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Have any of these questions ever popped in your head: Why am I so exhausted? How can I possibly get it all done? Will I ever get a break? What’s broken about the system? How can we get out of overwhelm?
In this newsletter, I’m bringing you into a conversation with one of the world’s experts on overwhelm, Brigid Schulte, AND sharing my best time management strategies, AND crossing my fingers that you’ll join me for a leadership retreat (just one month left to enroll)!
STORY: Q&A with Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed.
READ MORE: Links, resources, and more on how to escape the overwhelm.
BOOK STUFF: We’re talking about Switch: How to change when change is hard, on Thursday, July 25, 4-5 pm!
PODCAST: Episode 10: Escaping the Time Trap just dropped!
STORY: In Conversation with Brigid Schulte
I’m still pinching myself that Brigid Schulte joined Book Club in June to discuss her NYTimes bestseller, Overwhelmed: How to work, love, and play when no one has the time and to give us a sneak peek on her new book coming out in September, Over Work: Transforming the daily grind in the quest for a better life. She’s just as classy, authentic, and smart in person as she seems in her book.
Note: I foolishly failed to record our conversation. I’m clearly not a journalist like she is. So what you’ll get in this post is a Q&A with answers drawn both from the book (in quotes), paraphrased from the book, and from my notes from our conversation. **
Questions Brigid asked herself
One of my favorite paragraphs in the entire book is this list of questions that Brigid asks herself in Chapter 1. It reads like my own journal from my early years as a school principal. It’s the wailing despair of just about every working mom I know.
Q: “Why did I feel I never did enough work? … Why did every conversation I had seem to start with, ‘How are you?’ ‘Fried.’ ‘You?’ ‘Same.’ ”
A: There’s a pervasive myth in Western Culture of the Ideal Worker that just won’t die but which no human can possibly live up to. You know the one – first in and last out of the office, respond to emails in 10 seconds, on call at all times, maximally productive, never ever procrastinate, multitask, overachieve. The Ideal Worker is such a strong social norm that our brain’s fear detector, the amygdala, ignites like a fireball the instant we try to buck the trend. In fact, our brains bend the truth on us, literally trying to rewrite what we perceived with our eyes and ears to conform to the norm.
The biggest problem with the Ideal Worker myth is that it’s flat out wrong about what makes people the most productive. “Working continuously, without breaks, is in fact a surefire way to produce subpar work.” A consulting company compared the productivity of two teams, one that was tethered to their desk chair 50+ hours a week versus one that worked 40 hours, got flex time, and took full vacation days. Not only did the team with time off report “higher job satisfaction and better work-life balance, but they also increased learning, improved communication with their team, worked more efficiently, and were ultimately more productive.”
And it’s not just time off, flex time, and vacations. Working continuously through a single day is also detrimental. The solution is “pulsing” – alternating between intense focus for 90 minutes, resting, another bout of focus time, more rest, etc. Pulsing is more aligned with both how brain activity naturally oscillates and how the best of the best set up their days.
So “why did I feel I never did enough work”? Because of the myth of the Ideal Worker and working continuously day after day, month after month, year after year led to subpar work. That’s why!
Q: “Why did I worry that I never spent enough time with my kids? Did I really need to keep the house so tidy?”
Just as with the “Ideal Worker”, there’s an “Ideal Mother” myth that pulls us into overwhelm. It’s the elephant in the room and unless you face that cultural expectation head on, it will unconsciously pull you back in like a black hole. We may worry that we don’t spend enough time with our kids, but “in America, mothers today spend more time taking care of their children than mothers did in the 1960s, even though so many more are working and working full-time, outside the home. Mothers, on average, spend about fourteen hours a week caring for their children, up from ten hours in 1965, and they’ve almost tripled the amount of time they spend in high-quality ‘interactive care’, reading to and playing with their children.”
What’s changed is how many people tell them they are doing mothering wrong. “The cult of intensive mothering, I was discovering, runs on guilt, fear, and ambivalence… If working mothers are judged as selfish women who abandon their children, then mothers at home are criticized as bad feminists… Both sets contribute to the cult of intensive motherhood. And both get whipsawed by the culture’s schizophrenic ambivalence.”
That cultural ambivalence has resulted in complete gridlock when it comes to formulating family policy at the societal level. “There is no U.S. family policy that could help ease the overwhelm for working famlies. Instead, the United States ranks dead last on virtually every measure of family policy in the world. Unlike countries with high-quality, government supported child care, the United States has nothing of the kids. It is one of only 4 of 167 countries in the world with no paid leave for parents – the others are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. Saudi Arabia, where women aren’t allowed to drive, offers paid parental leave.”
(Psst… if the idea of the “Ideal Mother” or “Ideal Worker” resonates with you, the next episode of Leaders’ Playground dives right in. It drops on July 15th!)
Q: “Why was my husband smoking a cigar while I was clearing up birthday party stuff? Why did I feel he had a career while I just tried not to get fired?”
Both questions relate to how men versus women experience time. I spoke with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist most renown for his work on flow. He pages his research subjects randomly throughout the day and asks what they are doing and how they feel about it. Most men are doing one and a half hings at a time. Women and especially mothers do five things at a time.
“Men and women, it turns out, not only do different things with their time, but experience time itself differently, so much so that the ground-breaking work on the phenomenon is called ‘divergent realities.’ Research has found that even when a family is engaged in the same activity –eating dinner–the mothers tend to feel frustrated that they aren’t doing enough, while the fathers are proud of themselves that they’ve managed to get away from work to be there at all. Csikszentmihalyi… was one of the first to uncover how women’s time is ‘contaminated.’ No matter where they were or what they were doing, the women in his studies were consumed with the exhaustive ‘mental labor’ of keeping in mind at all times all the moving parts of kids, house, work, errands, and family calendar.”
Questions we asked Brigid
And then I asked Brigid the questions you all shared with me.
Q: You share lots of great research on why we are so overwhelmed. How much has changed in the 10 years since the book was written?
A: Unfortunately, not enough has changed on the policy level in the last decade. And the norms and expectations of the American work culture have also not changed enough. When I reached the end of Overwhelmed, that started a new journey to change how we work. It’s why I started the Better Life Lab, the work-family justice and intersectional gender equity program at New America, and why I researched and wrote my latest book, Over Work.
There are bright spots though. Corporations and businesses have power in work redesign. The old style is what worked for leaders in their early careers, but that’s not working now. It’s best to step back and talk to people today and look for bright spots. It’s embracing the idea that we don’t always have to do it that way, we can try something different.
For instance Iceland has moved towards shorter working hours which are now available to 80% of the population. There’s the 4-day work week movement. There’s great journalists like Claire Cain Miller writing about these issues for the New York Times. It’s about shifting the cultural values away from overwork and instead towards the things we truly value.
Q: What structural or organizational changes can leaders make today that make the biggest difference to their workplace culture?
I’d say, really get to know what it means to do good work. It’s taking the experience of work and expanding it beyond the number of hours you put in. Doing good work means doing meaningful work. There’s fairness. There’s cooperation. It’s telling a different story of work in the narratives we speak and that changes what we believe.
There’s also ways workplaces can change what they measure because as you know, what gets measured gets done. For instance, Bhutan is famous for measuring Gross National Happiness. There’s the Degrowth Movement which is fighting to prioritize human flourishing and freedom over economic growth at any cost. What might be the appropriate measure in a given workplace or for a team within a larger organization to measure good work for them?
Q: What does work-life balance mean to you personally these days?
Balance is not the right word. It’s about taking time to pause, to regularly find time for reflection, and to connect to self. Am I making time for the most important thing? That’s what it means.
So I make time to run, walk, wander, and take time for fun. I’m unapologetic about it and can finally embrace leisure rather than thinking I’m only allowed leisure time when everything else is done. Because there’ll never be a time when everything else is done.
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READ MORE: Links, resources, and more on how to escape the overwhelm.
Obviously, check out Brigid Schulte’s books: Overwhelmed and her new book coming out in September, Over Work. My two other favorite books on the topic are Tony Schwartz’s The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working and Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time management for mortals.
If you prefer videos, try this TED talk by ER doctor, Darria Long or this TED interview with Emily and Amelia Nagoski who literally wrote the book on Burnout.
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BOOK STUFF: We’re talking about Switch: How to change when change is hard, on Thursday, July 25, 4-5 pm!
How motivated are your employees? Ever try to change a bad habit? (Ack! I'm scrolling Facebook again...) What's happening in the world that screams for change? This brilliant book by Chip and Dan Heath offers concrete examples and solutions. I'm so excited that the Inquiring Minds book club chose it for our July and August read.
And if this summer is really busy for you as it is for me, either read just the first chapter OR watch this 16 minute video overview by the author, then come to book club anyway.
PM me or Tessa to get added to the list! We meet the last Thurs of the month at 4 pm on Zoom.
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PODCAST: Episode 10: Escaping the Time Trap just dropped!
Time confetti is when your days are chopped up into a million little bits. It’s trying to do everything. All at once. All the time.
In contrast, time serenity is when time seems to naturally flow with your own rhythm of the day. You follow your body’s rhythms. You take time for what’s truly most important and let go of the rest. The structures of life fully support you in work, love, and play.
The newest episode Escaping the Time Trap explores how to turn time confetti into time serenity. You can listen to the Leaders’ Playground on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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GOING FURTHER: Just 1 month left to join the Heroine’s Journey Women’s Leadership Retreat in Mendocino, CA!
If you are looking for a women's retreat comparable to a deep tissue massage + yoga on the beach, the Heroine's Journey is NOT for you.
However, if you’ve been feeling like leadership is getting heavier, the incline steeper, and maybe you're no longer quite sure where you're heading or even why you're on this path, then you've come to the right place.
It's time to fall in love with your work (and yourself) all over again and to do that in the company of other seasoned mid-career professionals that will inspire and support you exactly as you are.
One month left to enroll.
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