How to ‘have it all’

Work and life don’t have to be in opposition

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.
Good Morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is to stop thinking of work and life
as being in opposition. There is enough space in the
sixty eight hours we all have each week to devote

(00:25):
plenty of time to anything that matters. By telling ourselves
a story of time abundance, it becomes far more possible
to make work in life fit together. Because I write
about issues of careers and families, I often use the
phrase work life balance. That's the term that people search for,

(00:45):
so it makes sense to use it, but I've really
never liked the phrase. The implication is that work and
life are on opposite sides of the scale, hence the
balance metaphor, for one to go up, the other must
go down out. It seems like a zero sum game,
but it really isn't, or at least not within the

(01:06):
categories that people usually care about. Here's the statistic to
ponder as we celebrate International Women's Day this weekend. Time
Diary studies find that women spend more hours working for
pay now than they did in nineteen This makes sense.
The entrance of women into the paid labor force is
one of the major social changes of the last fifty years.

(01:29):
But time diary studies find that women are also spending
more hours interacting with their children than they did in
nineteen sixty. How is this possible? How can women spend
more hours working for pay and more hours with their kids. Well,
it turns out that work and childcare are not the
only thing that women do. In the nineteen sixties, women

(01:52):
spent quite a bit of time on housework, and this
number has fallen as hours devoted to child care and
work have risen. You can even see this changing emphasis
reflected in the language. In the nineteen sixties, people talked
about housewives with the emphasis on the house. Now we
talk about stay at home moms. Even the trade offs

(02:14):
involved with big, demanding careers are often different than the assumption.
A few years ago, I wrote a book called I
Know How She Does It that looked at how successful
women spent their time. I collected time diaries from women
earning over a hundred thousand dollars a year who are
also raising children. I found these women worked, on average

(02:35):
about forty four hours a week. The average woman with
a full time job who earns about forty dollars a
year works somewhere around thirty seven hours a week, and
they turned out to be huge financial payoffs to considering
careers that require a few extra hours per week on
the margins. So this seven or so our gap isn't

(02:55):
nothing between about forty four hours and thirty seven hours,
but it didn't require sacrificing much time with kids. In general,
it came out of leisure time. The people in my
study watched four point four hours of TV a week,
which is about eight hours less than the average woman
with kids in a job. And yes, it turns out
these hours could be substituted. I found about half the

(03:18):
women I studied worked sometimes after their kids went to
bed that time frame when a lot of people watch TV.
In other words, work and family weren't on opposite sides
of the scale. Work and Netflix were on opposite sides
of the scale, and that's a trade off that a
lot of people thought was worth making. Now, none of

(03:38):
this is to say that there won't be day to
day choices or that nobody faces work life conflict. Clearly
people do, people do all the time. But the bigger
issue is that when we tell ourselves stories that work
and life are naturally in opposition. We start to believe it.
We lament the volleyball game missed because of a meeting,
but not the volleyball game missed because another child has

(04:01):
a swim meet at the exact same time. People look
at the first scenario and decide they must dial down
or scale back or opt out. But no one looks
at the second hard choice moment and says, you need
to get rid of the other kid. That's the result
of our stories. So today, think about the work and
life stories you're telling yourself and figure out how you

(04:23):
can reframe them. So you worked late and missed bedtime
on Monday and TUESI this week, Well, is that horrible?
Is something amiss? Perhaps? Or you could tell yourself that
there are seven days in a week and you are
home for five. That sounds fairly balanced, like you're rocking
it at work and at home. When we reframe our stories,

(04:45):
we see that not only can people have it all,
often we already do. In the meantime. This is Laura.
Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of
our time. M Hey, everybody, I'd love to hear from you.

(05:05):
You can send me your tips, your questions or anything else.
Just connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at
Before Breakfast pod. That's B the number four, then Breakfast
p o D. You can also shoot me an email
at Before Breakfast podcast at i heeart media dot com
that Before Breakfast is spelled out with all the letters.

(05:28):
Thanks so much, I look forward to staying in touch.
Before Breakfast is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.