This isn’t true for every job of course — it’s mostly an information work phenomenon. According to the American Time Use Survey, which was just recently released, in 2023, 35 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home on the days they worked. But among workers over age 25 who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, 52 percent of employed people performed some or all of their work at home on the days they worked.

Now, the “some or all” phrasing is tricky, because anyone checking email from home after a workday at the office is, technically working from home.

But when I follow the data from the ATUS press release to its official Table 6, I see that only 57 percent of those with a bachelors degree or higher did some or all of their work at their workplace on the days they worked, which would at least seem to imply that 43 percent were working at home exclusively on the surveyed work day.

This is a lot! If you consider the various jobs-requiring-a-bachelors-degree that actually can’t be done remotely, it’s a high proportion of those that actually can. It is fascinating to me to see how things wind up changing in the real world. When I was writing I Know How She Does It in 2013-2014, negotiating to work from home one day a week (often Friday) was a big deal. People tried to figure out how to approach their managers about it, and often people were willing to give up something to get that perk. And it was definitely seen as a perk — something you had to be at a company for a while to get. Even then it was precarious. I am familiar with one workplace where the company moved into a gleaming new office building…and promptly tried to get rid of people’s work-from-home agreements.

Now, “you can work from home on Fridays” — 2014’s big concession — is less than table stakes.

While there have been some advances in technology, we had smart phones and video conferencing capabilities in 2014. There was no real reason a 3-2 hybrid schedule (that often isn’t even 3-2) couldn’t have been the norm then. It just wasn’t. A lot of organizations assumed there was no way their work could be done from home, until it had to be. If a lot of your work involves emailing and calling people in other places, there’s really no reason you have to drive 30 minutes (or take a train) to do that.

I imagine this is how change happens in a lot of scenarios. Little by little and then suddenly all at once. It seems unlikely I’ll ever wind up writing an article on how to negotiate to work from home one day a week again!

In other news: Speaking of content…This week over at Vanderhacks I suggested people “Upgrade your background music” and “Set a rain date” so you can keep moving forward even when life intervenes. The post behind a paywall was about “Big family logistics” — 13 little hacks for managing a crowd.

In the Before Breakfast podcast, I suggested people “Make silence meaningful,” (based on a tip from Anna Goldfarb) and I suggested some mindset shifts for figuring out “How busy people can travel more.”

Over at the Best of Both Worlds Patreon community site, we’re talking about Friday rituals, what we’re reading and, of course, the private ask-me-anything video.

But let’s be clear what we mean by “long.” Over the course of Monday, we had the junk removal service come to get an ancient mattress + bedding set that was still in the house, the HVAC crew was here all day repairing things, one child needed to be driven to Starbucks to meet friends, and then to be picked up when he called me, plus I was ending at 4:40 to bring another kid to fencing. I was also not exactly in a high energy state, as I had woken up at 2 a.m. thinking about things, and just as I was finally feeling ready to sleep again at 3:30 a.m., the toddler started screaming and did not stop, so I went in to him, and I didn’t wind up going back to sleep until 5:30 a.m. when I admitted defeat and gave him to my husband, who took the 5:30 – 7:15 shift.

(I would like to note that the thinking at 2 a.m. did work, in the sense that I wound up rewriting something with a much better structure than it had previously. So thank you, inner editor, I admire your skills, but I would appreciate you working at different hours. Perhaps the baby was also thinking deep thoughts from 3:30 a.m. on. I do not know…)

So I was tired and getting interrupted a lot. But it’s folly to hope for perfect working conditions. If I waited for perfect working conditions, I’d never start anything. And I don’t just mean those little tasks that people sometimes do in short spurts, like responding to meeting requests or sending invoices. I needed to do some thinking-required worky-work. Better to start and do what I can and come back to it when I need to. One way or another, the important stuff gets done.

Just not always between the hours of 9 to 5. Because I’ve been doing some stuff at night and on weekends (and on vacation) too. It’s what makes it possible to then do, say, Mommy Day #4, which I completed yesterday. I took the 7-year-old to Chuck E. Cheese and got him a 90-minute play pass. He had a grand time and we enjoyed hanging out. Now I’ve done these special outings with all four big kids this month! I wasn’t sure how it was going to fit, but it did. Everything fits when you decide it needs to. Now I’m even planning a Mommy Day #5 with the little guy next week if the weather cooperates. We shall see!

The aftermath of this disaster consumed seven hours of what was already an incredibly busy week. Seven hours is an interesting number, because it is the equivalent of “finding an extra hour in the day!” — a promise I have read on a great many magazine covers. And yet, if we had sat down at the beginning of the week, and tried to find seven hours for something like training for a triathlon or setting up a new mentoring program, I imagine we all would have struggled.

So what happened? Basically, time is elastic. When we decide that we need to do something, we find the time to do it. Other stuff either doesn’t happen, or it takes less time, or it gets punted forward. Much other stuff turns out to be more malleable than we might have imagined. And so, of course, the key to time management is treating the things we *want* to do with the urgency of the things we *need* to do. We make time for them first, and let everything else take the hit.

Easier said than done, to be sure. But I keep trying. This week, for instance, has turned out to have more time-consuming stuff in it, mostly personally though some professionally, than I planned. Such is life. I also had planned to take Thursday afternoon “off” for some little adventures from my winter fun list (visiting a greenhouse, seeing wintry scenes at an art museum). When I lost big chunks of focused time on Wednesday with the delivery window fiascos, Thursday was an obvious back up spot.

But I decided that time is elastic. I would probably feel behind one way or the other, whether I did my adventures or not. Better to have the adventures in this time I’d allotted and trust I’d figure something out.

So I did. Nothing life changing. A 30-minute stroll through the Brandywine museum looking at Andrew Wyeth paintings. About 90 minutes at Longwood looking at orchids and wintry meadows. Home in time to log another hour of work before dinner. But Thursday felt a little more memorable than it would if I’d stayed at my desk. I’m sure everything will fit one way or another.

Photo: Scarlet-plume from the Longwood greenhouse

I had a thought today that, thanks to my time-tracking, I have a record of how I have spent all 17,400-odd hours of his life. Of course, I don’t know how *he* has spent all the hours of his life, but we have spent a reasonable number of those together. It has been a strange two years in many ways, though there have been nice aspects (like having Daddy around for a lot more of those hours than with the older children).

Speaking of the older children…I also had a realization today that when kid #2 turned two I was welcoming another baby. I cannot even fathom that right now. I guess we do crazy things when we’re young.

In any case, it is so fun to watch him figure out language, and how the world works. He was excited to point out an “oc-po-pus” in a book tonight, and he said his own name pointing at himself for one of the first times recently (normally it’s “me” as in “Me did it!”) I can’t wait to see all the fun things he will learn over the next year!

I had a goal for that last one. By trying random ideas out, I would hit upon a plot that I could then use for my NaNoWriMo novel (National Novel Writing Month…when people write a 50,000 word novel during the 30 days of November — it’s a great way to get a draft done quickly).

And so I have faithfully written since January 1st. I missed one day, which I then made up (word count wise) the next day. I have 41,000 plus words in that free writing file from the almost 300 days that have passed in 2021.

And I’ve got…nothing. Ten months of trying stuff out has not revealed to me a plot that I actually want to write about. Ten months of thinking about this question daily has not produced an answer.

I’m not sure what to do about this. Perhaps if I just start writing on November 1st something will come to me but if it didn’t in 10 months that’s a tall ask of a particular day.

Perhaps my method was off. Because of the small daily required word count, I’d write little vignettes, or observations, or tiny character studies. Maybe if I’d made the word count higher I would have gone deeper. Or maybe doing something daily makes it something to be checked off, rather than something to be explored. I don’t really know.

So we shall see if NaNoWriMo happens now. I do think it’s a good discipline to do some creative writing every day. But I wish it had been a bit more fruitful! Is anyone else planning to do NaNoWriMo?

I managed to clean out several closets and move the stuff to the new house’s garage. Any prospective buyers will now see that our closets have floors, which apparently is a desirable thing in a house.

On the other hand, there was a lot of muddling through. Two kids came home sick from school in the middle of the week. Covid negative, but still sick. My husband went to an event last night and since we didn’t have childcare coverage (also sick!) I dialed into choir by Zoom. This went better than it could have — my daughter watched the baby for the first half hour, I got the 14-year-old signed on to his tutoring session at 7:30, I turned the camera off and got the baby to bed, and then I turned the camera back on to do the rest of the rehearsal in the garage since I didn’t want my singing to wake up the baby. Still, there is a certain ridiculousness to singing into your phone in the garage…

Anyway, it’s my turn to take the baby right now so off to do that and go get individual cakes for a weekend birthday party so no one has to take off their masks to eat. A very 2021 sort of celebration…

Anyway, in finding space for the second bushel we brought home this past weekend, I noticed that we still had about a dozen apples from the last time going bad in the fruit drawer. No one was likely to eat them. So I used the simple recipe that  (if I recall correctly) Calee posted last time (just simmer and mash it, peels and all!) and made a big batch of applesauce that I have been eating this week. It turns out that even going-bad apples can make good applesauce!

One of my little sources of satisfaction in life is using things up. Working from home allows for a lot of that with lunches. My husband and I heated up some Costco pulled pork on Sunday night, which made enough to take us through at least two lunches apiece this week. On one day I decided to use up some kale by frying up the pulled pork and kale in some olive oil in a pan. It was quite tasty, and a very palatable way to eat a ton of greens.

On Tuesday night we had pasta. I cut up some peppers that were lingering in the fridge, plus some spinach that was on its last legs, and put those in the sauce. I have found that almost any wilting veggie can be accommodated quite nicely with some rice and pre-cooked sausage, all pan-fried together. It’s a double bonus if we happen to have some sort of sauce left over from one of our Sunbasket meal kits.

Anyway, there’s a balancing act here. Theoretically, using it up means we could go longer between shops, or buy less. But when the larder looks bare, the kids just don’t eat as many fruits and veggies. I need to have their favorites on hand.

But I can still enjoy my thrift. Now if you need me, I’ll be over here putting water in my shampoo bottle to extend its life for a few more days…

This meant I was here with the three younger kids. It was not the most relaxing weekend ever. The toddler was up before 6 a.m. both mornings, as he had been the previous two mornings during the week when my husband was traveling, and I was feeling a bit…done…on the early morning toddler entertainment front. He is enamored with the Jimmy Fallon board books (Everything is Mama and Your Baby’s First Word Will be Dada) and wants them read over and over again. I also spent a lot of my toddler-free time (when he was sleeping, or when my almost 10-year-old daughter was watching TV with him) cleaning up the house in advance of the listing photos.

However…there has been progress there. Several rooms are less than 5 minutes away from being photographable (personal stuff/functional stuff like waste baskets would just need to be pulled out). This includes the bar kitchen in the basement which has been covered for years by the remnants of those horrible little “find the dinosaur fossil” type kits where you pound at plaster and make dust.

There were also a few nice moments. I took the three kids for a short hike on Saturday morning before various sports, and it was lovely to see the early fall color. I ordered in sushi for myself Saturday night, and enjoyed that. Sunday, I had a few hours of coverage for the toddler, so I could do some birthday stuff for the soon-to-be-10-year-old (with her 6-year-old brother in tow). We ate at Olive Garden — her request — and then went to Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Since the space is contained and the kids didn’t really need me, I sat at a booth and read my daily chapter in War and Peace. It was quite the juxtaposition. Tolstoy opens many sections of the book with a discussion of how individual choice isn’t shaping history nearly to the extent that much “Great Man” theorizing claims. Perhaps. It’s curious to think what forces beyond my individual choice led me to be sitting there in the booth, with one eye on my son, who was using his unlimited play pass to hone his skill at the claw machine. By the time we left he had won 8 small bouncy balls, which I could not help but see as just more stuff to be moved. At least he was happy about it!

The big boys all came home around 6:30, at which point we had a birthday dinner, and later cake and presents. In a very on-brand moment, my daughter had let me know which kind of wrapping paper she wanted her presents wrapped in. So I obliged, and made sure to use the bows that were tonally matched. In life, I suppose it is good to ask for what you want.

Now it is nearly noon on Monday morning. I have not followed my own advice at all, and have spent the morning clearing the decks of various things instead of doing my main task for the day, which is revising chapter 3 in Tranquility by Tuesday. But! Onward. It will get done by the end of the day.

Photo: Living his best life

For those new to this blog, my family faced a decision about our housing once we learned kid #5 was on his way. My husband and I both need office space, my baby sleeps in a closet and I have two kids sharing a room who really don’t want to (although, curiously, I also have two other kids currently sharing voluntarily, but that was a late summer thing — they plan to separate).

We had been looking at houses on and off for a year from 2019-early 2020. We had hired a construction firm to come look at our current house and see if we could renovate the attic to create two bedrooms and a bathroom. We could. They drew up a plan. We were thinking of doing that, but Covid put a pause on everything. Then, in the course of hunting around, we decided to go look at a historic property near here. I didn’t like the main picture on all the real estate sites, which is why we hadn’t looked at it seriously during the year-long hunt. But it was on a private road, so we’d never driven past. We did once while my husband was driving me home from dropping my car to get repaired and I was…taken.

It turned out that the “front” of the house didn’t face the road. The facade that faced the road was beautiful. The house was set back and private. The grounds were large and well-landscaped, if a bit overgrown. Our inspector informed us that the house needed a ton of work. This was why it had been on the market for a while. But we decided to go for it.

Our offer was accepted in late August 2020. We closed in early November. We signed a contract with a general contractor in January, hired an architect to make our case to the historic commission, got approved, and began work in March.

It is now September. The process has been…long. I have made a great many decisions. There were decisions I didn’t even think to realize were going to be decisions — like whether to keep the outlet in the middle of my office floor and what material to use for the shelf in several different showers. And that’s with a general contractor managing all the subs, and with a designer showing me limited choices so I don’t go crazy. We are basically renovating the whole house. There was the less-sexy stuff like an all new HVAC system, scoping out the drains, and putting a sloped floor in one of the basement rooms. We’ve put in new windows where the historic commission approved (long time readers recall the “muntin” debate…). We put on a new slate roof (it’s basically done now). We gutted the kitchen and two adjacent sitting rooms to make a more modern family kitchen + family room. We re-worked the master suite to be less chopped up (with a gut renovation of the master bathroom). We completely redid another bathroom and put new toilets in all of them. The third floor had several tiny rooms, so we knocked down the walls between them to make a playroom. It is now light and open and airy and pretty. All the floors are getting sanded and stained, with new paint everywhere, new wallpaper, new carpet…

To answer some comments earlier — yes, it is expensive. Yes, it is stressful. It is not possible to make all decisions well which means that some are going to no doubt annoy me when we move in, but so help me if anyone else who was not attending all the meetings and being 100 percent part of the selection process involving multiple showrooms complains about any choices…

(Just kidding ha ha! We would never have that fight! Especially not about the mudroom tile.)

Anyway, we seem to have weathered most of it at this point. We are still married and both of us have kept our jobs, so that’s a win. We’ve discovered most of the major things that could potentially be wrong now that we are through the demolition process. Some get changed. Some you live with. It is an old house. It helps to remember that you don’t have to fix absolutely all problems. The new walls and such are in, and things like paint and carpet are straightforward. We can see the house taking shape, and it’s going to be exciting to move in (probably around the beginning of the year). I think we’ve got a nice combination of honoring some of the house’s historic character (I have a brass figure that looks like William Penn on my office door, I kid you not) while also making it more energy efficient and family friendly.

I’m not sure I have any great advice for home renovations, though here are a few ideas. First, if you can, don’t live there while it’s happening. This wasn’t possible in our case, so we didn’t face that temptation. We did live in our house during the kitchen renovation a few years ago, but that was much shorter, and we did an overlap with spring break. Even so, it was challenging.

Second, just assume the project will cost more than originally planned. If you know this going in, this reduces your stress levels considerably (even if you, like me, are always looking for ways to save some $$. We went with the cheaper closet finish, in case anyone is wondering. It will constantly be covered by my clothes anyway!)

Third, it helps to be a satisficer, rather than a maximizer. There are a lot of white paints out there. There are a lot of mudroom tiles. If you are trying to find the best of anything you will go crazy. (And then when you find it, it will go out of stock!) Most things can be changed if it doesn’t work out. And few choices are truly wrong. Well, design choices at least. You can definitely have the wrong “rough-in” dimension on a toilet (10 inches? 12 inches?) But for most things, good enough is good enough.

As for time management, it helps that the new house is only 5 minutes from the old one. It’s easy to run over for something quick. But in general, I try to “batch the little things” — making home decisions and dealing with administration/logistics during certain times, and then keeping my prime hours for my main job. Easier said than done, of course. But worth trying.

If anyone else has gone through a major home renovation, feel free to share your tips!

Photo: Part of the master bedroom. If you don’t like the blue don’t tell me. 

That means I am…done for now. A first draft exists. I have not written a conclusion yet, but that will be short, and since it will mostly be based on the 3-month follow up results (which just came in) that can be done along with incorporating my editor’s feedback.

I guess I should celebrate, though honestly it feels a little anti-climactic. I liked reading through the drafts — generally a good sign — and I do think this book will be helpful to people. It’s also going to be roughly a year until it lands on shelves so I need to pace my excitement.

But hey, when first drafts are done, that means something exists. It is much easier to turn something into something better than it is to turn nothing into something. I’m happy to report that the writing timeline I created worked more or less as planned. I would write a few chapters in a row, one each week, then take a week off to edit. Starting with the introduction being due May 28, this meant that I finished chapter 9 this week, as planned, taking off the two weeks I was on vacation this summer. My official manuscript deadline is October 1st, so that gives me another month for edits.

Then I’ll need to spend the next year figuring out how to build the audience for the book. That is an entirely different sort of work, and less my preference than writing, but part of the package. Although I write first for an audience of one (would I like this book?) having an audience of only one would be a bit of a let-down. So, onward! And maybe something bubbly some night this week…