Train Your Mate, Kids To Do Tasks
“Finding Time.” I’d like to.
As I thumbed through this squat little book with the subtitle, “Breathing Space for Women Who Do Too Much,” I knew author Paula Peisner Coxe had been there.
She talks about women who feel overwhelmed by expectations, our own as well as others’. Better yet, she offers solid tips on how to handle both and whittle them down to size. We all know we should ease up, or as Florynce Kennedy puts it, “organize, not agonize.”
But for some of us, organizing is agonizing. This book aims to direct the crazed and cluttered on the straight and narrow. It’s organized in microscopic bits, so readers spend a minute a day thinking about pressures and handling priorities.
Each of us can afford a minute investing in creating a more peaceful - and productive - life.
She asks a familiar question we should each pause and consider: “How many balls are you juggling? Work, family, children, husband, friends, community, religion, volunteerism, exercise, hobbies.
“How often do you say, ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ Or ‘I’m running late, can you make it quick?’ ‘I’m tired but I feel guilty taking a nap or doing something for me.’
“These multiple responsibilities can push you into overdrive. Once there, you push yourself and your body too hard. Sometimes, you don’t even realize it until it’s too late.”
It’s too late when we don’t have time to loaf. Virginia Woolf, in “A Room of One’s Own,” wrote eloquently of free time: ‘It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.’ But, with overwhelming demands, women tend to let the most vital things go: their private time, their intimate connections with friends and family.
In a poll by the Family and Work Institute, 66 percent of women polled said they didn’t have enough time with their children. Also, from that same survey: “Women still work two full-time jobs, even when they contribute half or more of the family’s income, and even when the couple is young; 71 percent of women are still responsible for children, 81 percent for cooking, 78 percent for cleaning, 87 percent for shopping and 63 percent for bill-paying.”
Something’s got to go, and it shouldn’t be our collective sanity. Instead, start training your partner and children to do tasks. Unless you want to curse the next generation of women with exhaustion, start teaching sons how to cook and clean and scrub and sweep. It’s best if you start when they’re young and still fall for lines like, “When you’re a big boy, you can scrub the toilet, but not quite yet!”
Delegate whatever absolutely doesn’t have to be done by you. Not, the author stressed, what would be done best by you.
Here are some more tips from “Finding Time”:
Pad your time estimates. Give yourself more time than you think something will actually take. That will reduce pressure.
Learn to say no to others and yes to yourself. Habitually pause before you commit to something. Listen to your gut, learn to say no constructively.
Look ahead to identify conflicts. Many can be anticipated and surprises are stressful.
Work out compromise solutions, so that everyone gets a little of what she or he wants.
Know what steals your time and fashion your schedule so you always have some sacred time, some time each day when no one can interrupt you.
The phone is your friend. You can gab the night away if you’re starved for companionship and only catch up with friends while you do dishes. But, if you find yourself in tedious conversations, cut loose. Learn some conversation enders so you can get back to what matters to you.
Get into some good habits. Ask yourself if what you’re doing is important, or urgent and whether you can get someone else to do it. And blow off more things. Ask, “What is the worst thing that can happen if I don’t do this?” Usually, the answer is not much.
And, remember, do first things first. “It’s a matter of priorities. Ask yourself if you’re doing the most important thing first.”
A snappier way of putting that for the procrastinators among us: “Do the worst, first.’
xxxx Women and Work appears Tuesdays on the In Life People page.