were tough moments, to be sure, but I also saw kid
time, husband time, leisure time, . I’d even seen time logs
from senior women in consulting firms, that industry in which the
entrepreneur who wanted to start the coaching company hadn’t seen
anyone whose life she wanted. To be sure, not everyone would want
such a life. In the log she kept for me in March 2014, Vanessa
Chan, a partner in a major consulting firm and mother to two
young girls, woke up Wednesday morning in one city, which was a
different city from the one she woke up in Tuesday morning, which
was not the city she lived in either. She arrived home late
Wednesday after her girls were a. She gave the ing
children a kiss before going back to work. If we wanted a tale
inspiring work/life lamentation, we could focus on that scene.
But when you see the whole of a week, you see different moments
too. Chan missed Tuesday and Wednesday, but she put her girls to
bed more nights that week than she didn’t. She read them multiple
chapters in Little House on the Prairie. I tallied it up, and she
logged more time reading to her kids than, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, the average
stay-at-home mom of young kids reads to hers. She visited one
daughter’s school and set up playdates with other parents while
she was there. She did very little work on the weekend (not that
it never happened, she told me, but she tried to keep a lid on
it). Instead, she organized a game night for her family and went
skiing, and took her daughters to the Lego movie. She had a
coffee date with her husband. She watched TV and did a session on
the spin bike. Far from distressing pies to make them look
homemade, Chan spent a reasonable a of time designing a
Pokémon cake for her daughter’s upcoming birthday. In all her
busyness, she had time to indulge her hobby of making and
decorating Pinterest-worthy cakes.
Not everyone would want Chan’s life. Chan herself didn’t want it
forever. She had entrepreneurial aspirations for a second career,
and when I checked back a year later, she was starting a company
called Head First Ventures, which focused on bringing to life
product concepts that Chan developed to solve a wide range of
consumer gripes and pet peeves. But even if not everyone would
want Chan’s life, I couldn’t cl that no reasonable person
would want this life either. Cake designing, skiing, and snuggly
bedtime stories do not imply a work/life horror show.
I saw this same phenomenon in many allegedly horrid industries:
finance, law, medicine. Women were leaning in to their careers,
and they were leaning in to the rest of their lives too.
How did they do it? The math is straightforward. There are 168
hours in a week. If you work 50, and 8 per night (56 hours
per week in total), that leaves 62 hours for other things. If you
work 60 hours and 8 hours per night, that leaves 52 hours
for other things. Time diary studies (mine and others) find that
very few people consistently work more than 60 hours per week,
even if they cl they do.
The time is there to have what matters. Like Chan, though, we
have to choose to see this, and many people choose not to. In the
discussion of women’s life choices, we often focus on the crazy
moments, or the difficult moments, which makes sense. They’re
darkly entertaining. These get the press. Other moments—like
eating breakfast with your kids or playing board games together
on the weekend—aren’t talked about. High-powered people may not
mention them, partly because they absorb the not-unfounded
message that talking about family at work could hurt you
professionally. Leisure also isn’t something people stress in
conversation. They may mention, casually, something that happened
on The Bachelor, but they won’t introduce themselves by
announcing they spend their evenings watching it. When people ask
how things are going, the modern professional answers this:
“Busy.” I do it myself.
But what if this logical leap—these stressful things happened,
and therefore life is crazy and unsustainable—limits our stories?
The human brain is structured for loss aversion, and so negative
moments stand out more starkly than positive moments,
particularly if they fit a popular thesis. We lament the softball
game missed due to a late flight, and start down the road of soul
searching and the need to limit hours at work or perhaps resign,
but we don’t rend our garments over the softball game missed
because another kid had a swim meet at the exact same time. No
one ever draws the conclusion from that hard-choice moment that
you need to get rid of the other kid. We could draw numerous
conclusions from our Clifford Chance associate’s horrible day—she
needs a different child care arrangement, she needs a different
division of labor at home, she needs to be more clear about her
boundaries at work, or some days are just miserable and such is
the human condition—but these are not the conclusions that fit
the chant of our modern Greek chorus: no one can have it all, so
don’t you even try.
I’ve been pondering this aspect of narrative, and why certain
moments turn into stories that then develop their own power as
they get repeated. Influential economist Robert Shiller explained
the phenomenon best in a different context when he told The Wall
Street Journal why people cling to the idea that they can pick
hot stocks, basically because they like these companies’ stories:
“Psychologists have argued there is a narrative basis for much of
the human thought process, that the human mind can store facts
around narratives, stories with a beginning and an end that have
an emotional resonance. You can still memorize numbers, of
course, but you need stories. . . . We need either a story or a
theory, but stories come first.” Language existed long before
literacy. We absorb information as tales you might hear around a
campfire, with points of evidence leading to an epiphany that
teaches a lesson, a lesson that matches what the larger culture
wants you to believe, even if (another narrative device) it
sometimes masquerades as a “hidden truth.”
I love stories as much as anyone, but these campfire stories
built around dark moments miss the complexity of life. You cannot
look at Chan’s long Wednesday without seeing Little House on the
Prairie too. The traditional format leads to the conclusion that
life is madness. It is either/or. A commenter on the Modern Mrs.
Darcy blog summarized this worldview, explaining why she’d opted
out of the workforce: “If you get your joy from a paycheck and a
pat on the head, go for it. I prefer hugs and dandelions.”
Look at the whole of life, though, all the minutes that make up
our weeks, and you see a different picture. Those questions
lobbed at successful women as if any given cocktail party were a
presidential news conference—How do you do it? How do you manage?
How do you balance?—have a straightforward answer. Life has space
for paychecks and dandelions, business trips and Pokémon cakes.
We can carry many responsibilities and still revel in our own
sweet time.
I am more interested in this entire mosaic. Many people have
placed the tiles of their professional and personal worlds
together in ways that give them space to strive toward their
dreams at work and home. As I tried to convey this holistic view
to people, though, I often hit this problem: I had no statistics
I could call upon. Some organizations do phone surveys, but there
are vast problems with just asking people how they spend their
time (more on this later in this book). Time diary studies are
more accurate. The American Time Use Survey and studies from the
Pew Research Center and elsewhere look at how mothers and hers
spend their time, breaking it down by whether people work
full-time or part-time, in or outside the home. Full-time jobs,
however, are a diverse set, as are jobs held by people with
bachelor’s degrees (another common demographic cut).
I wanted to get at the idea of “big jobs,” and understand what
the lives of people with marquee careers and families looked
like. But I had nothing beyond the stories of people I
interviewed, and the slowly accumulating pile of time logs from
speeches to document the reality. As I read more “can’t have it
all” stories, I realized that people were arguing or, worse,
making huge life decisions based on anecdotes.
I wanted data. The best way to get that data, I decided, was to
produce some.
The Mosaic Project
In 2013, I began seeking out time logs from women who, by at
least one definition, had it all:
• They earned more than $100,000 per year
• They had at least one child (under age eighteen) living at
home
I recruited women who might keep track of their time via my blog
and various professional networks I’m involved in, and I branched
out from there. I sent volunteers a spreadsheet and asked them to
record their time for a week. Most received these instructions:
“Write down what you’re doing, as often as you remember, in as
much detail as you wish to share. Keep going for a week, then
send it back, and we can discuss it.” Some people used Word
documents so they could describe their lives more at length. Some
used apps such as Toggl to produce more precise measures than my
spreadsheet with its thirty-minute cells allowed. Some altered my
336-cell spreadsheet to turn it into a 672-piece mosaic of
fifteen-minute blocks.
When people sent the logs back, I tallied hours spent on work,
, TV, exercise, reading, and housework/errands. I had
conversations by phone or e-mail with most of the women. I wanted
to learn more about their strategies, and many people asked for
feedback about their logs: how they might solve time management
challenges and find more time for fun. I approached these time
logs partly as an anthropologist, studying these new ways of
making work and life fit together.
This book is about the results of what I came to call the Mosaic
Project: a time diary study of 1,001 days in the lives of
professional women and their families. Everyone has opinions on
having it all. I want to show, moment by moment, how it’s really
done.
At least that’s the hope. Any project like this raises questions.
Perhaps most obvious, why women? I hope this book will be useful
for anyone who wishes to have a full life, which these days
certainly includes many men in demanding careers as well. I
overheard my husband’s half of a conversation once with a new
her who was trying to figure out how he could build a career
at his firm and spend time with his son. It was the same
work/life balance conversation women have been having for
decades, even if neither guy would ever host a panel discussion
on the topic.
I focused on women for a few reasons. First, highly successful
women are still more likely to be in two-career families than men
in similar positions, with all the juggling that implies. One
study of medical researchers who won K08 or K23 grants, which are
early career National Institutes of (NIH) awards that
demonstrate high potential, found that only 44.9 percent of these
up-and-coming male researchers who were married/partnered had
spouses or domestic partners who worked full-time. For women, the
figure was 85.6 percent. That’s not to say that men with partners
who work part-time or who stay home with their kids don’t also
want to have full lives. Likewise, a number of women in the
Mosaic Project had stay-at-home partners, or partners who didn’t
work as many hours as they did. These categories are not
cut-and-dried.
However, I have found that, on the margins, successful women
still have a certain vision of what their involvement with their
families should be. I suspect it is benchmarked against a false
perception of how stay-at-home mothers spend their time, but to
put a positive spin on it, women really want to spend time with
their families. They want to be ly involved in their home
lives. So a breadwinning mother with a husband who stays home
with the kids tells me that she gets up with her children in the
morning so she can spend time with them before work and her
husband can . Another describes her husband “punching out”
when she gets home from work in the evening; she takes over the
evening shift. Few men with stay-at-home partners expect to come
home and enjoy a martini while their wives keep the children
hushed. Still, they aren’t facing a social message that they are
somehow neglecting their children by spending their days earning
the cash that keeps their families solvent.
People often speak of the work/home roles that high-earning women
navigate as a second shift. But they can be viewed less
pejoratively too. Because women are navigating these dual roles,
they produce new and creative ways to move around the tiles in
the mosaics of their lives. I’d seen this anecdotally in time
logs, and I knew this from my own life, but as a work-from-home,
entrepreneurial sort, I assumed I had freedoms others did not.
Indeed, in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article, the
conclusion was that women who managed both to be mothers and to
have big careers “are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.” As the
Mosaic logs poured in, though, I soon saw that even
conventionally employed women developed creative strategies for
building lives that allowed them to have it all, not just in
theory, but reflected in how they spent their hours.
That’s why I studied women. But here’s another question: why
mothers? Certainly, it’s possible to have a fulfilling life
without having children, and one recent poll done by Citi and
LinkedIn found that women are more likely to believe this than
men. Some 86 percent of men said having children was part of
their definition of success, but only 73 percent of professional
women included children in their definition of having it all. I
hope that, in time, the investments people make in extended
family, friends, and community will become a bigger part of the
work/life conversation. Right now, however, people with children
are the vanguard. As they create new ways of placing their tiles,
the strategies they employ can be instructive, whether your
definition of success includes having children or not.
As for the $100,000 salary requirement, I needed an objective
number. I know this measure of success is incomplete as well. I
am aware on an extremely personal level that some careers pay
more than others. A few minutes spent perusing the Bureau of
Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates
files convinced me that if I wanted to assume a good living, I
went into the wrong line of work. The median wage for “writers
and authors” is $55,870; the 90th percentile is $115,740.
Meanwhile, the median wage for lawyers is $113,310. This means
that an utterly middling lawyer will earn as much as a writer at
the top of her game. I know that by using $100,000, I’m going to
wind up with some mid-level lawyers in my sphere of “successful
women,” and I’ll wind up not counting enormously influential
people who have achieved success in lower-paying fields.
Nonetheless, earning six figures indicates you have achieved
financial success, even if you’re not in the 99th percentile for
your industry. You can support a family on your own, whatever any
other adults in the household choose to do. Very few women (in
the United States, less than 4 percent of employed women overall)
earn six figures. I wish that figure were higher, but it isn’t,
which suggests that women who have achieved it are doing
something worth studying. Even if it’s true that some careers
readily yield six-figure incomes, one reason many women don’t
choose these high-paying fields is a perception that you’ll work
crazy hours and have no control over your life. From these time
logs, I found this was not true, though I also found that another
objection I heard—it’s easy to have it all if you earn six
figures because you can just outsource everything!—wasn’t
automatically true either. Many women made their lives more
difficult than necessary by not taking advantage of their
affluence, a phenomenon I’ll explore in later chapters.
I had collected 143 complete logs when I and the researcher who
worked with me crunched the numbers to understand these 1,001
(143 × 7) days from a quantitative perspective. I received dozens
more logs I couldn’t use in the quantitative half of this project
because they were missing a day or two or were not detailed
enough to provide an accurate daily count of time spent working
and ing (the two categories that generally occupied the
largest chunks of hours in people’s lives). They still provided
qualitatively interesting fodder. I interviewed some of these
women for the book, and others who met the criteria but didn’t
keep logs, to learn their strategies. Many more logs have
continued to come in since I stopped “officially” collecting them
for data, and this book reflects ins from those logs too.
I appreciate all these logs, because tracking time takes time and
effort. This is why most people don’t undertake a study like this
when they want to understand how many hours people devote to
things. Instead, researchers ask people to estimate: How many
hours do you work? How many hours do you spend taking care of
your children? The study on K08 and K23 grant recipients, which I
mentioned above, used this method to estimate how many hours men
and women spent on household tasks. They asked.
Asking people to estimate how they spend their time is simple and
straightforward. Unfortunately, it produces unreliable answers.
Most of us don’t know how many hours we devote to different
things. We don’t know how many hours we work or or watch
TV. People will give answers to survey takers, but those are just
guesses. And worse, they’re guesses influenced by systematic
bias. If everyone in your industry talks about their eighty-hour
workweeks, even if logs show they’re probably averaging
fifty-five hours, you will talk about your eighty-hour workweeks
too. In a world where we complain about how busy we are, we’re
not going to mention that five out of seven nights per week we
just fine. It’s the night that a kid woke up at two a.m.
and you had to catch a seven a.m. flight that you talk about at
parties or mention in your departure memo. It’s not that the
horrible night didn’t happen. It’s just that it’s no more
emblematic of life than any other night. It must be taken in
context.
A 168-hour time log removes most of these problems. People can
lie on these logs, to be sure, but it’s harder to do. You’d have
to systematically input more work and less on the log
itself, and most people aren’t that intent on lying. Phone survey
lies are lies of ease, not nefariousness. A time log reminds the
respondent that a day has 24 hours, and a week has 168. No matter
how amazing we are, all of our activities must, and do, fit
within these bounds.
To be sure, a time diary study has limits too. As one woman aptly
pointed out, when you have a baby, morning, evening, and weekend
time rarely involves doing anything for thirty minutes straight.
Here’s an entry from one woman’s weekend: “Check on work/[son]
play outside/read book while watching/wash/hang/fold laundry.”
Many people described the mishmash of what happens after dinner
or on weekend mornings as “family time.” There may be puttering
around the house, some housework, some child care, some TV, some
playing, but those time blocks probably aren’t devoted to one
single activity. I don’t discount the “?” entries on time logs.
Modern life features a lot of “?” time. Furthermore, a key
requirement of a time diary study like the Mosaic Project is that
you have to be able to describe time in words. This seems
straightforward to me. I’m working. I’m driving. I’m ing. If
I’m multitasking by checking e-mail while watching TV, I’ll write
that too.
Not everyone thinks this way. One of the most poignant scenes in
Brigid Schulte’s 2014 book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play
When No One Has the Time, involves her attempting to fill out
sociologist John Robinson’s time spreadsheet, then abandoning the
Excel format when she decided she could not shoehorn her life
into a grid. Instead, she created a rather dramatic document: “2
am–4am Try to breathe. Discover that panic comes in the center of
the chest—often in one searing spot. Fear in the belly. Dread
just below that. The should haves and self-recrimination oddly
come at the left shoulder . . .” I have had a few people, often
extremely creative entrepreneurs, describe the same challenge.
People have different personalities. To stick with a time log for
168 hours, you probably need a practical personality closer to
mine (“it’s good enough”) than a free-form or perfectionist sort.
There is also the question of whether the weeks logged are
“typical” or “atypical.” I maintain that there are no typical
weeks. Attempts to label weeks as atypical are what create faulty
impressions of our lives. I don’t instruct people to start
filling out their time logs at a given day or hour. Starting a
log on Monday morning is good, but you can also start the log on
Wednesday at two a.m., as long as you keep going for the next 168
hours. Yet for the Mosaic Project, I saw that people generally
ed to log weeks they saw as more typical than atypical. A
number of women started over with new logs when they lost
workdays due to illnesses and snow and other unforeseen events,
even though these atypical events add up. Most didn’t log weeks
with holidays or vacation days, though these things happen too.
Overall, I suspect this tendency to hunt for typical weeks—often
weeks spent at work in a significant way—means people’s work hour
totals for their diary weeks were higher than one would find
averaged over a longer period of time.
I had to make judgment calls on what to count in different
categories. Everyone in the Mosaic Project e-mailed me at some
point, and I spoke with most on the phone too, so I tried to
clarify anything ambiguous, for example if “coffee with Lou” was
a work meeting or a personal one. If a log was too sparse, I
chose not to include it.
A few other sources of bias: The act of observing something
changes the thing being observed. I don’t always read to my kids
as much as I would like, but when I record my time, I’m more
diligent about it. I spend less time perusing social media, if
for no other reason than I don’t want people to know I check
Twitter fifteen times per day. I imagine others do the same
thing.
The women in this data set aren’t a representative sample of all
high-earning women with children. No doubt the truly overwhelmed
couldn’t (or wouldn’t) find time to fill out a time log. Also,
many Mosaic Project participants read my blog or have read my
books. The vast majority of humanity has not, so that’s one
difference. I think of my readers as extremely competent people,
though another possibility is that people become heavy consumers
of time management literature because they think they need help
in this area. About a third of participants worked for companies
where I bartered speeches in exchange for time logs. They came
from a variety of different fields and regions, though they often
lived in or near major cities, because that’s where six-figure
jobs tend to be concentrated. Their children ranged from babies
to teenagers. Their family sizes ranged from one to four kids. I
had married/partnered moms and single moms (I didn’t make having
a partner a criterion for having it all, though some might argue
it is).
I won’t cl I’ve done things perfectly, but despite the
limitations of my study, I think the Mosaic Project captures a
more holistic picture of the lives of professional women and
their families than I’ve seen elsewhere. In these logs, we see
how people truly spend their hours. We see life moment by moment,
rather than hearing about these moments after they’ve been
twisted by the human impulse to turn life into a story with a
conclusion (“Life is crazy!”).
To be sure, the logs did not show that life was a breeze. I am
not a Pollyanna; all is not perfect. There were moments on these
time logs when people were crazed, and some people were more
crazed than others. Some women described their lives in great
detail, stretching those Excel cells to convey moments that made
me cringe. One woman locked her keys in the car on the first day
she was dropping a child off at a new day care, thus making that
already traumatic morning even more traumatic. Another woman,
awakened in the night by a newly potty-trained child’s accident,
left the house at 5:45 a.m. to squeeze in a workout and “halfway
to gym realize I don’t have my sneakers, have to turn around, no
Spin class today.”
But these logs did not indicate a 168-hour show of desperation,
as you might expect from the “maxed out” anecdotes dominating the
literature about women, work, and life. There are sweet moments
of joy and fun, too. A lawyer’s 8:30 p.m. Friday night entry
shows this: “See a sign at favorite wine store that says they
have a ‘life changing pinot noir.’ I can’t pass that up.” A
manager at a manufacturing went to a balloon
festival and an alligator festival with her family on the same
weekend and also squeezed in “Shopping by myself!!!”—those three
exclamation points summing up the happiness of this experience.
There are snuggles in bed. There is space for blowing bubbles on
the driveway. In a beautiful meta-moment, a woman wrote of
attending a mosaic-making class to tap the artistic side of her
personality. There are strange juxtapositions: a woman ironing on
a Saturday, followed immediately by a facial, perhaps as a
reward. Such is the mishmash of life.
This varied nature is what I want to convey every time someone
asks “How does she do it?” What we think of as either/or is often
not so stark. The logs from the Mosaic Project show what life
really looks like for women with big careers and families. It is
about the strategies people with full lives use to make space for
their priorities, and what we can all adopt from these strategies
to make space for priorities in our lives too.
The Good Life
I wrote in the introduction that I am interested in what it means
to live a good life, and how one can construct a good life. As I
was compiling the data, a reporter asked me if the people in the
Mosaic Project were happy about their strategies.
It makes sense that the good life should be one that makes you
happy. Some women were voluntarily introspective after keeping
their logs, and I have shared their ins throughout this
book, but I didn’t ask people whether they were happy, partly
because the question is so fraught. Happy when? While on the
phone with me? Life is not static. Some participants recognized
elements of life that didn’t work; when I circled back six to
twelve months later, they’d made major changes from leaving jobs
to moving. One woman who’d moved and switched day cares actually
used the word “glorious” to describe her new morning routine.
We know from surveys of moment-by-moment contentment that people
are happier while engaged in “ relations” than while
driving to work. Any given week likely features both.
Hour-by-hour happiness doesn’t rise with household incomes past
$75,000 a year, though overall life satisfaction keeps climbing
well past $100,000. Random phone polls don’t find many very high
income households—because there aren’t that many, one constraint
I faced in enrolling people in this study—but one survey found
that the vast majority of people in high-income ($100,000-plus)
households called themselves “very happy.” None called themselves
“not too happy.”
Be that as it may, here’s an interesting statistic from one Pew
Research Center analysis: women find every activity more tiring
than men do. This is true for work, child care, and housework,
which might make sense, but it’s even true for leisure (though
we’re talking low absolute numbers in this category). I don’t
know why this is. It may be the stories we tell ourselves that
there is always more we should be doing. It may be a comparison
to our partners. In two-income households with kids, hers have
about 4.5 more hours of leisure per week than mothers, though
they also log 10.7 more hours at the office. Perhaps women feel
constantly “on call” in their lives, at work and at home. Stress
can lead to complaints, even if objectively things look good.
After I shared one woman’s work and hour totals with her—a
perfect 40 for work, and about 8 hours per night for —she
wrote me that “On paper, it kind of seems like I have nothing to
complain about! And yet I still do.”
It is the and yet I still do part that inspires much angst and
speculation in work/life literature, and it is no doubt at the
core of why plenty of women in the Mosaic Project, and in the
world at large, feel that they don’t “have it all,” even if they
meet my definition. People seek answers: maybe it’s that we’re
not mentally present, or that our leisure time comes in bits of
“time confetti,” to use Schulte’s memorable image. But no one
gets a perfect life. Not people who stay home with their
children, not those who are married or not married, not those who
have kids or don’t have kids.
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