Please help me with the Mosaic project!

It’s time for another public service announcement about the Mosaic Project. My next book looks at the lives of professional women with kids. I am still collecting time logs, and would love to have more participants.

First, the back story: A little over a year ago, I had an interesting conversation with a young consultant who’d  left her company. She wanted the usual things (a life, a family) and as she put it, looking at the senior women at her firm, she didn’t see anyone whose life she wanted.

I found this interesting, because I’d recently seen a bunch of time logs from senior women at another consulting firm. While I wouldn’t say that 100% of women (or men) would want their lives, their lives didn’t look like something no one would want either. They were working fewer than 60 hours a week. They had time to do things like go to neighborhood barbecues. They exercised, they got enough sleep, they had flexible enough schedules to sometimes do things with their kids during the day, let alone in the evenings and on weekends. Plus, they were compensated quite well for their work.

Looking at this, I realized there might be a disconnect between the perception of what it takes to have a big career and a family vs. what the reality looks like in the practice of daily life. I’m not saying this young woman was wrong — different companies have different cultures — but sometimes we focus on a few stressful moments, and don’t look at the picture as a whole. 

I want to look at the whole picture — the whole mosaic — and hopefully add a different voice to this conversation about what it means to have it all. To that end, I’m collecting time logs from women who earn six figures, and have kids still at home. I’m closing in on 100 logs at this point, but I’d love to have many more. Many blog readers who fall in this category have already sent me their time logs. Thank you for those! I welcome more, or leads to people or organizations who can help me. I’m more than happy to talk by phone with anyone who keeps a log for me for this project to offer suggestions and feedback. I’m also willing to barter my services doing workshops for organizations that can deliver a number of logs from people in this category. Just email me if you’d like me to send you the time log (I take other forms too — word docs, etc.) or if you have any questions. As always, I’m at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com. Participants can be completely anonymous, or can use their real names, or do various levels in between.

Thanks so much, and we’ll return to regular blog posts soon!