[Spoiler alert: If we define “having it all” as a thriving career, a happy family life, and enough time to sleep and have fun, then absolutely. Yes.]

Anyway, that book noted that the narrative that women simply couldn’t have big careers and functional families (and even the narrative that it’s “best” if mothers do not participate in the workforce) needlessly limited women’s lives. What I keep coming back to in the ten years since is that this narrative needlessly limits men’s lives too, though in some less obvious ways.

Over the years, I’ve observed several situations where a young man has an outsized talent in a field not known for its stability or high pay. The young man gets married, starts a family, and the family decides that Mom should stay home with the kids. The young man decides to pursue something more stable or higher paying in order to support his family.

People can certainly make their own choices, and many people don’t wind up doing what they grew up hoping to do. But it also seems like something of a loss. We all make our choices in context. If the family was surrounded by a different cultural narrative — say, that supporting a family financially is a joint responsibility, and that there’s no evidence that kids “turn out” better based on their mother’s workforce non-participation* — then maybe men would feel more able to pursue career options with less of an eye toward earnings. As it is, when men are the sole earner in a family, or the only one who is aiming to earn a family-supporting income, then even for normal people in normal jobs (where outsized talent isn’t at play), the options are more limited.

When you need to optimize on pay, you sometimes make other compromises — a longer commute, less flexible hours, less interesting work, more dangerous work. Not all high-paid work is terrible by any means, which is a key finding of I Know How She Does It! But pay can be a bigger or smaller factor in decisions. I know many women get frustrated in feeling like they need to compromise on pay in order to get flexibility or a shorter commute; many men experience the flip side of this in situations where they have an expectation to support a family at a certain level, with society telling them left and right that this is what a real man does.

I don’t have some neat conclusion here, and again, everyone can make their own decisions. But I do think one reason for young women to think seriously about their earning capacity is not just to give themselves options, but to give their whole future families options. And broadly, it would be nice if people recognized that the “no one can have it all” narrative can limit men’s choices in life too.

In other news: If you haven’t read I Know How She Does It, I’d love if you’d pick up a copy. I really enjoyed studying hundreds of time diaries — it really increased my desire to do more original time diary research.

*I’ve always been intrigued by this assertion. What does it mean to “turn out” better? What is the endpoint? In general for there to be solid research, there needs to be some sort of objective standard. It’s an interesting thought experiment to think about what that would be.

Photo: From the paperback cover.

I wanted to let people know about a fun discussion I’ll be leading in a few weeks. Our local Ronald McDonald House has an author book club series. If you donate $25, you can join the virtual book club to hear the author talk about the book and ask questions.

I’ll be doing a session on I Know How She Does It on Friday, February 11 at 12 p.m. You can see the page on all the author sessions here. I would love to have some familiar names on the call, and the Ronald McDonald House is a good organization to support (like everyone they’ve not been able to do the galas and silent auctions that they relied on for fundraising…I thought this was a nice new idea!). Thanks for considering it.

No big adventures planned for this weekend…so hopefully there will be a lot of unpacking. I still haven’t found the pots and pans but the kitchen only has a few more boxes in it. Here’s hoping…

Photo: Just using the fireplace picture again…

I realized it had been almost exactly six years since we bid goodbye to New York. On a June day, we loaded our family of four into our newly purchased car — something my husband hadn’t owned in 15 years and I had never owned — and drove from our apartment in midtown Manhattan out to suburban PA. I moved to NYC in 2002, at age 23, feeling much as Swift describes. I left at age 32, with more pedestrian concerns, such as where I would stick the third baby who was then on her way, and navigating the treacherous shoals of the NYC schooling situation for my then 4-year-old.

I do miss New York, though I think New York with four children would be a very different experience than New York as a young, unencumbered person. In particular, I miss singing with a really good choir. I still need to find one here. Fortunately, we didn’t move out into the total sticks. I’m 20 minutes from Philadelphia, which has great restaurants, and professional (albeit not-so-great) sports teams, and some good art museums. Philadelphia has an international airport that I think is nicer than Newark or JFK (if the flights to a few places aren’t as frequent), and a train station that beats Penn Station, and gets me on a train that gets to Penn Station in a little over an hour.

I still hate driving. I have spent far more time and money this year dealing with the joys of car ownership than I would have liked. Home ownership has its own woes. Anyone who thinks suburban living is cheaper than urban living should build line items such as “tree trimming” into their budgets. However, there are also some aspects of suburbia I have found surprisingly nice. Partly it’s that our yard is in full bloom now. Roses and lilies and hydrangeas make for quite a scene out my office window. Also, note that phrase: my office window. I have my own dedicated office in our suburban house, something that was unlikely to happen in Manhattan. In my first NYC apartment, I worked in the kitchen. In the second and third, I worked in part of my bedroom. Having my own professional space makes me feel more professional. I love being able to send the kids down to the basement, and not be on top of all their toys. I have taken the big kids into our pool (a big perk of the house that lured us out of the city) twice this week during the evening. Unless we suddenly became billionaires, we were unlikely to have our own private pool in NYC.

The school thing has been good. We moved to our community partly for the schools, and they haven’t disappointed. The kids have all attended a nice preschool that is half a mile from the house, and the local elementary school is a mile away. The other day the 7-year-old came home with a book he wrote on Pearl Harbor. The school helped him “publish” it through Book Nook press and he was so proud of it. Curiously, our district has recently been sued over what someone claimed are too high property taxes that are over-funding the schools. From our perspective, it is such a bargain vs. paying tuition for four children.

(Other interesting local news: the Bill Cosby trial is going on at our court house, where we do jury duty. But they didn’t pull a jury from around here — they brought one in from Pittsburgh.)

Anyway, I have liked suburbia more than I thought I would, and I do think it was the right move for our family. It’s only when I visit NYC sometimes that I get wistful about it. But probably I should just set it as a goal to go visit more often. And then come back here and sit on my porch and look at my flowering back yard.

In other news: Speaking of other things that have happened in Junes past, I Know How She Does It came two years ago. If you haven’t read the book yet, would you consider picking up a copy? In it, I show that women with big jobs can have far more balanced lives than the popular narrative conveys. It really is possible to have it all — and this is how it’s done.

Anyway, in the Q&A part, one woman asked for advice upon entering their no-doubt cut throat jobs upon graduation. They might all understand that getting enough sleep, and having time for family and friends, would make them more energized and creative at work. But what about colleagues who don’t care about their personal lives? Any competitive work environment will have one of these characters: someone who will stay late, work all weekend, whatever. How do you compete with such a person? How do you avoid looking bad?

It’s a good question, though I would first encourage people to rethink the narrative. In our minds, the “ideal worker” might be always available, but you don’t know for sure that other people perceive this the same way. It’s possible your manager is happy to dump work on your available co-worker, but doesn’t really see her as having leadership potential. Being a solid individual contributor, and showing that you will be able to nurture other people’s talents, are very different things.

Second, while I’m not sure it’s wise to view your colleagues as the “competition,” if we are going to go that route, make sure you know what you’re working with. Being able to throw hours at a problem is one strategy, but it’s always going to be a limited strategy, because there are only so many hours, and people are not machines. Specialized skills, knowledge, and connections are more formidable weapons in the arsenal.

Since that’s the case, you probably want to compete on that turf. So build up your capital within your firm (and outside your firm). Then you can exchange this capital for a good lifestyle in a relatively straightforward transaction. If you are your company’s leading expert on X, and a client is desperate to talk about X, then probably the meeting will happen at a time that’s convenient for you. Because you need to be there.

As you progress into management, being able to get work done without throwing excessive hours at a problem can spark incredible loyalty from your teams. Yes, people get assigned to managers, but when people actively want to work for you, that’s generally a more powerful position than when people actively do not want to work for you. While it’s possible that a colleague who doesn’t care about his/her social life is working long hours so his/her teams don’t have to, I suspect that’s often not the case.

Since you can only control what you do, and not what other people do, get clear feedback from the people you work with on whether your performance is exceeding expectations. If it is, great. Your overworked colleague can be of slightly less concern. Also, don’t forget to advocate for yourself. I heard Carla Harris speak not long ago, and she mentioned learning that all her male colleagues on Wall Street were walking into their managers’ offices and lobbying for as large of bonuses as possible. She felt uncomfortable doing this, but if that’s the way the world works, that’s the way the world works. Don’t wait for your good work to be noticed.

And finally, if you need to play the game, play the game. Just understand the rules of showing visibility. Send emails at 11 p.m. on occasion. Choose to stay very late one night a week or so and make sure people see you doing it. If people see you doing it sometimes, then you seem like the kind of person who stays late. Once people have a story, they look for evidence to support it, so the next week when you stay late one night, people think “Oh look, there’s Beth! Staying late again!” Then the rest of the time, leave whenever you can escape. This is partly how some men fake 80 hour workweeks.

Have you dealt with a situation where a colleague or colleagues didn’t care about having personal time? How did you deal with it?

Off the Clock will be my 5th book with Portfolio (part of Penguin Random House) and I’m now on my 4th editor, but they’ve all been great! Leah and I (and Natalie, the editor on I Know How She Does It, which is out in paperback on January 3) all had lunch and discussed how the project would take shape. We also discussed family road trips. I am grateful that this Christmas I am not spending 11 hours in a minivan traveling to Indiana; other people have come to see us. But Leah totally had me beat. She is the second of 9 children, and she once took a family road trip in a 12-passenger van that (if I recall correctly) involved Yellowstone AND Florida.

Then I went to midtown to tape a FB Live segment with Marketwatch on I Know How She Does It. You can watch it here. (I sometimes do FB Lives on my own FB site too — please like me here to follow along!)

Then it was on to the personal portion of the trip – a portion I consider my early Christmas present. I walked around midtown a bit until my husband met me at our hotel (booked courtesy his SPG points). He thought the Metropolitan Museum of Art was open late on Thursday night, so we took a nice walk up 5th Avenue — only to find it was closing at 5:30, something he’d neglected to notice when he pre-booked our tickets. Fortunately, the ticket counter lady comped us so we could go in for 20 minutes and then use our tickets the next day. We took a whirlwind run through the El Grecos and Titians and the like, and then walked down Madison Avenue, doing a little window shopping. We relaxed in our hotel for an hour before walking 2 blocks to the restaurant Aquavit.

We went to Aquavit on our third date, so it has some special history for us. While the meal was good, and sometimes surprising (a sour cherry dessert wine was involved!) I suppose it will never be quite what it was that first time, when we were falling in love and I’d not had other meals like that. We toasted our nearly 14 years together, and noticed that a few fellow guests had brought their children with them. Alas, our kids are less into Michelin stars, and more into cuisine that comes with toys.

On Friday we slept in (!) and then had breakfast at a bagel place near the Met. After viewing the collection of Van Goghs, Monets, and so forth, we went through the Jerusalem 1000-1400 exhibit, which had a number of illuminated manuscripts, and interesting artifacts showing cross-cultural interaction: a Crusader sword, for instance, stamped with Arabic when it later entered a Muslim person’s collection. We also noted from the archeological record that selling junk to tourists appears to be an eternal human past time.

Then it was back to collect our bags and head to Penn Station, where all of humanity was apparently attempting to leave the island of Manhattan. I am writing this on the train back to Philadelphia. I probably will not be blogging much next week, so here’s to a very happy holidays and a wonderful New Year! One way to celebrate the New Year? I’ll be doing a Time Tracking Challenge on January 9-16, so if you’ve ever thought about tracking your time, that would be a good week if you want moral support. Cheers!

PS. If you enjoy reading this blog, would you consider pre-ordering a paperback copy of I Know How She Does It? Based on 1001 days in the lives of professional women and their families, this book gives practical strategies for managing work and life and succeeding at both. Thank you!

Photos: West Village, near the Penguin offices, and a Menorah in a medieval manuscript.

Second, I am starting work on a new book! It’s tentatively called Off the Clock: Secrets of People with All the Time in the World. I’ll look at how some busy people manage to feel relaxed about time. How can the rest of us learn to feel like there is enough time for the things we want to do? It’s about shifting one’s mindset from scarcity to abundance. There will be both a quantitative and qualitative element to this book. I’ll have more details on participating in the quantitative survey later, but in the meantime, if you feel like you have a good relationship with time, I’d love to hear your strategies. As always, you can email me at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com. The book will be published in late spring or early summer of 2018.

The good news is that the weekend schedule does eventually open up somewhat. When I analyzed time logs for I Know How She Does It, which featured women with kids of all ages, I found that people averaged 7.3-7.5 hours of sleep on various weekdays, and then 8.1 hours on Saturdays and 8.6 on Sundays.

I am still in the baby/toddler stage myself, and it shows on my time logs from the past year. There was a much tighter range:

SLEEP HOURS BY DAY

Monday: 7.35

Tuesday: 7.54

Wednesday: 7.17

Thursday: 7.42

Friday: 7:15

Saturday: 7:57

Sunday: 7.61

In other words, while I am right with the IKHSDI average on weekdays, I am a reasonable bit under on weekends, including a whole hour under on Sundays. I have a line in some of my speeches about why we should think in terms of 168 hours, not 24: “What’s a normal day for you, is it Tuesday or is it Saturday? They both occur just as often, and they both have the same number of hours, but if I looked at you on those days, I’d get a very different picture of your life.” Except that in my life, when it comes to sleep, Tuesdays and Saturdays are basically identical. I am getting the amount of sleep I need, but partly because I am quite regimental about it. I would like to go to bed later on weekends, but I can’t do so without consequences.

(Unless I am in a hotel room by myself. Then all bets are off!)

Work is a slightly different beast. My days did not look identical there, but even so, I can see that the work days are shorter than I might ultimately like (especially Fridays — I had no childcare for a big chunk of the year’s Fridays), and hence Saturday and Sunday are seldom zeroes.

WORK HOURS BY DAY

Monday: 7.74

Tuesday: 7.30

Wednesday: 7.45

Thursday: 7.15

Friday: 4.46

Saturday: 1.44

Sunday: 1.77

There were only 43 days during the year that I did not work. Kid events during the weekdays shorten these days and make me spread out the work onto weekends and holidays to average 40 hours/week (during non-vacation weeks — it was 37.40 overall). There is a lot of work-life integration in my life. It is how I make the pieces all fit.

When it comes to sleep, are you an even-every-day sort, or a weekender? As for work, do you mostly keep it Monday-Friday, or do you use weekends too?

In other news: Please excuse another request for sources! I’m still hoping to interview someone, age 50+, who’s participated in the on-demand economy (eLance, Fiverr, Uber, even renting your place out on AirBnB). As always you can email me at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com. I really appreciate the help!

In life, however, these things do happen, both the planned (dentist appointment) and the unplanned (a quick Friday morning trip to the urgent care clinic!). If someone generally works 8-6, this would seem to be 50 hours a week. Yet often there is at least an hour of non-work stuff (lunch, breaks) during a day, bringing the total down to 45 hours. Leave early on Friday and the total comes down to 43 hours. If every other week brings at least a 2-hour diversion, you are down to 42 hours on average.

I don’t know that there is a good way around these diversions. You can minimize some with back-up care, but not all. For the kid-related ones, it seems fair for couples to share, but this is often not the way it goes. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women with full-time jobs are more likely than men with full-time jobs to have worked fewer than 35 hours during the week due to absence. The absence rate in the particular comparison I am linking to (granted, from a few years ago) was 2.7 percent for men and 5.1 percent for women. To be sure, this is not all family-related. Nonetheless, in the various ways that inequality gets exacerbated, this is a real one.

So what to do? I know many of my readers are committed to keeping their careers going full-throttle during the little kid years. Success does not require working around the clock, but it does require intense hours at times. It also requires that one not feel constantly frantic about falling behind. The strategy many parents use is to purposefully work late one or maybe two nights per week.

Sometimes this is a source of guilt, but I do not think it should be. First, there are 7 days in a week. Working late 1-2 nights (which could include working late while traveling) means you are not working late 5-6 nights. 5-6 is a lot more than 1-2. Think 168 hours, not 24.

Second, if you fall behind, you are going to wind up working late right before deadlines anyway. Planning the late nights ahead of time, before the situation is dire, means less stress for you and your family. Kids know that Tuesday is coming, and Tuesday is the night they go to Grandma’s, or it is the night Daddy makes pizza, or that Gail comes and they all play Monopoly after doing homework.

Third, while the usual narrative is that a late night means work is encroaching into family time, if you are the primary parent (or even an equal one) of young children, family will encroach into work time with some frequency. Sometimes, for people with job flexibility, this is for fun, wonderful, chosen reasons (attending the school play!). Sometimes it is for soul-crushing ones (the vomiting child who must be picked up after you have driven an hour in the opposite direction). Smart workplaces take this in stride. Others require formal write-ups if someone shows up at 8:02 instead of 8:00. But in either case, working late is evening the situation back up.

Many people use a “split shift” (working after the kids go to bed) to increase their hours. That can work too, but working straight through on one night might buy you an evening off for a little leisure time — no small thing for a working parent. Working late one night a week can also allow you to be seen, and if you are needing to dash off to pick up a sick kid here and there, being seen working late some nights has major political benefits. Perhaps it should not. But it does. And many people have told me that it feels incredibly nice to get caught up at 7:30 P.M., and then be able to start thinking of big picture stuff while still functional. The split shift is great for routine work, but seldom for deep thinking.

Do you work late on a regular basis? Or schedule a weekend shift (which is another option)?

In other news: Do you live near Connecticut? Are you recently back in the workforce, or pondering going back in? I am speaking at the 9 Lives For Women “Make Work Fit Life” conference in Stamford on May 12. This conference is focused on women who have taken a pause in their careers and are re-starting. Let me know if you will be there!

Photo: You can skip the bedtime routine some nights.

It has not been onerous. I take a minute or two a few times a day to write down what I have been doing. It is fairly high-level: work or read or kids or clean up, that sort of thing. While part of me wishes I had been more detailed on my work entries, so I could figure out how much time I spent in my inbox, or on the phone, or working on my blog, any time-keeper inevitably faces the tension between capturing details and not turning time-keeping into its own huge time suck.

I will be doing the full analysis of my year soon (and because it is my own naval-gazing blog, I will post the results!) But as I printed up the logs this morning, I could already see a few things.

First, my baby slept pretty well in April last year. He got worse as he got older. There were some fairly atrocious stretches within these time logs. The spreadsheet format makes that clear. I can see night after night of being up in the middle of the night, often multiple times. On some level, I am surprised it was as productive a year as it was. I think I have been doing a lot of muddling through in something of a haze. Thankfully, all of this has gotten better in the last 2-3 months. This lifting haze explains why I have been relishing my sleep of late.

Part of the relishing: an early bedtime. I have convinced myself that going to bed early is how grown ups sleep in. I have been able to convince myself of this because I have also noted that I am seldom doing much of consequence before bed. If I am busy I will work, but the work ebbs and flows. I fill my late night puttering time with magazine reading. It is my equivalent of TV. I should start reading some better literature. Some of the magazine fare is interesting but I do not need to read another story on how air popped popcorn is the perfect low calorie snack.

There was a lot of breastfeeding and pumping over the year. I have just finished this, which in its own way is momentous. I have been pregnant or breastfeeding for the vast majority of the past decade. While the end of that might be a cause for melancholy, I am also intrigued to think that I am starting a new chapter of my life.

Overall, though, two things strike me as the key takeaways. First: how much space there is in my life. In theory, I am busy. A quick glance at my logs reminds me of the sheer volume of travel this year has entailed. Then there are the four kids, and their associated activities. But the busyness ebbs and flows too, and the nature of writing is that it requires open space for thinking and creating. I have been pretty good over this past year at making sure that space still exists. Maybe not as much as I want. But it is there.

Second, even as there is space, I have an amazing and full life. The logs make me grateful for that. There is the professional stuff, which has been fun, but I enjoy seeing what we have done as a family too. My kids went to Disney World and Disneyland in one year! They went to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and Six Flags outside Washington DC. They saw the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I worry that they spend too much time playing video games, I am going to remind myself of the sheer volume of experiences they have had in their young lives. I think it will turn out OK.

In lieu of an essay-style post, here are some random life updates.

The 6-year-old is really and truly reading. He is a curious kid, which was why I found it a little strange that he didn’t start reading until now. Reading lets you find stuff out without having to ask anyone! He was resistant at the start of the year. But now something switched on. I had him read a Pete the Cat book to me the other night and he was able to read almost all the words. Then last night I had him read the first few pages of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs to me and he was zooming through that too. He is very proud of himself, and I am proud of him as well!

The past two days were warm enough to run outside. I have been enjoying my new treadmill workout (as those of you who subscribe to my newsletter read) but oh, is it nice to be out in the fresh air too! Today is warm but rainy so I am back inside.

In terms of Q1 goal updates: I have an idea for a non-fiction book. I am getting some feedback on it now. On the treadmill workout, I have now made it through 1 minute at 9.0 mph after doing the 2 minutes at 6.0, 2 minutes at 7.0, and then 2 minutes at 8.0. I can do longer than 1 minute at 9.0, but not after the three-quarters of a mile at progressively faster speeds. The goal is doing 2 minutes at 9.0 mph after the 6-minute build-up. Re the ‘relationships’ goal, I have a planning meeting this week about the preschool moms party I am hosting in March.

The 8-year-old started drama club a few weeks ago. They are trying out for their play today. He is quite excited about this. I am happy that he has landed in a few activities that he really likes, particularly drama and swimming. He is also taking piano lessons and doing a ski development program on weekends. I am not sure those are quite as big of hits, but we will do them this year and then figure out if we are continuing.

I put all 4 kids in the bath together (the large master bath) last night. This was efficient, though not exactly low-stress. At one point, while I was dealing with the baby, the 6-year-old decided the sides of the tub would make a really good water slide. He hit the bottom of the tub hard. I think he did hurt himself, but he refused to show it because he could tell I was mad.

The 4-year-old is — how shall we put this? — exerting control over her environment. She has a series of foods that must be prepared a certain way. An apple must have a tiny piece cut out of one side, so she can bite in easily to that nick, but she wants the other half of the apple cut into slices. Her frozen waffle must be toasted, then buttered, then stuck in the microwave to have the butter melt properly. Then she wants the crust of the waffle cut off (though she will eat the crust — it just must be separated). If she wants a cheese stick, she wants it cut up in slices, and put in a bowl, but one of the slices must be significantly bigger than the others. It goes without saying that when these specifications aren’t met, there is intense disapproval.

The 1-year-old is really into swords, light-sabers, etc. The older kids ensure there is a large quantity of these around. The other day I was sitting in my office when I heard someone at the glass French doors behind me. I turned around to see my toddler standing there, gaping through the glass, giant plastic sword raised above his head. It would have been a wee bit intimidating were he not, you know, less than 3 feet tall.