The mechanics of having it all

Lessons from I Know How She Does It

This month I am celebrating the 10th anniversary of I Know How She Does It, one of my earlier time management books, being out in the world. I wrote much of the book while pregnant with my fourth child, and it was something of a passion project for me. Young mothers sometimes hear the message that women just can’t “have it all” and so I wanted to show, in hour by hour detail, exactly how women with thriving careers and families spent their time.

I’ve been re-reading the book lately (spoiler alert: I’m enjoying it) and I think a lot of the advice holds up. Here are some of my favorite strategies from that book, that I hope anyone looking to build a career while raising a family, would learn.

1. Think 168 hours, not 24. There’s a common trope in work/life literature about getting home too late from work some night to put your baby to bed — and thus deciding to dial down/scale back/opt out/etc. There are many problems with this trope. Babies who go to bed early often wake up at the crack of dawn, so you probably saw the kid before work. Not all babies go to bed at 6:30 p.m. (mine never did!). But even if yours does, you can see around this hard-choice moment by zooming out. Do you work late every single night? Many people do a few nights a week, but not 5 nights a week (if nothing else, Friday is likely earlier). And even if you do work long hours during the week, weekends are real days too, and can feature lots of family time. Someone who had to work late Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and missed bedtime those nights, might be doing bedtime Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday…which is more nights than not. Same with things like exercise. If you don’t exercise Monday, it’s not the end of the world. Someone could exercise Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and still be getting a fair amount of physical activity even if it never worked on “peak” days. Looking at a week instead of a day makes life feel far more doable.

2. Beware of people who overestimate their workweeks. When that finance bro warns you out of his industry because of the “100-hour workweeks,” know this: he’s probably lying. He’s never tracked his time. He has no idea how many hours he’s working. He doesn’t want to compete against you, and making it sound like people have to work around the clock in any particular industry can scare off folks who’d likely excel but who want to have a life. One of my favorite studies ever found that people claiming 75-plus hour workweeks were off by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction. No one I studied for I Know How She Does It worked more than 70 hours during their diary week, and most people worked much less. That said…

3. Consider working just a little more than average. You can succeed a lot working just a few extra hours on the margins. For I Know How She Does It, I collected time diary data from women who earned over $100,000 a year (in 2013). They worked, on average, 44 hours a week. This is north of 40, but not a lot more than 40. Given that most people don’t earn six figures, this suggests that there are major returns to considering jobs where workweeks are just a tiny bit on the longer side.

4. Seek flexibility. Flexibility matters more than total hours worked. It will be harder to work 35 hours if you are required to be in a certain place, at certain times, with no ability to leave without a lot of prior notice, than it will be to work 45 hours with none of those conditions. Here’s another truth: the more senior you are, the more likely your job will look like the latter. Big jobs tend to come with more autonomy than ones lower down the hierarchy. Sometimes, when people ask what the best job is for working moms, I say “CEO.” I’m sort of joking but also…not. One doctor in my study noted that her friends who were teachers had way less flexibility than she did in her particular practice, even though medicine is often perceived as less “family friendly” than education. She also earned a lot more in medicine than she would have as a teacher.

5. Invest in more childcare than you think you need. If you have young kids, and want to build your career, then childcare isn’t an expense. It’s an investment in your life-long earning potential. You want to make sure you have enough childcare that you feel you can do your job without being stressed about it. For many people that means a “layered” approach with more than one form of childcare. Think day care plus an au pair, or a full-time nanny plus a part-time nanny.

6. Protect time to rest and have fun. This makes life feel doable, rather than just like a survival game. Carving out time for enjoying life might mean investing in a few more hours of childcare, or developing a good system for trading off with your partner so each of you can catch up on sleep, see friends, exercise, and enjoy some downtime.

7. Don’t fret so much about sleep. Even people who have big jobs and families sleep a reasonable amount. The women I studied for I Know How She Does It slept, on average, 54 hours during their time diary week. That’s about 7.7 hours/day, well within the range of 7-8 hours per day that most adults need. The nature of an average is that some slept less and some slept more, but in general there were few terrible nights. In most cases, a terrible night or two will be followed by a few days of sleeping more to even out. The idea that working mothers never sleep is just not true. So this fear doesn’t need to factor in to nearly the degree that people sometimes think.

8. Think through your family time. Sometimes people assume that they aren’t spending much time with their kids, so they don’t think about how to spend this time, and then it’s less meaningful than they’d like. The truth is that if you have young kids, you will spend a ton of time with them, even if you work long hours. That’s the nature of sharing a house with people who need constant supervision. So think about what little adventures or activities would be fun for you and them. Figure out ways to do one-on-one time when that’s possible.

9. Get creative about time. Choosing unorthodox times for various activities can make a full life possible. I loved reading people’s strategies, like going out for a manicure after a kid was a in bed, or doing early happy hours, or doing date lunches. When you view the 168 hours of the week as a mosaic, where you get to place the tiles, then all sorts of possibilities open up.