On the Best of Both Worlds podcast, we love sharing the stories of women who’ve come up with ways to make work and life fit together. This week, Sarah and I are excited to share an interview with longtime listener Anandi Raman Creath.
Anandi has built her career at one of the major tech companies, going through various work styles: full-time, part-time, remote, contract — moving between these as made sense for her and her family. By keeping her network strong, she has been able to find new roles that have kept work interesting.
She and her husband are raising two girls and have tried different schooling formats, including homeschooling for a while. Anandi has taken each daughter on a big international trip, and she also makes time for some serious scrapbooking.
She’s got lots of tips, including on how to work remotely when others are not remote. So please give the episode a listen! In the introduction, we discuss Sarah’s recent call week, and in the Q&A we talk about how to decide if any given opportunity is worth it.
As much as I enjoy interviews with writers pitching their ideas or the casual conversations between you and Sarah, it’s really refreshing to have an old fashioned profile of a normal person share the things they’ve learned as they’ve navigated work and parenting.
Yes, definitely, and it’s something you don’t always get elsewhere. Like I like Eve Rodsky and think she’s really interesting, but I’ve heard the blueberries story in a million places. The tactics of ordinary people , particularly those with more “normal” careers as case studies is often more helpful.
Could not agree more with Alyce and Cb. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why I liked this so much but seeing it written out was an ah-ha moment. I also enjoy the other more ‘famous’ guests but I wonder if a ‘listener spotlight’ every so often would appeal, too – just hearing about how other people have navigated their lives (and maybe applied some of the lessons from BOBW?).
@KGC- we are very open to having listeners on as guests! I’m glad people enjoyed this one.
@Alyce – we are big fans of “normal” extraordinary people and love to feature whenever possible!
Yay, glad you liked it. I figure someone should benefit from my mistakes 😀 I can’t stress enough how much I WOULD NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS try that split schedule childcare arrangement we had for my daughter’s first year. I’m surprised we survived it. I have never been so tired in my life.
@ARC – I don’t recommend it either! But it’s surprising how many people describe similar arrangements to me as evidence that they are “good” at time management…
Hah! For us, it was a fear of daycare and some false ideas we had in our heads about it. Also, probably more than 50% of my female friends quit when they had kids, maybe more. I didn’t have a lot of close friends who were working moms with little kids at the same time. We only did that crazy arrangement for about 5 months, then my husband switched jobs to a company who at the time did not even consider any kind of flexible work (rhymes with Oogle). We were “forced” to send her to daycare, and I’m SO GLAD. Toddler daycare was an amazing experience for her, and we loved it enough that I ended up going back to work earlier than expected after our 2nd kid because I wanted her to have that experience too. (And for that extrovert kid it was 100% the right idea.)
@ARC – a really good toddler daycare is an amazing place. A “baby prison” it is not.
I really enjoyed this episode, too, and agree that a regular interview with listeners about how they’ve navigated their careers would be helpful and interesting. If you ever want to talk to a mom who went through a bit of a career crisis after having a baby and questioned if she was meant to be a working mom and then experienced a complete 180 and felt sure she was meant to be a working mom, I’d be happy to chat with you ladies. 🙂 I have shared my experience with other moms in my industry in case they feel the same way. I hadn’t ever talked to a mom who went through what I did. I was so glad I didn’t make any rash decisions and decided to see how I felt in a year or so. I have to imagine other moms will experience what I did. I had older colleagues tell me they went through something similar. I tried to get start a mentoring program started at my company as other firms in financial services have something similar but then the pandemic hit and I lost steam on pushing for a program to be established. We have a women’s networking group but it doesn’t address that day to day experiences working moms have, especially during times of transition like returning to work.
I had to laugh when thinking about what the stats would be if I used the wardrobe ap Anandi uses. I am VERY casual when working from home so my nursing tanks, joggers, and sweatshirts would show up as being worn an embarrassing number of times!