Are You Being Too Efficient?

Here is an essay questioning some of the unintended consequences of being too efficient. By trying to be a “supermom”, the author questions her quality of life and her ability to be her best. She offers interesting points to ponder in our writings on balance work and family.

Motherlode - Adventures in Parenting

Are You Being Too Efficient?

By Laura Vanderkam

Even in a slack labor market, Americans waste a lot of time. Case in point: are you reading this at work? If so, don’t sweat it. Reading a blog post only takes a few minutes. The real vampires — meetings and phone calls that didn’t need to happen, trips that didn’t need to be taken, excess layers of supervision — can steal whole days.

As the Johnson & Johnson commercial says, though, having a baby changes everything. When full-time working women become full-time working moms, our tolerance for anything that wastes our time plummets. Over the past six months I’ve interviewed hundreds of people about their time management techniques. Moms in particular have told me about how they squeeze minutes out of the day. One professor, a mother of two small kids, explained that she takes the stairs because she hates waiting for the elevator. Another sets a kitchen timer for 30 minutes and challenges herself to race — undistracted — through her assignments.

We change the way we work. We change the way people work with us. Parents boast of getting more done in less time than they ever thought possible.

In general, that’s a good thing — for the economy and our jobs. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering: In our quest for efficiency, do some of us take things too far? In our efforts not to shortchange our children, are some of us unnecessarily shortchanging our careers?

Since I work for myself, I’ve never had to deal with the office woes many other women have, but still, after my son Jasper was born in May 2007, I found my work habits changing. In order to spend time with him, I — like many moms — crunched my schedule to quit by 5pm. I dropped projects that I didn’t think were advancing my career. I planned out my weeks and days based on my top priorities. I spent a lot less time in political chat rooms. I let unimportant emails pile up during the day, then I’d take a few minutes to mass-delete ones I didn’t intend to deal with.

My day-to-day assignments got done. Once I started adding a two-hour shift some weeknights after Jasper went to bed, I even added a few new clients.

But in my zeal to be efficient, I noticed that I’d stopped doing things that maybe weren’t the wastes of time they appeared to be. I love to write fiction, but I wasn’t reading any fiction — and hence not picking up new ideas to improve my craft. I didn’t spend much time surfing the web, but that made it harder to come up with story ideas. I wasn’t promoting myself, because I felt busy enough. And I rarely left my home office to meet people in person or attend networking events. Traveling takes time — getting there and making myself look presentable — and anything that happened outside Jasper’s usual childcare hours required the kind of logistical feats that made it easier not to bother.

Periodically though, I’d be a little inefficient — and be amazed at the results. A quote from Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto turned out to be perfect for something I was writing. A casual mention of a project at a PR event led to just the source I needed. I’d give myself an hour to daydream and would come up with a column idea.

So how do you strike the right balance? How do you keep the upsides of working motherhood — like garnering the courage to extract yourself from a weekly meeting that doesn’t matter — without being so efficient that you cut yourself off from opportunities?

I’m still trying to figure this out as I prepare to welcome a new baby into my life this September. I now set “inefficient” goals for myself, like going to one professional meeting or event outside the office each week and reading one novel a month.

I’m also learning to relax about how many hours per week I work, total. Often, moms who work full-time think that our work is somehow taking time away from our children. We think that moms who work less are spending vastly more time with their kids. But as I’ve been studying the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I’ve learned that this isn’t necessarily the case. There are 168 hours in a week. If you work 50 of those hours (as I do; I’ve kept logs) and sleep eight hours a night (56 hours a week), this leaves 62 hours for other things. The average mom who is not in the workforce and whose youngest kid is under age six, spends less than six hours per week playing or doing hobbies with her kids, and just over two hours reading or doing educational activities. Since I beat this hands down during my 62 waking, non-working hours, there’s no reason to hold myself to a 40-hour work week just so I can have 72 family and leisure hours. There’s definitely no reason to work part-time so I can have 92 hours. In the context of 168 hour weeks, working 40 or 50 hours a week is a lot closer to “balanced” than working 15-20.

Indeed, I am learning that just as putting some limits on your workweek forces you to make better choices, putting some limits on your waking, non-work hours forces better choices there, too. If I know I will see my son three evenings during the work week, I put more effort into those evenings than I would if I had five. We go play on the playground together — really together (yes, that would be me, the woman who’s seven months pregnant and trying to go down the slide). We hunt for street fruit vendors selling “nanas” and then camp outside the window of the nearby doggie day-care and watch the puppies. We read our new favorite book about Louis Blériot’s 1909 flight across the English Channel rather than watch the videos I’d be tempted to use if I had more time.

In other words, it is quite possible that my work hours, and my interactive time with my son, have been rising in tandem. This is not the usual narrative you hear in work-life balance literature, but it’s true for us. And I’ll bet that others have discovered this secret, too — that working a little longer, and maybe not so efficiently, can go a long way toward making life fit better.

* Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company