I like all my books. But I’m particularly fond of I Know How She Does It, my book about how professional women with kids spend their time. This book came out 10 years ago this week.
(Fun fact: I made an appearance on Morning Joe, and you can see some professional photos of me with Mika Brzezinski and me with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist, who was also there that day.)
The book rose out my interest in time diary data. I had begun collecting time logs in earnest while writing 168 Hours, and I could see, when people tracked a full 168 hours, that many of the “hard choice” moments that tend to inspire viral screeds are just not the whole story. I decided to collect many time logs from women who earned over $100,000 a year (in 2013) and who had kids at home. What did their lives really look like? How did they organize their time?
Here are a few things I learned from that book, and that I’ve continued to talk about over the last 10 years.
1. Extreme workweeks are rare. I cringe when I hear people throw around phrases like “80-hour workweeks.” If you get paid by the hour, then you know how many hours you work. If you don’t, then you often don’t. People just guess (I mean, it’s always a round number! Isn’t that odd?). People often discount time away from work as an aberration, but as many women in I Know How She Does It came to see, it’s the rare week that doesn’t feature something. I am not saying extreme workweeks never happen, because they do, but often, even if someone does log extreme hours one week, or for a few weeks while staffed on something intense, there are likely other weeks nearby that bring down the average. Sometimes this overestimation is just silly — I had someone try to tell me that their work hours were 168 hours minus the hours they slept because “I’m always thinking about work.” Hmm. Anyway, the point is that many people, even in big jobs, work far more reasonable hours than the popular perception. The women in IKHSDI averaged 44 hours/week.
2. Lots of jobs can be family-friendly. See above. If you found out that plenty of people in a particular industry were working 50 hours a week, not 80, that might change perceptions. One of my major take-aways from I Know How She Does It is that if you want a family you don’t need to fear the “big” job. Often so-called big jobs come with more autonomy and flexibility than those lower down the hierarchy. And you get paid more, which means you have the resources to deal with various challenges.
3. Part-time is not necessarily the best of both worlds. Various surveys have found that many mothers say they’d like to work part time. If you can afford it and there are high quality things you want to do other than paid work, great. But in many organizations, there’s no accountability for part-time schedules, which means that I found women with part-time schedules were often working as many hours as women on full-time schedules. In one particular company, I found a woman on a part-time schedule working more hours than a woman with a full-time schedule. Within companies, there was often a huge range in how many hours people worked — like a gap of 10 or more hours. In some cases, you might be better dipping to the lower range for a while if you need to, and then dialing back up when you can, rather than officially going part-time.
4. You can trade work time for TV time. I knew that a lot of women with young kids worked what I call a “split shift.” The idea is that if you need to work long hours, and you have young kids who go to bed relatively early, you leave work at a reasonable hour a few times per week, spend the evenings with your kids, then do more work at night (from home) after the kids go to bed. The logs from IKHSDI showed this was quite common (about 45 percent of women used this strategy at least once during their diary week). As a result, you trade off work time for TV time, as opposed to work time for family time. The rise of remote work has tempered the need for this somewhat (removing a commute creates more time for everything!). But as more places are pushing people back into the office, I think it remains a smart idea. The women in IKHSDI worked more hours than the average woman with a full-time job, but they also spent less time watching TV. Basically, mothers value time with their kids, so they figure out a way to preserve that time when they can.
5. Mornings and weekends count. Years ago, one critic cited my calculations that working a full-time job still leaves a lot of time to see your family, and said dismissively that “most of this time is on the weekend.” Maybe, but…so what? Are weekends not real days? People often have huge blind spots about morning hours too. If your kids are up early (mine often were!) this can be time to hangout with them as well.
6. Childcare is an investment, not a cost to be strictly minimized. As I’ve written about work and life, I’ve had people reach out to share how “good” they are at time management because they’ve managed to minimize paid childcare. We are talking working from 4-7 a.m., during naps, and on weekends when a partner can cover. I mean, if you’re happy, great but…I don’t buy into this mindset that childcare is “bad” and therefore using less makes you a “good” parent. Childcare is an investment in your lifelong earning potential. The women in IKHSDI who seemed most calm, and who were figuring out how to advance in their careers, usually had this mindset. Most people don’t have that many kids, which means that the expensive childcare years don’t last that long.
7. Working moms can do happy hours. Life does not need to be either/or. I believe in being “strategically seen.” You go to some stuff, if not to everything. You can work late one night so people see it and then cut out early other nights. You go to happy hour with your colleagues sometimes, so they keep asking, but then you don’t go other times if it doesn’t work. You understand that going to a few conferences or industry events is not going to scar your children for life. In general, stark rules (“I’ll never take a job where I need to travel”) don’t serve us well. There’s a lot to be gained in being more flexible, both at work and at home.
8. You get more leisure time as kids get older. Lots of people assume that working mothers have zero leisure time. I found in IKHSDI that women with kids under age 2 spent significantly less time on various leisure activities (reading, TV, exercise) than those with older kids. I think the narrative of having “zero” time comes from those harder early years. It’s not true then either, but leisure tallies are lower. The good news for people worried about this is that if you have two children (which is most common) then you will spend a mere 4 years of your life having a child under the age of 2. By the time all your kids are ages 5+ (as I am seeing now) it becomes easier to relax. If you have two kids two years apart, you’ll only spend 7 years of life with kids under age 5. Most people don’t have 5 kids spread over 13 years!
9. Most people sleep. This was another cool discovery from my IKHSDI time diaries. People averaged 54 hours of sleep per week, which is about 7.7 hours/day on average. There were some short nights, but not many. Only 37 of the 1001 days in my project featured fewer than 6 hours of sleep. No one logged less than 42 hours, total, of sleep during the week (6 hours/day). So, for anyone pondering building a family and a career at the same time, will there be some bad nights? Sure. But in general, sleep gets more continuous as kids get out of the baby stage, and kids don’t stay in the baby stage for long. If someone is feeling like sleep isn’t working well, there are various things to try. But the idea that working mothers in general don’t sleep probably isn’t the case.
10. “Life is stressful and life is wonderful.” We should be wary of constructing a narrative about life based on epiphanies. Something bad happened, and therefore I decided everything needed to change! Bad things happen. Good things happen too. Such is the human condition. We can learn to see both.