January 19, 2022 • 35 mins
Have you ever thought to yourself "my time is never enough because everything is on me”? This week, Eve and Aditi continue to unravel the messages women tell themselves that undermine and devalue their time. They are joined by time and gender roles researcher and bestselling author, Brigid Schulte, as they discuss why men and women inherently view time differently. To learn more about Brigid, visit www.brigidschulte.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Time Out. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the
New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space,
activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator.
And I'm doctor add Nerukar, a physician and medical correspondent
with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health,
(00:22):
and burnout. We're here to peel back to layers around
why it's so easy for society to guard men's time
as if it's diamonds and to treat women's time as
if it's infinite like sands. And whether you are partnered
with or without children, or in a career where you
want more boundaries, this is the place for you for
all family structures. We're here to take a time out
(00:45):
to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim our time.
Add I want to tell your story. I live for
your stories. Well, this is something I think you can
relate to. And I called the case of the drunk
(01:08):
Man's Jackets. So I woke up at five am one
morning to catch a flight for one day work trips Seattle,
right after Ben was born. And you can picture the
scene right. I was carrying my breast pump my purse
on my shoulder, my laptop, my carry on bag with
(01:28):
tons of documents, and I remember I pulled up to
the curve at departures around seven am, and I get
a text from Seth. He set seems apparently loves to
send me text the d d um. But his text said,
some guy left his jacket and beer bottle on our lawn. Okay.
So I was thinking that's weird and gross, and more importantly,
(01:51):
what was I supposed to do about it? From the road,
So I put the drunk ey's jacket out of my
mind for the day, and as the plane took off,
I began prepping for the Family Foundation board meeting that
I was leading that day. So I land in Seattle.
I pumped for twenty minutes in the airport. How many
of us have had to do that go into one
(02:12):
of those weird pods or more likely to stairwell. And
I arrived in my client's boardroom and I lead this
all day meeting with three generations of family members that
have been feuding so badly when I met them that
every time my client's son would open his mouth, my
client would storm out of the room. This day, I
(02:32):
felt really proud of myself that all three generations around
the table were communicating with grace and humor and generosity.
So the meaning finishes, and I knew I had to
pump again, but because of the sex noises. I don't
know if they still do that a d D if
your clients tell you that. But the sex noises my
pump me. I was too embarrassed to use the family
(02:53):
boardroom restroom, and so I found myself, as we said earlier,
really pumping in a dark stairwell of the building parking garage,
pumping into plastic bags before I raced on the plane
to get home. So I pull up to my house
around ten thirty that night, completely exhausted as you can imagine,
(03:13):
and as I'm dragging my carry on bag, I see
a crumpled up jacket and a broken beer bottle. It
was still there. Add you know, I decided to give
Seth the benefit of the doubt because I figured, you know,
maybe he was dead or maybe trapped under a giant boulder.
(03:35):
So after I put the breast milk bottles in the refrigerator,
I started lugging myself up the stairs and guess what
I find? Seth outstretched on the bed, but definitely not dead.
In fact, he cheerfully told me that he had four
hours after the kids went to bed to check email,
watch Sports Center, work out, and finish a power Point deck,
(03:57):
plenty of time to decompress from his long day, yet
not enough time, apparently to clean up the drunk guys
stuff he discovered on our lawn sixteen hours earlier. And
so I go back downstairs because actually, why did I
do this? That I reflect on this now because what
jackets are gross, but more importantly because I had a
(04:19):
toddler at the time, and the shattered beer bottle felt
like a safety hazard for my kids. And so I
put on a pair of rubber gloves I had left
over from school sandwich duty. I grabbed a trash bag,
I walked outside, I threw the gross stuff in the bag.
I throw the trash bag into the bin, and I
come home. But my active resistance that night, as I
(04:42):
was doing this was that I finally timed myself. And
all in all, it took twelve minutes, twelve minutes from
putting on those rubber gloves to finally peeling them off
and dropping them at the foot of seth side of
the bed, where I looked him in the and said,
you're fucking welcome as I stormed off. Why I want
(05:06):
to talk about this as an intro to this episode
today is I realized I was so upset because sess
morning text wasn't a can you believe this text, but
a I don't have time, this is on you? And
I began thinking about twelve minutes. Those twelve minutes multiplied
(05:26):
by thousands over the course of almost a decade of
marriage and two kids at the time of this is
on you required to get through each of my days,
and that's when I realized that women are racing against
the clock from the moment we wake up. This episode
(05:46):
is about why, Why was this on me? Why is
this on us? So? What's so fascinating to me? This
idea of time is so unique to women versus men,
And not only do women value time differently than men,
but also across the lifespan, we value time so different.
(06:09):
And you and I have talked about this before. We
are both moms and wives, and our husbands are amazing.
We married feminist husbands who totally support our decision to
work and thrive and be working mothers and have a
dual income household and all of these things, and yet
these stories continue to happen to us and women everywhere.
(06:33):
I have several patients women who are cancer patients, and they,
you know, have had families and work hard, and then
they get that diagnosis of cancer. So many of these
women that have come to me will often say that
it was their cancer diagnosis that was that wake up
(06:54):
call for them or that aha moment. So I've seen
from my patients women may have had a certain kind
of job or a different kind of family structure and
then completely usurp and change everything about their life, so
they might quit their job or go into a line
of work that they've always wanted to do. I've had
some patients suddenly decided to be children's authors or painters
(07:18):
or fashion designers. But it's their hearts calling. They weren't
listening for decades. And it's always shocked me that it
takes something like a life altering cancer diagnosis for women
to reclaim their time. And I've had patients who have
been healed. But the crux of all of that is
(07:39):
that they finally start valuing their time on a deep
cellular level. Oh my god, I love this so much
because I think about the healing versus a cure, right,
The idea that there's a cure to this on you
text is a fallacy because it's a practice, and so
healing is so much more of a active verbs because
(08:01):
you can take agency in your own life. And what
I like to say, and as Seth is so proud
of me now and brings fair play everywhere that my
healing journey. When people say what started it? Or how
did you get to a place where your time is
now being valued within your marriage, my prescription is, well,
just write a book about your partner that portrays them
(08:22):
in a terrible light, because that was my healing journey.
But the good news about this podcast is you don't
need to do that. We're going to do it for
you and with you, and it starts with communicating with yourself.
And the premise of this episode is that I wish
I could talk to myself back then and say, this
(08:45):
is not about you and Seth. You have a great partner.
You are in a messed up society and system that
values and treats Seth time as if it's finite and condition.
As you and your partner and the ones around you
to treat your time as if it's infinite. What I
(09:08):
mean by that is that if women enter male professions,
salaries automatically go down. We hear from society that breastfeeding
is free when it's really hours, it's a full time job,
but somehow apparently it's free only in a world where
(09:28):
women's time is infinite. And finally, I will say that
the things that's been hardest for me though, as we
talk about reclaiming our time, is that it starts with
the messages we tell ourselves. And so these were the
four most popular ones. And I'm centering women married to
men right now, because even though this occurs in many
different family structures, this is where often the problems start,
(09:51):
with these heteronormative societal roles that we get stuck in.
One my partner makes more money than me, or somehow
my job is more flexible. When we know that if
a woman is a lawyer and a man is a doctor,
she thinks her job is more flexible. If the woman
is the doctor and the man is the lawyer, her
job is toda more flexible. Number two women across the
(10:18):
globe in seventeen countries said to me that they're wired
differently for care that they are better multitaskers. For that one,
I had to go to another doctor, a neuroscientists, and
I had to ask him are our women wired differently?
Are our brains wired for multitasking caregiving? And indeed he
just looked at me and said, well, I guess culturally,
(10:40):
definitely not neurologically. That was a hard one for me
to hear. Number three And the time it takes me
to tell him her they what to do, I should
just do it myself. That's a classic devaluing of your
future time. According to professor and friend Dan Arielli, who's
a behavioral economist and popular author, and finally, the one
(11:02):
that makes me laugh the most, my partner is better
at focusing on one task at a time, and I
can find the time. And so I like to say,
unless we're Albert Einstein, we can funk with the space
time continuum. There's actually no way to find time. There's
no way to find time, and so what happens does
that just leave to burnout if we think our time
(11:23):
is infinite. So, as you were sharing each of those
toxic messages, in my mind, I was saying, yep, number two, yep,
number three. Yep. So what I've seen in my clinical practice,
and many doctors will attest to this as well, is
that men and women, like you said, inherently see time differently.
(11:47):
Women will say I don't have enough time. That typically
means that they don't have enough time to do all
of the things on their to do list that they
need to do, which includes work responsibilities, family responsibilities, home responsibilities.
But when you ask them where do you fall on
that list, they are not even on that list. So
(12:10):
we often say in pop culture, put yourself first, or
fill your own cup before you feel someone else's. But
it is truly a paradigm shift because many women do
not even put themselves on that list. Men also feel
time crunched, but in a different way. It's very work centric,
and the women I'm talking to, they have jobs outside
(12:30):
the home or even in the home. They work so much,
so this is not a career specific view. This has
been very much a gendered view. Wow, I love that
so much, And I want to go back to something
you said about women inherently valuing their time different than men,
because I think the word inherent is important in here
(12:53):
because it's not neurological it's not biological. Inherently is because
we have been conditioned from birth to believe that having
it all means doing it all, and once you're done
with wiping the asses and doing the dishes and securing childcare,
(13:15):
there's literally no time left. Everything I had been taught
about having time choice over how I used my life.
Being in the best decade ever women can do what
the same as anybody else does was was really it
was really a lie. You know. It's interesting about multitasking
is that it actually has a negative impact on the brain.
(13:37):
We've talked about this idea of women doing everything and
feeling like it's a badge of honor to be able
to do it all and have it all, and I'm
so on top of things. It actually is not healthy
to multitasks. So that's another societal norm that we need
to blow up that doing it all at the same
time isn't a badge of honor. It's actually impacting your
health in a negative way. You know. In mindfulness, we
(13:59):
talk a lot about the timelessness of the present moment.
So even if it's fifteen minutes or ten minutes a day,
it's that sense of timelessness that childlike wonder that we
can create, which has so many therapeutic benefits apps. And
by the way, thank you for saying that, because I'm
sort of sick of productivity books as I read each
(14:21):
one of them. It seems like we just get these
ridiculous messages like wake up an hour earlier or find
two uninterrupted days a week, and it's unrealistic. It doesn't
speak to people without extreme amounts of privilege. And so
the last toxic time message I want to talk about
before we get to bring on Bridget Chalty, who is
(14:44):
the queen of talking about productivity and time, is this
message of if you're so overwhelmed, get help. So many
people say that to women, and I find it really
toxic because not only does it not recognize that most
of the work that is leading to women being diagnosed
with twice as many anxiety disorders as men is the
(15:05):
cognitive labor. The way we've looked at time, the way
we talked to women about time since we are born.
It needs to be blown up and needs to be
seen as toxic and there has to be a new
way forward. So we're going to get to talk to
my great friend and fellow activists Bridges Shelty today who
(15:26):
literally wrote the book on being overwhelmed, and I cannot
wait to welcome her into the studio. Bridge Shelty literally
(15:52):
wrote the book on being overwhelmed. She's the author of
the New York Times best selling book over Work, Love
and Play When No One Has the Time, And it's
really a book about time pressure, gender expectations, and the
overwhelm of modern life. So we're so happy to have
her here today. High Bridget, Hi, great to meet you.
(16:17):
Do you know that I've read your Guardian piece multiple
times from two thousand and nineteen. You know it's so
funny about that pieces. It keeps showing up on Twitter,
like from all around the world, and that peace came
out of such a moment of frustration. And I tried
to write it for a year, and every time I
went to sit down, I was like, mom, can you
(16:37):
do this? I thought it was like a cosmic joke
that I couldn't even find the time to write that piece.
And for our listeners who don't know it, can you
tell us a little bit about what the article it
was Bridget that went so viral. So I'm a journalist
and a writer and spent most of my career at
the Washington Post, and I kind of fell into writing
about time and women and work life issues that resulted
(16:59):
in this book called Overwhelmed, Work, Glove, and Play. When
no one has the time really thinking about women and time.
And I'm working at the Better Life Lab and there's
a kind of a million balls in the air, but
my identity is always as a writer first, and I
was feeling just this real pain that I didn't have time.
I wasn't making the time to write and create and think.
(17:22):
And so somebody at a conference said, oh, you should
read this book about how the great artists made time.
Maybe that can give you some advice. So I read
this book. I got it for myself for Christmas. This
was going to be like the key for me to
understand how I could make more time to be creative
and write. And I started reading and they were really interesting.
(17:45):
They were sort of the back stories of a lot
of great artists. But about ten pages in and I
just started getting really kissed off because just about every
single artist was a man. And it's like the writer
he didn't even understand the picture that he was painting,
you know. He talked about Freud and how he had
(18:05):
all of this time and space to think, and part
of it was because his wife laid out his clothes
every morning and even put his toothpaste on his toothbrush,
you know. And they talked about Gustaf Mahler, and you know,
he was married to this young, really up and coming composer,
but he wanted her to walk with him while he
thought about music, and he didn't want her to make
(18:28):
a sound, and she wasn't allowed to create, or you know,
her whole purpose was to help him create. The more
and more I read these pieces, the angry and angrier
I got because it was such a reflection to me
about how women have never had this kind of space
or time to create and think that that's considered selfish.
(18:51):
We talk about me time as if it's something that
only weak, stupid people would want, and a woman's work
is never done. And so it may me angry that
the author couldn't even see that the men were able
to have this space and they were able to really
have this wonderful full family life and the women, for
the most part, we're not. And it was sort of
(19:14):
one more indication to me of how we just don't
get it. Women have never had a history or culture
of having time to themselves, And I just thought, what
have we lost? Wherever you sat on the gender spectrum,
we all deserve time to be as fully human as
we are. All time is crazy equal, and you are
(19:37):
our leader and fearless warrior. And I will just reflect
on how powerful your work has been to me. A
lot of what you talked about is time choice. You know,
when Seth was coming home from work and he had
four hours after our kids went to bed too work out,
check powerpoints, finish a deck, b Shakespeare or Freud, or
(20:02):
have as time to think great. I was doing things
in service of our house until my head hit the pillow,
and um, I remember going to him and saying, I
just want equal time choice. I want as much choice
over how I used my day as you have. And
that is why I'm resenting you so much, because you
look so free, and I think the problem is all
(20:23):
the productivity researchers. Besides, you assume that we can have
this uninterrupted time for deep work that is just not
afforded to women. You know, when you look at the
history of women's time, women have never had concentrated, uninterrupted time.
Think about it. The good wife kept the children and
(20:46):
everything away from the husband so that he could be
in the study. The good secretary her time was interrupted
so she could protect the boss's time. So women's time
has always been fragmented, interrupted, moving from thing to thing.
Leisure for women tends to always have this moment of
your checking everybody else's emotional temperature. Is everybody else having
(21:08):
a good time? Did I plan this right? Somebody described
it to me. It's like maybe you're at the pool,
but you're like the fireman. It's not pure leisure to yourself.
And I think that's what this fight is for women
to see that they deserve this kind of time and
to work together because your partners have to work with
you as well. Just like they need and want unstructured,
(21:31):
concentrated time, women need that too. And then we need
to work on these larger work systems and policy systems
to make sure that all people have access to that.
You know, as I was doing research, I came across
this quote. To be interrupted is to be disrespected, And
so think about it. With women's time being so interrupted
throughout all of human history, it's a sign of enormous disrespect.
(21:56):
So R. E. S. P. E c. T. It's time.
It's time for women to respect ourselves, to demand it,
but also for others to recognize that we deserve it.
So indeed, is gonna ask you a couple of practical
questions about how we can start reclaiming our time. But
before that, I never asked you this personally. I've never
given you the toxic time quiz. I thought it would
(22:17):
be fun to ask you how many of these messages
you heard in your research? I love it as long
as you know, like full disclosure from the outset. I
may research this stuff, but I'm still working on all
of it. So how many of these messages have you
heard or said to yourself? My paid hours are worth
more than your unpaid hours. It's not worth it for
(22:38):
you to work. What did you do all day? Why
are you wasting time doing that? You're so lucky you
don't have to go to work. Well, if you don't
have enough time and you're so overwhelmed, just get help.
I don't have time, so can you. You're a better multitaskers,
so you should just do it. My partner travels or
(23:01):
goes to work early, so it's on me and the
time it takes me. To tell my partner what to do,
I might as well just do it myself. Yes, more
time for myself would be great, but I really should
go clean out the freezer. You know. I have to
say all of them. I hear them all the time
still in the research that I do. I have to say,
my husband and I have been doing the awful lot
of work. And it was really through the process of
(23:23):
doing the research of the book that I recognized that
I had to begin to respect my own time because
nobody else was going to. I had to learn to
disrupt my own mental models of everything that I had
been taught. I had a breadwinner father, distant. I work,
That's what I do. Don't bug me. And then I
had a mother who she was a homemaker and drove
(23:46):
the car pools and did nothing on her own and
signed her checks Mrs Arthur A. Shalt Jr. It's like,
who is that, you know? And she started sending things
to me, Mrs Thomas M. Bowman. I started to send
them act her saying I don't know who this is.
That is not me, you know. So I have heard
all of those messages, and they are very potent, and
(24:08):
they're very powerful, and they get into your psyche. So
the first step is just to be aware that it's
out there and that you can make a choice. You
can choose to think differently and honest to God. Awareness,
education and recognizing that this is a choice. You know,
(24:28):
it's not a baby step. That's an enormous leap. If
all you do is work between your ears, that's going
to pay off because then it will come out in
day to day life. So it's sort of like constantly
catching yourself. Somebody wants asked me, what's your best productivity tip,
and I just said, compassion, because you know what, this
(24:49):
is hard, and you're going to screw up and your
partner's going to screw up because this is hard. We're
pushing back against centuries of status quo thinking that's really
outdated and really painful for women and honestly for men
and anybody across the gender spectrum. So policing you into
these very narrow roles that takes work. That's hard. So
(25:12):
fall down, take a breath, forgive yourself, have some compassion,
and begin again. I still picked up the drunk man's
jacket and it was on my lawn for six So
we still have a lot of work to do. But
it's a practice. It's a practice. I think that's the
best way to look at it. I'm working on my
next book. It's about overwork. Guess what, I'm overworking working
(25:34):
on my book about overwork. I mean, I know that
I know that I'm doing everything wrong. We fall down
begin again. You know. I love that you said that
your first step is often the hardest, but the greatest
leap that sense of awareness. It seems like it might
not be a lot, but it actually is a great awakening.
Can you talk to us a little bit more about
(25:55):
what people can do to feel the greatest sense of
equity or not feeling as overwhelmed as your book suggests. Yeah,
so a couple of things. So when it comes to
that sense of time to yourself, the sense that you
don't have to be the one that does everything at home.
(26:16):
I was really struck by this one study that was
done back in the nineties asking women across the globe
about leisure time and what do you do or what
do you deserve? And what so struck me is that
it didn't matter what country it was, how old the
women were, what your religion was, Almost two have one
every single woman in this study said, I feel like
(26:37):
I don't deserve time to myself. I have to earn it,
and the only way to earn it is to get
to the end of a really long to do list.
So I bring that up because the first step is
to give yourself permission to let that go, give yourself
permission to recognize you don't need to earn it. And
(27:00):
once you make that switch that it's important that you
deserve it, that it's okay, that you don't need to
feel guilty or ashamed. There's lots of really great strategies,
and the easiest one is thinking about it as a
practice and putting time in your calendar. So you want
time to learn how to play the guitar, Okay, can
you find thirty minutes on a Saturday on a Tuesday
(27:22):
evening and put it in your calendar. Let everybody around
you know so that they'll support you. And if they
see you clean out the fridge, it's like, you know, Hey,
wasn't this the time you were going to try to
learn how to play the piano or watch this Ted talk?
You wanted let people know what's important to you, get
their support because sometimes it's hard. We can feel guilty
(27:42):
or selfish. Get people on board and practice it. The
other sort of great advice that I got was start small.
Don't think that you're going to completely rewrite your calendar
next week. Put on a timer and do something that
that might be fun, that your soul might be calling
out for. And sometimes we don't do that because we
don't know. We get so busy, we don't really know
(28:04):
what we want. When I've talked to leisure researchers, that's
the one thing that they'll say, like people tend to
not enjoy their vacations because they don't take the time
beforehand to think what do I really need? And what
their research has found is that if you take just
like ten minutes before you plan a vacation and just
take that breath and think, what do I really want?
(28:24):
You know, do I want to go swimming outside? Do
I want to make sure that I connect with certain people?
Kind of get in touch with your own intuition, and
then proactively say, Okay, this is what I'm going to
use this time for. So take that pause to figure
out what it is you really want and then kind
of create that schedule or that time or that expectation
that you'll have it. You can't manage time. You can't.
(28:48):
What you can manage are your expectations, and you can
manage your priorities for what you do in time. The
last thing I'll say about that is in the United
States and women in particular, we think of about it's
like a pantry and you just got to cram all
this stuff in there, and then we get all these kudos.
Look at how busy I am. Look at all this
amazing stuff I crammed onto my calendar. Rather than think
(29:10):
about that cramming and kind of busy treadmill, think about
your time and your schedule like an art gallery. Very mindfully.
Choose those beautiful paintings that you want to spend time
looking out or dealing with. And then in between the paintings,
give yourself some white space to recover, to reflect, to prepare.
(29:31):
Don't think about going from one thing to the next,
to the next to the next. And there are days
that we do get into code red. No matter no
matter what you want, you know what you try. But
it doesn't have to be like that every day. You
can recognize that there are choices that you can make
so that you'll have more energy when code red does come,
and then you can give yourself the permission to have
(29:53):
a code green the next day. Our culture does not
make it easy, there's no doubt about that. But the
thing about practice is the more you do it, the
better you get at it. And it all begins, as
you said, with being able to take agency in our
own lives in the midst of these messy systems. So
thank you for giving us that ability to give ourselves
(30:13):
the compassion to make it a practice. Thank you for
your advice and wisdom. Bridget Oh well, thank you, thank
you all for thank you both for doing this and
for really keeping these conversations going. Hi, it's me Eve,
(30:37):
and I want to tell you about my latest book,
Find Your Unicorn Space. So you're playing fair and have
established equity in your home, but now what it's time
to find your Unicorn Space. My new book will help
you set personal goals, rediscover your interests, and reclaim the
creative expression of self that makes you uniquely you. Find
your Unicorn Space is a mix of research space, how
(30:58):
to advice, and big picture inspirational thinking. I hope it
can show you a clear path to reclaim your permission
to be unavailable and manifest your own unicorn space. Find
your Unicorn Space is available now wherever books are sold.
(31:19):
So every episode of this podcast will be ending with
an action atem for you are listeners that we call
a time out. This is really a time for you
to focus on yourself and reflect on what you're hearing today.
And we're starting the conversation first with ourselves and then
ultimately with our partners and others. I think Bridget has
(31:40):
some important wisdom for us here a d D, and
especially in this idea around having it all does not
mean doing it all. And for me, when she talks
about a crowded pantry, I feel like in that pantry
are societal expectations. Things that we do by de fault,
(32:01):
all the extra unpaid labor that possibly we should be
distributing to. Our partners are roommates, our parents are colleagues,
and so I want to take a page from Bridget
and start thinking about how our lives can look more
like art galleries and less like stale pantries. And I'll
(32:22):
start with what I want to throw out. For me,
it's a lot of societal expectations around gratitude, and so
the first one would be thank you notes I hate
writing them. I love gratitude, but not in that way,
and so I'm done. I'm going to figure out how
to express gratitude in a way that's simpler and easier
(32:45):
for me than write handwriting and stamping thank you notes.
You know. In reflecting on Bridget's work, I've thought a
lot about my to do list, and in medicine, when
we're seeing our patients in the hospital, to do list
is literally what gets us through the day, and I
am a master of to do lists. But what's happened
(33:05):
over the years is that life has gotten complicated. You
get married, you have kids, you have more and more
work responsibilities, so that to do list just grows and grows,
and what once was a four to ten box checklist
now becomes a to do list of thirty items that
you absolutely can't get done in a day. So for me,
(33:26):
also in reframing bridgets lessons of moving from a pantry
to art gallery, I'm going to really think about my
to do list and instead of focusing on what do
I need to do this week or this month, just
focus on the day and the rest of the stuff
can all wait. And so in this week's time out,
we would love for you to think a little bit
(33:49):
more deeply about what's crowding your pantry and how you
can streamline that into a beautiful, curated art gallery with
lots of works of art, but also plenty of white space.
So this week we discuss why we have a time deficit,
why we're always running up against the clock from the
(34:10):
moment we wake up. Now if we get that time back, though,
what do we do with it? When you have an
extra time, when you have that white space, when your
life is more like an art gallery and less like
an over stuff pantry, what do you even do with
that found time? We like to call that unicorn space?
(34:31):
What makes you you and how you share it with
the world, and we're going to teach you how to
find it next week. Thank you for listening to Time Out,
a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm
Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller of
fair Play and Find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on
(34:53):
social media at ev Rodsky and learn more about our
work at fair Play Life and I adoptor Adity Car,
Harvard physician with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout and
mental health. Follow me on social media at dr A
d D The Root Car and find out more about
my work at doctor a d d dot com. That's
d R A D I t I dot com. Our
(35:15):
Hello Sunshine team is Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker.
Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett
and Jessica Friendshitch. We hope you all love taking a
much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe
to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your favorite shows
Welcome to Time Out. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the
New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space,
activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator.
And I'm doctor add Nerukar, a physician and medical correspondent
with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health,
(00:22):
and burnout. We're here to peel back to layers around
why it's so easy for society to guard men's time
as if it's diamonds and to treat women's time as
if it's infinite like sands. And whether you are partnered
with or without children, or in a career where you
want more boundaries, this is the place for you for
all family structures. We're here to take a time out
(00:45):
to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim our time.
Add I want to tell your story. I live for
your stories. Well, this is something I think you can
relate to. And I called the case of the drunk
(01:08):
Man's Jackets. So I woke up at five am one
morning to catch a flight for one day work trips Seattle,
right after Ben was born. And you can picture the
scene right. I was carrying my breast pump my purse
on my shoulder, my laptop, my carry on bag with
(01:28):
tons of documents, and I remember I pulled up to
the curve at departures around seven am, and I get
a text from Seth. He set seems apparently loves to
send me text the d d um. But his text said,
some guy left his jacket and beer bottle on our lawn. Okay.
So I was thinking that's weird and gross, and more importantly,
(01:51):
what was I supposed to do about it? From the road,
So I put the drunk ey's jacket out of my
mind for the day, and as the plane took off,
I began prepping for the Family Foundation board meeting that
I was leading that day. So I land in Seattle.
I pumped for twenty minutes in the airport. How many
of us have had to do that go into one
(02:12):
of those weird pods or more likely to stairwell. And
I arrived in my client's boardroom and I lead this
all day meeting with three generations of family members that
have been feuding so badly when I met them that
every time my client's son would open his mouth, my
client would storm out of the room. This day, I
(02:32):
felt really proud of myself that all three generations around
the table were communicating with grace and humor and generosity.
So the meaning finishes, and I knew I had to
pump again, but because of the sex noises. I don't
know if they still do that a d D if
your clients tell you that. But the sex noises my
pump me. I was too embarrassed to use the family
(02:53):
boardroom restroom, and so I found myself, as we said earlier,
really pumping in a dark stairwell of the building parking garage,
pumping into plastic bags before I raced on the plane
to get home. So I pull up to my house
around ten thirty that night, completely exhausted as you can imagine,
(03:13):
and as I'm dragging my carry on bag, I see
a crumpled up jacket and a broken beer bottle. It
was still there. Add you know, I decided to give
Seth the benefit of the doubt because I figured, you know,
maybe he was dead or maybe trapped under a giant boulder.
(03:35):
So after I put the breast milk bottles in the refrigerator,
I started lugging myself up the stairs and guess what
I find? Seth outstretched on the bed, but definitely not dead.
In fact, he cheerfully told me that he had four
hours after the kids went to bed to check email,
watch Sports Center, work out, and finish a power Point deck,
(03:57):
plenty of time to decompress from his long day, yet
not enough time, apparently to clean up the drunk guys
stuff he discovered on our lawn sixteen hours earlier. And
so I go back downstairs because actually, why did I
do this? That I reflect on this now because what
jackets are gross, but more importantly because I had a
(04:19):
toddler at the time, and the shattered beer bottle felt
like a safety hazard for my kids. And so I
put on a pair of rubber gloves I had left
over from school sandwich duty. I grabbed a trash bag,
I walked outside, I threw the gross stuff in the bag.
I throw the trash bag into the bin, and I
come home. But my active resistance that night, as I
(04:42):
was doing this was that I finally timed myself. And
all in all, it took twelve minutes, twelve minutes from
putting on those rubber gloves to finally peeling them off
and dropping them at the foot of seth side of
the bed, where I looked him in the and said,
you're fucking welcome as I stormed off. Why I want
(05:06):
to talk about this as an intro to this episode
today is I realized I was so upset because sess
morning text wasn't a can you believe this text, but
a I don't have time, this is on you? And
I began thinking about twelve minutes. Those twelve minutes multiplied
(05:26):
by thousands over the course of almost a decade of
marriage and two kids at the time of this is
on you required to get through each of my days,
and that's when I realized that women are racing against
the clock from the moment we wake up. This episode
(05:46):
is about why, Why was this on me? Why is
this on us? So? What's so fascinating to me? This
idea of time is so unique to women versus men,
And not only do women value time differently than men,
but also across the lifespan, we value time so different.
(06:09):
And you and I have talked about this before. We
are both moms and wives, and our husbands are amazing.
We married feminist husbands who totally support our decision to
work and thrive and be working mothers and have a
dual income household and all of these things, and yet
these stories continue to happen to us and women everywhere.
(06:33):
I have several patients women who are cancer patients, and they,
you know, have had families and work hard, and then
they get that diagnosis of cancer. So many of these
women that have come to me will often say that
it was their cancer diagnosis that was that wake up
(06:54):
call for them or that aha moment. So I've seen
from my patients women may have had a certain kind
of job or a different kind of family structure and
then completely usurp and change everything about their life, so
they might quit their job or go into a line
of work that they've always wanted to do. I've had
some patients suddenly decided to be children's authors or painters
(07:18):
or fashion designers. But it's their hearts calling. They weren't
listening for decades. And it's always shocked me that it
takes something like a life altering cancer diagnosis for women
to reclaim their time. And I've had patients who have
been healed. But the crux of all of that is
(07:39):
that they finally start valuing their time on a deep
cellular level. Oh my god, I love this so much
because I think about the healing versus a cure, right,
The idea that there's a cure to this on you
text is a fallacy because it's a practice, and so
healing is so much more of a active verbs because
(08:01):
you can take agency in your own life. And what
I like to say, and as Seth is so proud
of me now and brings fair play everywhere that my
healing journey. When people say what started it? Or how
did you get to a place where your time is
now being valued within your marriage, my prescription is, well,
just write a book about your partner that portrays them
(08:22):
in a terrible light, because that was my healing journey.
But the good news about this podcast is you don't
need to do that. We're going to do it for
you and with you, and it starts with communicating with yourself.
And the premise of this episode is that I wish
I could talk to myself back then and say, this
(08:45):
is not about you and Seth. You have a great partner.
You are in a messed up society and system that
values and treats Seth time as if it's finite and condition.
As you and your partner and the ones around you
to treat your time as if it's infinite. What I
(09:08):
mean by that is that if women enter male professions,
salaries automatically go down. We hear from society that breastfeeding
is free when it's really hours, it's a full time job,
but somehow apparently it's free only in a world where
(09:28):
women's time is infinite. And finally, I will say that
the things that's been hardest for me though, as we
talk about reclaiming our time, is that it starts with
the messages we tell ourselves. And so these were the
four most popular ones. And I'm centering women married to
men right now, because even though this occurs in many
different family structures, this is where often the problems start,
(09:51):
with these heteronormative societal roles that we get stuck in.
One my partner makes more money than me, or somehow
my job is more flexible. When we know that if
a woman is a lawyer and a man is a doctor,
she thinks her job is more flexible. If the woman
is the doctor and the man is the lawyer, her
job is toda more flexible. Number two women across the
(10:18):
globe in seventeen countries said to me that they're wired
differently for care that they are better multitaskers. For that one,
I had to go to another doctor, a neuroscientists, and
I had to ask him are our women wired differently?
Are our brains wired for multitasking caregiving? And indeed he
just looked at me and said, well, I guess culturally,
(10:40):
definitely not neurologically. That was a hard one for me
to hear. Number three And the time it takes me
to tell him her they what to do, I should
just do it myself. That's a classic devaluing of your
future time. According to professor and friend Dan Arielli, who's
a behavioral economist and popular author, and finally, the one
(11:02):
that makes me laugh the most, my partner is better
at focusing on one task at a time, and I
can find the time. And so I like to say,
unless we're Albert Einstein, we can funk with the space
time continuum. There's actually no way to find time. There's
no way to find time, and so what happens does
that just leave to burnout if we think our time
(11:23):
is infinite. So, as you were sharing each of those
toxic messages, in my mind, I was saying, yep, number two, yep,
number three. Yep. So what I've seen in my clinical practice,
and many doctors will attest to this as well, is
that men and women, like you said, inherently see time differently.
(11:47):
Women will say I don't have enough time. That typically
means that they don't have enough time to do all
of the things on their to do list that they
need to do, which includes work responsibilities, family responsibilities, home responsibilities.
But when you ask them where do you fall on
that list, they are not even on that list. So
(12:10):
we often say in pop culture, put yourself first, or
fill your own cup before you feel someone else's. But
it is truly a paradigm shift because many women do
not even put themselves on that list. Men also feel
time crunched, but in a different way. It's very work centric,
and the women I'm talking to, they have jobs outside
(12:30):
the home or even in the home. They work so much,
so this is not a career specific view. This has
been very much a gendered view. Wow, I love that
so much, And I want to go back to something
you said about women inherently valuing their time different than men,
because I think the word inherent is important in here
(12:53):
because it's not neurological it's not biological. Inherently is because
we have been conditioned from birth to believe that having
it all means doing it all, and once you're done
with wiping the asses and doing the dishes and securing childcare,
(13:15):
there's literally no time left. Everything I had been taught
about having time choice over how I used my life.
Being in the best decade ever women can do what
the same as anybody else does was was really it
was really a lie. You know. It's interesting about multitasking
is that it actually has a negative impact on the brain.
(13:37):
We've talked about this idea of women doing everything and
feeling like it's a badge of honor to be able
to do it all and have it all, and I'm
so on top of things. It actually is not healthy
to multitasks. So that's another societal norm that we need
to blow up that doing it all at the same
time isn't a badge of honor. It's actually impacting your
health in a negative way. You know. In mindfulness, we
(13:59):
talk a lot about the timelessness of the present moment.
So even if it's fifteen minutes or ten minutes a day,
it's that sense of timelessness that childlike wonder that we
can create, which has so many therapeutic benefits apps. And
by the way, thank you for saying that, because I'm
sort of sick of productivity books as I read each
(14:21):
one of them. It seems like we just get these
ridiculous messages like wake up an hour earlier or find
two uninterrupted days a week, and it's unrealistic. It doesn't
speak to people without extreme amounts of privilege. And so
the last toxic time message I want to talk about
before we get to bring on Bridget Chalty, who is
(14:44):
the queen of talking about productivity and time, is this
message of if you're so overwhelmed, get help. So many
people say that to women, and I find it really
toxic because not only does it not recognize that most
of the work that is leading to women being diagnosed
with twice as many anxiety disorders as men is the
(15:05):
cognitive labor. The way we've looked at time, the way
we talked to women about time since we are born.
It needs to be blown up and needs to be
seen as toxic and there has to be a new
way forward. So we're going to get to talk to
my great friend and fellow activists Bridges Shelty today who
(15:26):
literally wrote the book on being overwhelmed, and I cannot
wait to welcome her into the studio. Bridge Shelty literally
(15:52):
wrote the book on being overwhelmed. She's the author of
the New York Times best selling book over Work, Love
and Play When No One Has the Time, And it's
really a book about time pressure, gender expectations, and the
overwhelm of modern life. So we're so happy to have
her here today. High Bridget, Hi, great to meet you.
(16:17):
Do you know that I've read your Guardian piece multiple
times from two thousand and nineteen. You know it's so
funny about that pieces. It keeps showing up on Twitter,
like from all around the world, and that peace came
out of such a moment of frustration. And I tried
to write it for a year, and every time I
went to sit down, I was like, mom, can you
(16:37):
do this? I thought it was like a cosmic joke
that I couldn't even find the time to write that piece.
And for our listeners who don't know it, can you
tell us a little bit about what the article it
was Bridget that went so viral. So I'm a journalist
and a writer and spent most of my career at
the Washington Post, and I kind of fell into writing
about time and women and work life issues that resulted
(16:59):
in this book called Overwhelmed, Work, Glove, and Play. When
no one has the time really thinking about women and time.
And I'm working at the Better Life Lab and there's
a kind of a million balls in the air, but
my identity is always as a writer first, and I
was feeling just this real pain that I didn't have time.
I wasn't making the time to write and create and think.
(17:22):
And so somebody at a conference said, oh, you should
read this book about how the great artists made time.
Maybe that can give you some advice. So I read
this book. I got it for myself for Christmas. This
was going to be like the key for me to
understand how I could make more time to be creative
and write. And I started reading and they were really interesting.
(17:45):
They were sort of the back stories of a lot
of great artists. But about ten pages in and I
just started getting really kissed off because just about every
single artist was a man. And it's like the writer
he didn't even understand the picture that he was painting,
you know. He talked about Freud and how he had
(18:05):
all of this time and space to think, and part
of it was because his wife laid out his clothes
every morning and even put his toothpaste on his toothbrush,
you know. And they talked about Gustaf Mahler, and you know,
he was married to this young, really up and coming composer,
but he wanted her to walk with him while he
thought about music, and he didn't want her to make
(18:28):
a sound, and she wasn't allowed to create, or you know,
her whole purpose was to help him create. The more
and more I read these pieces, the angry and angrier
I got because it was such a reflection to me
about how women have never had this kind of space
or time to create and think that that's considered selfish.
(18:51):
We talk about me time as if it's something that
only weak, stupid people would want, and a woman's work
is never done. And so it may me angry that
the author couldn't even see that the men were able
to have this space and they were able to really
have this wonderful full family life and the women, for
the most part, we're not. And it was sort of
(19:14):
one more indication to me of how we just don't
get it. Women have never had a history or culture
of having time to themselves, And I just thought, what
have we lost? Wherever you sat on the gender spectrum,
we all deserve time to be as fully human as
we are. All time is crazy equal, and you are
(19:37):
our leader and fearless warrior. And I will just reflect
on how powerful your work has been to me. A
lot of what you talked about is time choice. You know,
when Seth was coming home from work and he had
four hours after our kids went to bed too work out,
check powerpoints, finish a deck, b Shakespeare or Freud, or
(20:02):
have as time to think great. I was doing things
in service of our house until my head hit the pillow,
and um, I remember going to him and saying, I
just want equal time choice. I want as much choice
over how I used my day as you have. And
that is why I'm resenting you so much, because you
look so free, and I think the problem is all
(20:23):
the productivity researchers. Besides, you assume that we can have
this uninterrupted time for deep work that is just not
afforded to women. You know, when you look at the
history of women's time, women have never had concentrated, uninterrupted time.
Think about it. The good wife kept the children and
(20:46):
everything away from the husband so that he could be
in the study. The good secretary her time was interrupted
so she could protect the boss's time. So women's time
has always been fragmented, interrupted, moving from thing to thing.
Leisure for women tends to always have this moment of
your checking everybody else's emotional temperature. Is everybody else having
(21:08):
a good time? Did I plan this right? Somebody described
it to me. It's like maybe you're at the pool,
but you're like the fireman. It's not pure leisure to yourself.
And I think that's what this fight is for women
to see that they deserve this kind of time and
to work together because your partners have to work with
you as well. Just like they need and want unstructured,
(21:31):
concentrated time, women need that too. And then we need
to work on these larger work systems and policy systems
to make sure that all people have access to that.
You know, as I was doing research, I came across
this quote. To be interrupted is to be disrespected, And
so think about it. With women's time being so interrupted
throughout all of human history, it's a sign of enormous disrespect.
(21:56):
So R. E. S. P. E c. T. It's time.
It's time for women to respect ourselves, to demand it,
but also for others to recognize that we deserve it.
So indeed, is gonna ask you a couple of practical
questions about how we can start reclaiming our time. But
before that, I never asked you this personally. I've never
given you the toxic time quiz. I thought it would
(22:17):
be fun to ask you how many of these messages
you heard in your research? I love it as long
as you know, like full disclosure from the outset. I
may research this stuff, but I'm still working on all
of it. So how many of these messages have you
heard or said to yourself? My paid hours are worth
more than your unpaid hours. It's not worth it for
(22:38):
you to work. What did you do all day? Why
are you wasting time doing that? You're so lucky you
don't have to go to work. Well, if you don't
have enough time and you're so overwhelmed, just get help.
I don't have time, so can you. You're a better multitaskers,
so you should just do it. My partner travels or
(23:01):
goes to work early, so it's on me and the
time it takes me. To tell my partner what to do,
I might as well just do it myself. Yes, more
time for myself would be great, but I really should
go clean out the freezer. You know. I have to
say all of them. I hear them all the time
still in the research that I do. I have to say,
my husband and I have been doing the awful lot
of work. And it was really through the process of
(23:23):
doing the research of the book that I recognized that
I had to begin to respect my own time because
nobody else was going to. I had to learn to
disrupt my own mental models of everything that I had
been taught. I had a breadwinner father, distant. I work,
That's what I do. Don't bug me. And then I
had a mother who she was a homemaker and drove
(23:46):
the car pools and did nothing on her own and
signed her checks Mrs Arthur A. Shalt Jr. It's like,
who is that, you know? And she started sending things
to me, Mrs Thomas M. Bowman. I started to send
them act her saying I don't know who this is.
That is not me, you know. So I have heard
all of those messages, and they are very potent, and
(24:08):
they're very powerful, and they get into your psyche. So
the first step is just to be aware that it's
out there and that you can make a choice. You
can choose to think differently and honest to God. Awareness,
education and recognizing that this is a choice. You know,
(24:28):
it's not a baby step. That's an enormous leap. If
all you do is work between your ears, that's going
to pay off because then it will come out in
day to day life. So it's sort of like constantly
catching yourself. Somebody wants asked me, what's your best productivity tip,
and I just said, compassion, because you know what, this
(24:49):
is hard, and you're going to screw up and your
partner's going to screw up because this is hard. We're
pushing back against centuries of status quo thinking that's really
outdated and really painful for women and honestly for men
and anybody across the gender spectrum. So policing you into
these very narrow roles that takes work. That's hard. So
(25:12):
fall down, take a breath, forgive yourself, have some compassion,
and begin again. I still picked up the drunk man's
jacket and it was on my lawn for six So
we still have a lot of work to do. But
it's a practice. It's a practice. I think that's the
best way to look at it. I'm working on my
next book. It's about overwork. Guess what, I'm overworking working
(25:34):
on my book about overwork. I mean, I know that
I know that I'm doing everything wrong. We fall down
begin again. You know. I love that you said that
your first step is often the hardest, but the greatest
leap that sense of awareness. It seems like it might
not be a lot, but it actually is a great awakening.
Can you talk to us a little bit more about
(25:55):
what people can do to feel the greatest sense of
equity or not feeling as overwhelmed as your book suggests. Yeah,
so a couple of things. So when it comes to
that sense of time to yourself, the sense that you
don't have to be the one that does everything at home.
(26:16):
I was really struck by this one study that was
done back in the nineties asking women across the globe
about leisure time and what do you do or what
do you deserve? And what so struck me is that
it didn't matter what country it was, how old the
women were, what your religion was, Almost two have one
every single woman in this study said, I feel like
(26:37):
I don't deserve time to myself. I have to earn it,
and the only way to earn it is to get
to the end of a really long to do list.
So I bring that up because the first step is
to give yourself permission to let that go, give yourself
permission to recognize you don't need to earn it. And
(27:00):
once you make that switch that it's important that you
deserve it, that it's okay, that you don't need to
feel guilty or ashamed. There's lots of really great strategies,
and the easiest one is thinking about it as a
practice and putting time in your calendar. So you want
time to learn how to play the guitar, Okay, can
you find thirty minutes on a Saturday on a Tuesday
(27:22):
evening and put it in your calendar. Let everybody around
you know so that they'll support you. And if they
see you clean out the fridge, it's like, you know, Hey,
wasn't this the time you were going to try to
learn how to play the piano or watch this Ted talk?
You wanted let people know what's important to you, get
their support because sometimes it's hard. We can feel guilty
(27:42):
or selfish. Get people on board and practice it. The
other sort of great advice that I got was start small.
Don't think that you're going to completely rewrite your calendar
next week. Put on a timer and do something that
that might be fun, that your soul might be calling
out for. And sometimes we don't do that because we
don't know. We get so busy, we don't really know
(28:04):
what we want. When I've talked to leisure researchers, that's
the one thing that they'll say, like people tend to
not enjoy their vacations because they don't take the time
beforehand to think what do I really need? And what
their research has found is that if you take just
like ten minutes before you plan a vacation and just
take that breath and think, what do I really want?
(28:24):
You know, do I want to go swimming outside? Do
I want to make sure that I connect with certain people?
Kind of get in touch with your own intuition, and
then proactively say, Okay, this is what I'm going to
use this time for. So take that pause to figure
out what it is you really want and then kind
of create that schedule or that time or that expectation
that you'll have it. You can't manage time. You can't.
(28:48):
What you can manage are your expectations, and you can
manage your priorities for what you do in time. The
last thing I'll say about that is in the United
States and women in particular, we think of about it's
like a pantry and you just got to cram all
this stuff in there, and then we get all these kudos.
Look at how busy I am. Look at all this
amazing stuff I crammed onto my calendar. Rather than think
(29:10):
about that cramming and kind of busy treadmill, think about
your time and your schedule like an art gallery. Very mindfully.
Choose those beautiful paintings that you want to spend time
looking out or dealing with. And then in between the paintings,
give yourself some white space to recover, to reflect, to prepare.
(29:31):
Don't think about going from one thing to the next,
to the next to the next. And there are days
that we do get into code red. No matter no
matter what you want, you know what you try. But
it doesn't have to be like that every day. You
can recognize that there are choices that you can make
so that you'll have more energy when code red does come,
and then you can give yourself the permission to have
(29:53):
a code green the next day. Our culture does not
make it easy, there's no doubt about that. But the
thing about practice is the more you do it, the
better you get at it. And it all begins, as
you said, with being able to take agency in our
own lives in the midst of these messy systems. So
thank you for giving us that ability to give ourselves
(30:13):
the compassion to make it a practice. Thank you for
your advice and wisdom. Bridget Oh well, thank you, thank
you all for thank you both for doing this and
for really keeping these conversations going. Hi, it's me Eve,
(30:37):
and I want to tell you about my latest book,
Find Your Unicorn Space. So you're playing fair and have
established equity in your home, but now what it's time
to find your Unicorn Space. My new book will help
you set personal goals, rediscover your interests, and reclaim the
creative expression of self that makes you uniquely you. Find
your Unicorn Space is a mix of research space, how
(30:58):
to advice, and big picture inspirational thinking. I hope it
can show you a clear path to reclaim your permission
to be unavailable and manifest your own unicorn space. Find
your Unicorn Space is available now wherever books are sold.
(31:19):
So every episode of this podcast will be ending with
an action atem for you are listeners that we call
a time out. This is really a time for you
to focus on yourself and reflect on what you're hearing today.
And we're starting the conversation first with ourselves and then
ultimately with our partners and others. I think Bridget has
(31:40):
some important wisdom for us here a d D, and
especially in this idea around having it all does not
mean doing it all. And for me, when she talks
about a crowded pantry, I feel like in that pantry
are societal expectations. Things that we do by de fault,
(32:01):
all the extra unpaid labor that possibly we should be
distributing to. Our partners are roommates, our parents are colleagues,
and so I want to take a page from Bridget
and start thinking about how our lives can look more
like art galleries and less like stale pantries. And I'll
(32:22):
start with what I want to throw out. For me,
it's a lot of societal expectations around gratitude, and so
the first one would be thank you notes I hate
writing them. I love gratitude, but not in that way,
and so I'm done. I'm going to figure out how
to express gratitude in a way that's simpler and easier
(32:45):
for me than write handwriting and stamping thank you notes.
You know. In reflecting on Bridget's work, I've thought a
lot about my to do list, and in medicine, when
we're seeing our patients in the hospital, to do list
is literally what gets us through the day, and I
am a master of to do lists. But what's happened
(33:05):
over the years is that life has gotten complicated. You
get married, you have kids, you have more and more
work responsibilities, so that to do list just grows and grows,
and what once was a four to ten box checklist
now becomes a to do list of thirty items that
you absolutely can't get done in a day. So for me,
(33:26):
also in reframing bridgets lessons of moving from a pantry
to art gallery, I'm going to really think about my
to do list and instead of focusing on what do
I need to do this week or this month, just
focus on the day and the rest of the stuff
can all wait. And so in this week's time out,
we would love for you to think a little bit
(33:49):
more deeply about what's crowding your pantry and how you
can streamline that into a beautiful, curated art gallery with
lots of works of art, but also plenty of white space.
So this week we discuss why we have a time deficit,
why we're always running up against the clock from the
(34:10):
moment we wake up. Now if we get that time back, though,
what do we do with it? When you have an
extra time, when you have that white space, when your
life is more like an art gallery and less like
an over stuff pantry, what do you even do with
that found time? We like to call that unicorn space?
(34:31):
What makes you you and how you share it with
the world, and we're going to teach you how to
find it next week. Thank you for listening to Time Out,
a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm
Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller of
fair Play and Find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on
(34:53):
social media at ev Rodsky and learn more about our
work at fair Play Life and I adoptor Adity Car,
Harvard physician with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout and
mental health. Follow me on social media at dr A
d D The Root Car and find out more about
my work at doctor a d d dot com. That's
d R A D I t I dot com. Our
(35:15):
Hello Sunshine team is Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker.
Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett
and Jessica Friendshitch. We hope you all love taking a
much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe
to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your favorite shows
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