Archive for January, 2009

My article on the Miss America pageant ran at Culture11.com today. Highlights? Quoting my own 2002 USA Today column on the competition, in which I noted that it had become a search for “the nation’s most inoffensive woman.” Either be truly about empowering women and find us the Nobel Prize winners, CEOs and senators of the next generation, or get off your high horse and just show us a bunch of gorgeous (full-stop) girls.

Two years after the publication of Grindhopping, I officially decided to merge my two main websites (Grindhopping.com hadn’t been updated in a while, and it kept getting spammed or slowed down). Grindhopping.com now redirects here. I plan to cover more career issues on this site moving forward — including the key message of the book, which is doing what you love. I’ll also write more about self-employment in general; my cover story in City Journal on “The Promise and Peril of the Freelance Economy” is on news stands, but not yet up on the website, so that link will come soon. Many thanks to my little brother, Dan, for managing the redirect  — maybe it was his Google 20% project for today…

I was linked to a bit around the conservative blogosphere back in November when I gave my advice to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin about what to include in her memoirs (and, I must say, my interest — as a veteran ghost — in writing the book). Apparently, she has now enlisted an agent, Robert Barnett, and is shopping her book concept around.

I hope she will resist the temptation to pen a short term payback book about the campaign and its iniquities. They are many. But a leader doesn’t dwell on these things, and I believe that Palin wants to be a leader for many years to come. Such my-side-of-the-story style narratives also give books a shorter shelf life than a carton of milk. Palin should write a book that still reads fresh in 2012 or even 2016, because that’s when people will be turning to it as they make up their minds about which candidate to support in the next presidential election.

So what should such a memoir include — beyond her own colorful Alaskan story of fishing, beauty pagents, and the joys and rough patches of authentic family life? I, of course, would love to see a little bit on how this ultimate Core Competency Mom does it (Alaska gov is not a part-time job!). But beyond that, she needs to spell out her conservative philosophy: that society should enable and reward hard work, entrepreneurship and strong families. That there is an intellectual case to be made for deferring to traditions of faith and self-reliance. And that the Republican party has often neither made this case nor, it seems, believed it.

I think Palin does believe it. And I think she’s a lot smarter than her many critics will allow themselves to see. Hopefully this book will help establish that truth.

My review of Barbara Flanagan’s Smart Home ran the other day at Culture11.com as “Home, Sweet Minimalist Home.” Flanagan insists that you only need 98 household objects to live well. I disagree with her on a few of them, but it is a fascinating thesis, and my favorite part is that she stubbornly insists on only naming 98. No adding two more objects to get a round 100!

My review of Megan Basham’s Beside Every Successful Man ran at the American’s website the other day under the title “What Women Want.”

An excerpt: “Basham’s advice to women reveals a blind spot. She praises women who bake cookies for their husbands’ clients, women who do their husbands’ accounting or write their reports, and women who take everything off their husbands’ plates at home so these men can devote themselves fully to achieving professional success. Yet she also devotes a full chapter to lamenting the “work-worship in America these days,” including the rise of the extreme worker, “people characterized by seventy-hour-or-more workweeks, constant availability to address work issues, and little downtime.”

“It never seems to occur to her that one of the reasons corporations demand so much of their workers is that the men who run their offices often have stay-at-home wives clearing their schedules to maximize productivity, in Basham’s words. Because these executives are available 24/7 for work, they expect their people to be available, too. Studies have found that a big reason professional women drop out of the workforce is not that they don’t want to work, but rather that there is insufficient flexibility in their jobs—partly because their male colleagues and bosses have such “supportive” wives that they don’t need flexibility. In other words, the two-people-one-paycheck model Basham extols makes life harder, not only on working moms, but also on men who want to have a balanced life and spend more time with their children.”

Work/life balance is always a topic in vogue, and one of the key hallmarks of a “family friendly” company or profession is supposedly the availability of part-time jobs. From an economic standpoint, these are always difficult for companies to get their heads around, because overhead is similar for a part-timer and a full-timer (if these are professional jobs with benefits) and so hiring two part-timers is more expensive than hiring one full-timer.

But I would argue that the calculus doesn’t actually benefit families as much as people think it will, either. For starters, there are 168 hours in a week. That’s a lot of time. If you sleep 8 hours per night, that’s 56 hours per week, leaving 112 for other things. If you work 40 hours per week, that still leaves you 72 hours. That’s more than 10 hours per day — plenty of hours to spend quality time with your family, do your hobbies, exercise 30 minutes a day, and keep a reasonably well-functioning home. Even if you work 55 hours a week, that still leaves 57 hours, or a bit over 8 per day, for other things. For all that people talk of feeling time-starved, that feeling seldom takes those numbers into account.

Beyond that, though, data from the American Time Use Survey shows that when moms do work part-time, rather than full-time, on average, the hours aren’t necessarily gained in the way we think they would be. Moms who work (for pay) full-time spend about 36 hours per week doing their jobs; moms who work part-time spend 19. Moms who work full-time spend 8.40 hours interacting with or caring for their children; moms who work part-time spend 13.16. In other words, by working 17 fewer hours per week, you gain less than 5 hours of active kid time (the other extra hours are consumed by more housework, more leisure time — which is often spent watching TV, a few extra minutes of sleep, of shopping and other errands, and a larger chunk of unclassified time).

What’s even more interesting, though, is looking at what is done in those hours of interaction with children. Moms who work full-time spend a fairly lousy 0.04 hours (2.4 minutes) per day reading to their kids. But moms who work part-time only spend 4.8 minutes. Moms who work full-time spend 11.4 minutes playing or doing hobbies with their kids. Moms who work part-time play for 21.6 minutes. Moms who work full-time spend 6 minutes on education related activities with their kids; moms who work part-time spend 9.6 minutes.

In other words, in exchange for giving up a big chunk of income and often scaling down her career trajectory, the average woman who works part-time instead of full-time only gains, in practice, about 16 extra minutes per day in activities that most people would deem “quality time.”

Now, obviously, some people do much better. These statistics also include all married women with kids under age 18; for mothers with very young children the differences may be more pronounced. As it is, your 17-year-old doesn’t want to spend even 2.4 minutes reading with you (or 11 minutes doing hobbies together).

But, looking at these numbers, it strikes me that the hallmark of family friendly work is not so much part-time hours, it’s flexibility as to when those hours can be. If you can work a second shift from 8-11pm most nights, and your kids are in school, you can easily get those 36 hours of work-time in without serious non-family childcare. Over the past few years, I’ve interviewed moms of pre-school aged children who have flexible enough jobs to get in 10 hours during pre-school, 10 hours during naps, 10 hours on evenings and weekends, and another 10 hours when they have paid childcare. As with time at the office (see the previous post about wasted time at meetings and browsing the Internet), the question of whether we have enough time for things is more often about whether we are spending our time on the right things than anything else.

Occasionally I get asked for advice on freelancer work habits and, in particular, how to work for yourself from home. Some people would like to work from home, but worry that they’ll be distracted by television, home repair projects, housework, or their kids.

The last is a legitimate fear. If you plan to (really) work from home, then you need childcare. Kid distractions are not easily quarantined into limited chunks of time. Dealing with the others, however, is a matter of two things.

First, cut yourself some slack. The average office worker spends an hour per day in meetings she does not personally deem productive. She also spends about an hour commuting (in addition to the time she spends each morning pulling on uncomfortable clothes). She surfs the Internet at work for personal reasons for about two hours per day. So right there, that’s four hours per day of largely wasted time. You could watch television for three hours during the workday at your home office and still come out ahead if you focused on work projects during the other times.

Second — and this is my personal tactic — you become downright obsessive about the goals you set for yourself. Every Sunday, I make a list of my priorities for the week. These include both work and personal priorities. If they are not all crossed off by Friday afternoon, I indulge in fits of self-loathing. Since I do not particularly enjoy that activity, this provides a good incentive to turn that to-do list into a sea of horizontal lines. I want to see those horizontal lines even if it involves some bizarre behavior.

For instance, I just got off the treadmill after — exactly — 5.5 miles. Last Sunday, I set a goal to run 15 miles this week. I had certainly covered more than 15 miles by today in a bipedal fashion. On Sunday I walked 2 miles and did 5 on the elliptical. On Monday I ran 4 miles, on Wednesday I ran 3.5 miles, on Thursday I did 2 miles on the treadmill and 3 on the elliptical. This adds up to 19.5 miles. But it does not add up to 19.5 miles of running, and my priority list says very clearly that I am to “run” 15 miles. If you add up the running components of that list, that comes out to 9.5 miles. So what did I do today? 5.5 miles of running on the treadmill, of course. Even though I am the one who wrote that verb and I very easily could have changed it.

But I guess I figured, why? Exercise is an opportunity for a “daily private victory” as Covey puts it in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. When you start admitting defeat on these smaller things, it becomes easier to admit defeat on the bigger ones, like not writing 1,000 words a day on a novel, or not sending out a certain number of pitches to magazines. When you work for yourself, particularly if you work at home, you have no other boss to whip you into shape. So you become the toughest boss you will ever face.

Really and truly. Please be my friend…

The first chapter of The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging has been reprinted widely on the web, both at Amazon.com, and the Wall Street Journal’s website. You can read the WSJ’s excerpt here.

What is a blog? “A blog at its most fundamental level is simply a ‘web log.’ That is, a regularly updated account of events or ideas posted on the web. But calling blogs mere updated web diaries is a bit like calling poetry a pleasant arrangement of words on a page. There is an art to this. Those of us who work at HuffPost believe we are fortunate enough to be present at the advent of a new form of human communication — one that is more interactive, more democratic, and just more fun than what has come before.”

Over the holidays, I traveled through Germany and Austria with my husband, son, and mother-in-law. We had a grand time, seeing everything from Raphael’s Madonna of the Meadow to King Ludwig’s fairy tale castle, although we did come close to freezing our tails off. People told me Bavaria was cold. I didn’t believe it. Then I spent hours outside touring with a 20-month-old who refuses to keep his mittens on and I started to understand.

Jasper (my son) was a real trooper. Not only did he survive the 8-hour plane trip each way, his jet lag was no worse than mine, and probably better. He didn’t mind the cold too much. He didn’t protest our long car trips. That said, he did decide to stop eating regular food and instead subsisted on pretzels. Germany has a lot of pretzels, but still.  He also reverted to the bottle instead of the sippy cup, and guzzled milk to the point where I actually had to beg cafes to sell me their coffee milk. Apparently they either don’t drink milk in Germany and Austria, or else they don’t have children (I kind of believe it’s the latter — low birth rates and all).

Traveling with a small child forces you to slow down and take things as they come. For instance, on our last day, we came across a stable and manger display featuring a live camel and sheep. This was not on the agenda, but we stayed there until our hands went numb. Then Jasper screamed when we left the “neigh” (all hoofed critters are “neighs”).

Traveling with a small child also leads you to ask certain questions. As I stood in the Kunsthistorisches museum, the Hapsburgs’ priceless art gallery, looking at all the pictures of Madonna and Child, I started to wonder things. Baby Jesus is seldom wearing clothes in these paintings, even though he is supposed to be God incarnate. Did he not have a fully human GI tract? Last Christmas, my son managed to poop so much and so explosively that it got in his own hair. Did baby Jesus ever poop in his own hair? Did he ever scream for milk when Mary and Joseph took him to the temple, with all the elders turning around to stare at them self-righteously as though they had done something distasteful by breeding? (a man on the flight home walked back to our row and stood there shaking his arms, as if we were supposed to smother the kid or something).

I suspect, of course, that the carol line about “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes” is far from accurate. The great miracle of Christmas is the idea of this awesome, unknowable power becoming a helpless, screaming infant. One of my favorite painting in the art museum was one by Fra Bartolommeo of little Jesus, looking like a toddler, his fat fingers gripping his mother’s neck.