Academic Mom Hacks
I frequently get questions from friends and colleagues "how do you do it all? Tell me how you do it!". Well, spoiler alert - I DO NOT DO IT ALL. But, I do have some quick and easy academic mom hacks to help make life just a tad easier. These are some hacks I have followed the last ~6 years or so since starting as a faculty member and achieving tenure, that have helped me achieve the facade of "doing it all".
1. I do not respond to or file the majority of my emails. Inbox zero is not a thing! Spend less time emailing and more time with your kids! I once tried to organize and sort all of my emails to get to inbox zero for an entire week. It took roughly 2 additional hours of my time each night and had no measurable benefit. Instead, bask in the glory of thousands of emails! If it's a really important email, make sure to star it or send it to an "Immediate" folder. For sanity, try to send fewer emails, and instruct students, staff, and others to pop in and ask questions during a twice/week office hour session. Use "out of office" emails A LOT. I use it when I am truly out of the office, but also when I am in the midst of a big grant writing deadline or anything else that requires me to step away from email so I can write with fewer distractions! Yes, I have occasionally missed an important email, but it didn't ruin me. Writing will get you promoted. Emailing people back will not.
2. Forget about perfection. Done is better than perfect! This goes for housework, cleaning your car, cleaning underneath your couch, and even academic papers. Even your own version of a perfect paper is probably different than someone else's opinion of perfect, so you are likely wasting your time! I just lifted up my couch and this is what I found: dirt, dog hair, and a LOT of kids toys (pirate eye, toy hammer, a cucumber, a magna-tile, legos, a bazillion missing puzzle pieces, etc). In that time you spent cleaning under the couch every day, someone else wrote something brilliant! It could be you if you just stop cleaning!! ;-) If you are type A and you can't handle the mess, see next hack...
This is what it typically looks like under my couch. It's so gross. But, our conditions are still livable!
3. Employ minors to do your cleaning. Yes, the children!! Offer incentives like sticker charts if they clean their room, help you pick up the toys under the couch, and sweep the floors. This can be done with kids as young as 3. My 4-year old daughter is obsessed with cleaning her room and she thinks sweeping the floors and mopping is the best. Teach them responsibility, a great way to occupy their time, AND your house is clean! It's a win-win-win!
Kids actively cleaning our house while I have time to either sip my coffee and relax, or catch up on one of my 20,000 emails.
4. Don't waste money and time on a gym membership and spend more time away from the kids because you want to work out. Buy a treadmill desk instead! It's the ultimate hack in achieving work/life balance!
Just another day in the office - getting steps in and catching up on emails! Oh, and the pumping. Yes, that's my breastpump on my desk. The ultimate ultimate mom hack is walking, pumping, and working, all at once!* *Try at your own risk / may result in milk spillage.
Though the treadmill desk may be costly, it is worth it's weight in gold in quality of life and gym membership savings (perhaps paid in < 1 year depending on your membership and how sweet of a desk setup you want). Double hack points if you can convince departmental leadership to buy you this desk, or if you have discretionary funds in which you should just buy the desk without asking permission and ask for forgiveness later if anyone gets upset.
I will confess that I am a bit of an exercise addict, and I get that this isn't everyone. But I swear, the more active I am, the more productive I am and the more energy I have for my kids. In an ideal world, I exercise every day. I love running! And swimming, and ultimate frisbee, swimming, hiking, and biking! But after leaving my kids all day at daycare, I feel too guilty to leave them at home with a babysitter so that I can exercise. Instead, I typically get a babysitter ONCE a week so that my husband and I can join friends at our neighborhood running club, and the rest of the time I walk on my treadmill desk or barter with my husband for time. Which brings me to...
5. Find a significant other who will not only put up with you, but will be an equal partner with you.* There are some great books on this topic, like Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu, or Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, that advocate for making your partner a real partner. I was pretty lucky to marry someone that is super supportive, but he still took some training, especially after we had kids! If you are type A, you can try an excel spreadsheet of all of the "tasks" that each of you do. After kids, you feel like you are doing everything yourself and your partner is not pulling their own weight! Part of this may be true but it also may just FEEL that way because the amount of things you need to do increases by about 1000%. The excel spreadsheet of tasks may make you realize that some of the things each of you are doing are going unnoticed (e.g., booking babysitters, maintaining social calendars of kid birthday parties, paying the bills, or doing the taxes). My husband and I recently found the BEST tradeoff: one morning per week, we trade off who gets to sleep in (or do whatever they want), and the other one is on kid duty. It's been so amazing to have the OPTION of catching up on much needed sleep, getting some exercise, or going into the office to get work done, guilt free! *I recognize there are some single parents out there who might be really frustrated with this hack...for that, I apologize. I do not know how single parents do anything and you are a supermom if you are surviving.
6. Plan to have kids to fit within the academic calendar. Or not! Great way to get out of your Spring class if you can plan the birth of your child then instead! But seriously, this one really is a PERSONAL choice and don't let anyone tell you to do otherwise. When I was a first year faculty member, I made up some silly rule that I wasn't going to try to have kids until I got my first research grant. I somehow convinced myself this was necessary, based on a male colleague supervisor telling me that they applied for 24 grants in 24 months. This was some serious motivation for me -- I applied for ~30 grants in 30 months (anywhere from small pilot grants to major national grants), and felt I needed to prove I could do this too. True to my promise, about a year into my crazy frenzy of grant applications, I was finally successful in receiving my first grant. I had the luxury of then planning to get pregnant on the academic calendar. I GOT REALLY LUCKY. ALSO I WAS STUPID! My work/life balance that year was terrible. And I have many friends and colleagues who have had difficulty conceiving, in part probably because they waited too long. When one of my female trainees asked me for advice on this issue, and whether she should wait to have kids, I told her she should do what is best for her family and that everything else would fall into place. Yes, it really helped my career that I had time pre-kids to work long nights and weekends submitting grants, but if I could go back over and do it all over again I would never have traded the option for having kids for getting that grant. It devastates me to think of the consequences if I was never successful in getting a grant!
Notes from a women's professional development seminar I took in 2012, before I had kids.
7. Hire really cheap labor to help get your work done AND show others that it's possible to work hard and have a family. So this one may depend on the age of your kids...my two year old was not super helpful in letting me get any actual "work" done, but I do think it's helpful for your kids to see you working, and for your colleagues and staff to see YOU with your kids. I read some advice from one of the academic parenting books published several years ago that advised avoiding talking about your kids, showing pictures of your kids at the work place, etc due to potential repercussions to your professional reputation. I think this advice sucks. This culture has to change! We have to show other disbelievers that yes, it is actually possible to still be hard working, get your work done, AND spend time with your family. Can we all just agree to make this the new normal??
My youngest research assistant, hard at work in my office
8. Outsource as much as you can at home. You really can't do it all. No one can! It is nearly impossible to have a full, productive day at work and also focus 100% on your kids when you get home when you have a bazillion other things to do like pay bills, walk and feed the dog, exercise, help kids with homework, spend time with your partner, keep in touch with family/friends, and all the other things it takes to maintain a household. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DO IT ALL! Instead, I try to outsource as much as I can. Time = $ and valuable missed opportunities like missed quality time with my family. Instead, I outsource what I can the things that are big time wasters. My husband and I used to fight about who was spending more time cleaning the house and when we hired people to clean the house for us we realized we had a lot less to argue about. When I realized that we were going to the grocery store 3-4 times a week because we were terrible at planning ahead meals or other needs, I subscribed to Instacart for the year so we could get groceries delivered to our doorstep. We also have tried different meal services to help us with the evening meals, and although we still struggle to get all of it done, these things have really helped to give us more quality time with one another.
9. Accept that it's okay to be a "B" mom. Perfection is unattainable. I'm not a perfect mom. I probably let my kids watch too much TV. I even let them play with swords (well, wooden ones). I sometimes leave them unattended and they do crazy things like draw with markers all over the house or all over their faces. I try not to over worry because I figure the worry about what could happen helps no one. I am a selfish mom sometimes -- I really love my work, I love to exercise, and I like to catch up with my friends, and sometimes those are competing interests to spending more quality time with my kids. But, I think that's okay. I think that when they grow older, they might respect and value that their mom had important things to work on that were sometimes something bigger than just our family. As long as they know that I love them, and that I am always there for them when they really need me, I'm still a good mom. And the difference between being a B and an A+ mom isn't really that big of a difference anyway!
My two year old colored with non-washable markers on a door one of the times I left him alone a little bit longer than an "A" mom would have allowed for...
10. Give up the idea of doing it all. The myth that working women can do it all is potentially harmful. I can think of numerous women in academics that I *think* are doing it all, but the more I get to know these women I realize they have their own hacks too. Maybe they have a nanny who helps tremendously, or family in town, or they have a house/office/desk that is covered in filth. It doesn't matter! We all learn to prioritize the things that matter most, and the less important details are ignored. The sooner we realize that no one is infallible, the better off we all will be in accepting our imperfections. Rather than striving for doing it all, I strive for "always make meaning with the ones you love."
What better motto is there for life than this?