In today’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah interviews Erika Ayers Badan, the former CEO of Barstool Sports. She is the author of the new book Nobody Cares About Your Career, with lots of advice on how to take charge of your working life. She and Sarah discuss failure, boss challenges, coming back from maternity leave, and more.

In the Q&A, a listener asks about using a career coach. Are they useful, and if so, how do you find a good one?

Please give the episode a listen! As always we welcome ratings and reviews — more reviews help us convince potential guests that we’re worth their time. Also a heads up that the BOBW Patreon Community will be meeting by Zoom this Thursday to discuss Jodi Wellman’s book You Only Die Once. Membership is $9/month and you can sign up here.

That is the topic of this week’s Best of Both Worlds episode. Sarah was given some leeway to choose her clinic days next year, so this sparked a whole discussion of what the ideal part-time schedule would be. If you’re going to work 3 days a week, which should they be? Or if you’re going to work 20-30 hours in a job, when would it be best to log those? A lot of organizations have landed on a hybrid schedule of being in the office three days a week and working at home 2 days. If you have a choice, which days should you choose to work from home?

There’s no one right answer for everyone, but we suggest some things to think about. We also suggest creating a “realistic ideal week” template for thinking this through.

Please give the episode a listen. And please consider joining our Patreon community where we discuss this and other topics!

My current working schedule tends to be mostly 8:15-4:15 or so, with some days ending a little earlier and some a little later based on the driving schedule. Add in breaks and various other responsibilities and it tends to come out around 35 hours a week.

But the metaphor is problematic. Work/life balance implies that work and life are on opposite sides of a scale. For one to go up, the other has to go down. It’s by its nature adversarial.

Anyway, that said, I was intrigued by a phrase that our Best of Both Worlds guest Laurie Weingart used in this week’s episode. She talked about people’s “work/work balance.”

Given her expertise, this was about breaking down your work into promotable and non-promotable tasks, and making sure that you weren’t spending inordinate amounts of time on the latter. But really, this concept could be used for many things. Any job consists of many different activities. There’s the core “stuff” of the job (which might be further broken down into various projects people do). There’s often learning and professional development. There’s network and relationship building. There’s planning and prospecting. There’s administration. There’s probably stuff that’s hard to categorize.

One reason to track working hours is to figure out what proportion is spent on each of these things. There’s no right answer, though certain categories (learning, networking) tend to get shoved to the side when things get busy. If a given category (perhaps non-promotable tasks) seems very heavy, then the balance is off and it’s time to figure out ways to change this.

I would imagine that work/work balance often influences work/life balance. I know when work feels tedious — too many tasks I don’t want to do — than I feel like I’m working too much. When I’m excited about work, I don’t feel that same way. In terms of numbers, my work/life balance might be the same either way, but it feels entirely different.

In other news: The Next Big Idea Club ran my “book bite” on Tranquility by Tuesday recently. You can check out the printed form here. And you can check out the audio version on the app here!

Photo: The old office. It’s been almost a year since I’ve been in there! 

Anyway, this time of year always turns the mind to graduation, and graduation clichés. Commencement speakers everywhere will tell people to “follow your passion.” It’s not bad advice. I’m glad I followed my passion to become a writer, even if it was not an obviously viable career option.

But of course “writing” encompasses a lot of different ways you can spend your day-to-day life. What does one write about? What form does the writing take? How does a writer spend his or her hours?

Many careers have similar variances. A school nurse and an ER nurse will spend their days differently. I recently met someone whose job involves going to landowners and communities to get formal permission for utility right-of-ways.* It’s document production and signing, but it is a very different day to day job than, say, an in-house corporate legal person.

It turns out that professional happiness is often a function of how you spend your hours as much as anything else. One source of dissatisfaction for a great many people is that they have jobs that sound cool in theory, but they spend hours daily in boring meetings, or responding to angry emails.

It would be hard to ditch meetings and emails entirely. But I do think the “follow your passion” advice should lean a bit more on this question of what you want your days to look like in addition to the “stuff” of the job that tends to dominate.

All sorts of questions come to mind. Do you like quiet? Do you like talking with lots of different people? Do you mind having the same conversation over and over again with lots of different people or would that make you go insane? Do you want to be able to control when you do things or do you like to go with the flow? Do you want set hours? If so, do you care when those hours are? Some industries feature much, much earlier hours than others. If you do clerical work for a construction company, you will likely be starting your day by 7 a.m., but if you do clerical work for some tech and media companies you might be starting more like 9:30 a.m. or later (and going later too). Do you like to focus on one thing and develop deep expertise, or would you like to learn about lots of different things? Do you want to go to the same place most days (which could be a home office) or do you like going to different sites?

These things might be a bit harder to suss out as people consider jobs and careers because they are not as immediately obvious as what the “stuff” of the job is. Some hour by hour happiness is also dependent on the specific people you wind up working with. But these questions are definitely worth thinking about. My passion is writing, but my passion is also sitting in a quiet office, all by myself, with large blocks of unstructured time. It suggests a different life than, say, corporate communications, or a daily newspaper job, or being part of a TV show writing team.

What do you think of the “follow your passion” advice? Did you follow your passion or figure out your passion along the way? (I realize sometimes this phrase is “find your passion” — but that is something else entirely!)

Photo: Where the magic happens most days, though it looks different now that I have my junk all over the desk.

*I am pretty sure they can get the right of way whether people approve or not, but I think the idea is that everyone feels happier if they feel like they were consulted.

By Jennifer D. Sciubba

One of my prized possessions is a 1967 Teen Guide to Homemaking textbook, found years ago in a successful dig through the thrift store shelves. On the cover is the side profile of a sweet strawberry blonde with a pink bow in her bobbed hair. Inside, girls and boys learn the basics of ironing and good nutrition—including plenty of then-in-vogue canned food. In the section on career advice, the authors explain that boys and girls might have different goals when it comes to a career. They say that a girl “can be pretty sure that she will have to know how to be a homemaker and mother,” and so her career outside the home likely won’t be as important as it would be to a boy.

The world teens live in today is radically different from the world in 1967 when the Susans and Tommys of America were reading the Teen Guide to Homemaking, but has the gender revolution completely freed women from those societal constraints? Is the struggle over?

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild tried to answer those very questions. She studied married women working full-time, with husbands who were also working full-time and who had kids ages 6 and under; in other words, me when I was writing the first draft of this book. She watched them come home from work, fold laundry while on the phone, give the kids baths, and so on. She chronicled her observations in her book The Second Shift, in which she argued that although there had been a lot of changes in gender roles across the decades, there were still larger societal issues making some women question whether getting married and having kids was worth it. Working both a first shift outside the home and a second shift inside it was exhausting.

Multiple pressures on women is a global issue. Researchers Mary Brinton and Dong-Ju Lee find that post-industrial societies that encourage women to work outside the home while also painting them as natural caregivers have lower fertility because they impose conflicting narratives on women. We can see this difficult dynamic in East Asia. In much of East Asia, it’s the norm that men are breadwinners and women are responsible for household and child-rearing duties, but women are also welcome to work. With this gender-role ideology, women struggle to reconcile work outside the home and family responsibilities. As a result, they often have only one or two children or forgo childbearing altogether. In low-fertility Japan, a 2009 survey by the East-West Center showed that Japanese wives of reproductive age did 27 hours a week of household duties while their husbands only did 3—and most of those wives worked a paid job, too. Having a family continues to be incompatible with work for Japanese women. An OECD study of 18 member countries ranked Japan second from last “in terms of coverage and strength of policies for work-family reconciliation and family-friendly work arrangements,” and pointing out that “Japan’s childcare coverage and parental leave offered by employers are both especially weak.”

In contrast, when women are discouraged from working, their role as homemakers and mothers is clearer, and fertility is higher, but it’s the interaction between gender norms and labor-market conditions that affects fertility, not just one or the other. Fertility is actually lower in countries where men and women have equal roles, because these norms lock women into a particular lifestyle rather than give them a range of socially acceptable choices about how to combine work and family. Countries that have more flexible arrangements, rather than strict equality, have higher relative fertility, as we see in Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Finding ways to reduce the pressures on women and share household tasks can be an effective way to support women who do want children.

How does that play out in the United States? At first glance, it seems like mothers in the US have perfect freedom to choose whether or not to work outside the home, and the US does have a higher fertility rate than many countries, but if we look deeper we must acknowledge those choices are highly constrained. “Flexibility” without supportive social structures (like affordable and available childcare before school ages) means that some women who might want children will choose not to have them, and those who might want several might settle for smaller families.

The answer isn’t to prevent women from working, it’s to put policies in place to meaningfully support their choices, policies that are likely to result in higher fertility overall, with benefits to the size of the working-age population in the long run.

I’m now working on a longer written project on a similar topic. This will be a manual for succeeding in self-directed work. Plenty of people are working from home for the first time in this era of social distancing. While life will eventually return to normal, it will be hard to argue that occasional remote/flexible work is simply not an option. It is! And so people can use it as a tool toward achieving their career ambitions.

I really do think that in many cases, structuring work to be flexible (and in some cases remote) is not just about work/life balance. It’s actually a strategic advantage. Organizations are more nimble. People are happier. Lots of time is wasted driving places just to email and call people in other places. Face-to-face work is great, but like all things, there is a point of diminishing returns.

I’ve got my own ideas from running a business out of my home office for decades. For instance:

*I almost always go on a run or a walk in mid-afternoon. This is the time when my energy is flagging, and by getting some exercise, I’m then able to put in another hour or two.

*Perhaps this is a little thing, but still — I pay attention to what’s outside my window; we planted skip laurels so I no longer see the neighbors’ garage. A green view makes me happier and (I think) more productive.

*I have a Regus account and (in normal times) go work there when my home office can’t work (a home demolition happening nearby, a Wifi problem…)

In any case, I want to include lots of other people’s tips as well. If you were working flexibly/remotely pre-Covid, or (even better!) managing a remote team, I’d love to hear your strategies. How do you plan your days? How do you structure employees’ work? Any networking tips? As always, you can email me at laura at lauravanderkam dot com. Thank you!

Launching today from iHeartMedia, and hosted by me, The New Corner Office features strategies for succeeding in the new world of work, one where location and hours are more flexible than in the past.

The format is the same as Before Breakfast: a quick tip every weekday morning. Many people are working remotely for the first time as the world tries to slow the spread of COVID-19. This podcast will help them get up to speed on what works and what doesn’t.

But even when the world gets past this (which it eventually will) the working world will have changed. It turns out that a great many jobs do not need to be done between 9 and 5, five days a week, in a particular physical location. The New Corner Office will focus on the strategic advantages of flexible work, on career-building strategies, daily happiness hacks, and tips from successful people on how to get more done.

I’m excited about this new project. So please give the first three episodes of the podcast a listen, and leave a rating/review at Apple Podcasts.

In other news: If you haven’t listened to Before Breakfast, we’re now running some “Second Cup” episodes on Saturdays with the greatest hits from the past year. That might be a good place to start if you don’t have time for all…280 episodes.