How do high-earning women with kids manage their time? Laura Vanderkam explores the answers in I Know How She Does It  (Portfolio/Penguin, 2015).

I don’t have kids, so this takes a whole world of busyness off of my shoulders. And while the schedules of working moms might be quite different from my own, I have tons of respect for the productivity chops of these get-it-done ninjas and will take a tip from a mom any day. Which is why I turned to Laura Vanderkam’s book, I Know How She Does It (Portfolio/Penguin 2015, new edition 2017), which studies how successful working mothers juggle family and work and still find time for themselves.

The book takes a data-driven approach, with the author conducting something she called the Mosaic Project, a survey of time journals by women who earned at least $100K per year and had at least one child living at home. Some were single parents, others had partners. In total, she had collected 143 completed logs for the book, and conducted follow-up interviews with many of the participants. She also supplements the data with research from other sources, including the American Time Use Survey and studies from the Pew Research Center.

Now, the research nerd in me was looking for holes here. For example, there is a certain amount of self-selection in her sample set. A woman who feels insanely, unpleasantly busy might have declined to volunteer to track her time, or a woman who works 80 hours per week might have had her time log rejected if she didn’t have a moment to complete it correctly. But even allowing for some selection bias, there’s enough great, directional data here to be worth exploring, for both men and women.

Here are few of the more interesting revelations:

  1. Hardly anyone works as many hours as they think (or say) they do. The 60-plus hour work week is in fact quite rare.
  2. People (particularly women) may be led away from high-paying fields because of this narrative of busyness. Become a lawyer? Take that VP role? Some will reject these out of hand because they feel it would eat their life and turn them into distracted, neglectful moms.
  3. Watch for chores that expand & take over. Some tasks, particularly work email or household chores, will expand to fill the time you give to them.

This was not a traditional “productivity hacks” book that tells you how to save minutes by laying out your outfits for the week or devoting a whole Sunday to cooking and freezing meals (yuck!). But there were a few tips worth passing along:

  1. Plan your leisure time, because if you don’t you’re apt to fritter it away on TV and the like. This takes some effort, as you may need to list out activities in advance to avoid drawing a blank and sinking into the couch on a Sunday afternoon. For example: Get a flower box for my upstairs balcony, write a note to my old college buddy, read that novel that’s been on my list forever, try a Pilates class… you get the idea.
  2. Don’t fall into the 24-hour trap. Plan your week, and don’t fret about things you can’t fit in every single day. For example, perhaps it’s important to you that the family has dinner together. But, you are often stuck at work until 6 or 7 with little energy to cook after the commute home. Well, take a look at that weekly schedule and figure out how to combine your overtime hours into one or two days of the week, and decide, rather than having 6 rushed and frantic family dinners together a week, you are going to have 4 really leisurely, pleasurable ones together.
  3. At work, start in your calendar, not in your inbox. If you dive into the inbox and let that lead you astray, you’ll run the risk of getting lost in other people’s priorities rather finding time to tackle the things that are really important.

Key to getting something out of this will be knowing how you spend your own time. To find out for myself, after reading Vanderkam’s book I decided to log my own time for a week, in painful 15 minute increments. I’ll follow up on how this went in an upcoming post.

The gap in this book will be that lower-income women who read it might not see their reality reflected. One possibility for an interesting follow-up book would be a combination of this time-use study, and the book Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America, by Barbara Eherenrich. Vanderkam focuses on successful women, because it’s important to know that a) you really can have it all, if you know how to juggle it, and b) to discredit the myth that any woman who is career-focused and successful must somehow be neglecting her family. But by focusing on financially successful women, we see that money does buy time-saving options. Most of these women can afford to have housecleaners, many have nannies or other paid child care arrangements. Some can likely afford grocery and meal-delivery services, to reclaim some time from shopping and cooking tasks. Life is not harder when you have more. So what about the majority of women and moms who work 40+ hours a week and are not close to that $100K a year mark?

Case in point: I was getting sugared last week (sugaring is like waxing, basically, but usually more expensive). I was chatting with the woman doing my sugaring and asked her what she did on the days she wasn’t working at the salon (her availability for appointments was only two days per week, for 10 hours each day). “Well,” she said, three days a week I work at the sports bar waiting tables, and three days a week I work at the jewelry store.” So I said “Really? So is there a day you have completely off?” She shook her head “No. But there’s only a couple of days where I have to work two jobs and go from one to the other, so that’s OK.”

I was exhausted just listening to her. Her lifestyle – many jobs but not much money – is familiar to me, but thankfully it’s a lifestyle I got to leave behind years ago. As I was getting dressed to leave I saw a picture of what I assume was her son, in some kind of military or ROTC uniform on her work table. I can say “I know how she does it” when the “she” is someone who’s making six figures. But there are many other women in less lucrative circumstances who get by rather miraculously given how hard the economic system makes it for them. I’d love to know how they do it, too.