Sorting Out What’s Really Important

Your real challenge isn’t to run harder and faster, it’s to winnow your overall priorities down. With a sharper, more specific sense of what I should be doing and—just as important—what I can let go of, fully or partially, you’ll be able to start reclaiming your time, taking more charge of your calendar, and developing confidence that you’re putting your energies and hustle toward the right things. To help you do so, let’s start by defining priority in the workparent context—and then walk through a quick, effective process for examining and determining your own.

Before you had kids, priority meant something important, or that took precedence over other, less important things—but now, as we’ve seen, you have to be much more specific and more stringent. To determine if something fits on your true working-parent priority list, ask yourself the following five questions.

1. Does this task or activity represent a “highest and best” use of my time as a working mother or father?  Does it affect my ability to earn a living or keep the kids healthy and safe? Will this somehow enhance my career, my life, my family? Or is this something I’m doing automatically, because I feel I should; because I’ve always done it, to meet somebody else’s expectations; or because it’s simply fallen into my lap?
2. Is this something that only I can do?  Does it really require my skills or presence? Could somebody else do it in my stead and nearly as well, or with the same impact?
3. Will this feel important, or be beneficial to me, my career, and my family, five years from today?  What will this add up to, or accrue toward? Am I doing it just because it’s easier not to find an immediate workaround, or because it feels good in this moment?
4. Does this task or activity have special meaning to me?  Does it align with my values as a professional, parent, person? My vision for my family? My career legacy? The future? Does it make me feel more energetic and alive?
5. Does it benefit or sustain other parts of my life?  If I do this one task at work, for example, will it have positive “spillover” effects at home, with the kids, or for me as a person?

Granted, we’re setting an extraordinarily high bar for priority here—but that’s the entire point! To get through the next decade-plus with your career, family relationships, and nerves intact, you’ll need to become very discerning in separating true priorities from the merely important, and those importants from the nice-to-haves and the shoulds.

Try this method of stress-testing your own priorities by putting three or four of today’s most urgent tasks through the five-question gauntlet. Be merciless: pretend that you’re a flinty senior manager willing to make tough decisions on behalf of a lean and mean organization (that organization being you).

Most likely, one or two of your priority items will come out the other side completely whole and unscathed, while the others will feel at least slightly less important. For example, you may realize that the seemingly small act of putting your five-year-old to bed tonight is a “highest and best” use of your time, something only you can do, that will shape your relationship with her for years to come, that has special emotional resonance, and thus gives you energy and motivation for other things. Conversely, you may decide that helping your colleague with that tricky project, or agreeing to host your family’s holiday celebration this year, doesn’t meet more than a few of the five criteria—and is thus something to avoid or limit spending your time on.

To qualify as a true priority, not every item has to pass questions 1 through 5 with a resounding yes—and you’ll inevitably find that certain items will move onto and fall off of your list at different times and for special reasons. Organizing your team’s annual off-site may be a drag, for example, but if a senior person asked you to do it, and the entire team were watching, you might decide that it belongs at the top of your task list, at least for now. Even while raising the priority-setting bar, use your subjective judgment.

Now that you’ve test-driven the process, try applying it more broadly—to the wider spectrum of your responsibilities and to-dos. To be efficient about it, and to keep yourself both honest and organized, use the Sample Workparent Priority Setter (table 10-1).

In this particular sample, and to illustrate just how you can use the priority setter in the context of your demanding, complex, working-parent life, let’s imagine that you’re a regional salesperson for a technology company and parent to eight-year-old twin girls. There’s pressure to build out client relationships in your territory, but your real goal is to be promoted to regional leader, a job that will simultaneously allow you to do more of what you love—mentoring, developing people, building a team—and keep you on a more regular schedule as the girls enter those critical preteen years.

In this case, meeting your sales targets would clearly be important. Without success in this area, there’s no hope for advancement or future for you at the company. But to get ahead, two other things will also be critical for you: establishing good rapport with the Canadian office and making the new-salesperson mentoring program you set up successful (the first for political reasons and the second as a way of demonstrating your people-management potential). Each of these items meets only four of our five criteria, but they easily earn priority status.

Now let’s look at item number 4, dinner with your partner. This is the only activity that, hands down, meets all five criteria, so it’s obviously a priority. But what about items 5 and 6—coaching the swim team and handling lawn care? Those seem like a radical departure from your other top-rank activities—and they are. But you love swimming, and coaching the girls’ team is a great way to “show up” for them when you’re working so much—not to mention sharpen your team-building skills. And lawn care happens to be your Point of Control, as discussed in chapter 4: the simple, small thing that gives you a disproportionate sense of energy and well-being amid the day-to-day workparenting frenzy. It may hit only two of the five criteria, but lawn care, you’re keeping.

What doesn’t make the cut includes above-and-beyond sales performance, which isn’t needed for the career path you’re shooting for; triathlons, which you enjoyed but have decided to give up in favor of shorter workouts in your basement gym; school drop-off and pickup, which got deprioritized as soon as the kids were old enough to take the bus; and admin tasks like expense reports, which have to be done but aren’t highest and best priorities. In this fictionalized example, you’re still a busy working parent, but you now have a simple, easy-to-remember priority mantra: sell-connect-mentor, dinner-swim-lawn. If you’re doing those six things, you’ll be on a good working-parent path.

Of course, this is an example, and no working parent really gets off after only twelve activities—our lives are much more complex and multifaceted than that. But the approach works, and you can now confidently use the priority setter yourself: feeding each of your time commitments through the five-question mill, and being ruthless in your judgment about whether it lands in top-priority territory, and thus deserves more of your attention and focus, or outside it, and should be allocated less.

Don’t worry if deprioritizing things feels awkward at first, or if you don’t have perfect, clear answers to each of the five questions. And if you want to amend the tracker to include other questions, or to “tier” your priorities, do so—whatever works best. Just be sure that at every phase of working parenthood you’re nudging yourself toward a clearer and narrower view on what’s really worth your time.

The Calendar Audit: A Way to Win Time Back

Once you’ve got a solid, refined list of your priorities, you can start operationalizing them—making sure that “what’s most important” matches your day-to-day actions, and that you’re being as mindful and deliberate as possible about where all of your working-parent time and sweat equity are really going. For this, you’re going to use a simple hack we’ll call the Calendar Audit. To do an audit from start to finish, all you’ll need is fifteen to twenty minutes, your calendar and your to-do list in front of you, and a physical or electronic red pen.

Start by glancing over your appointments and tasks for the past week and—marker in hand—circling the commitments and to-dos that, in light of your real priorities, you could feasibly have put off, done in less time, delegated, automated, or said no to. As you work, be ruthless—and look for themes. Don’t be afraid to observe when and what you could be doing a bit better (remember, there’s no judging, and this exercise is just for you). Maybe you have a hard time declining volunteer requests from the kids’ school, you’re spending more time than you really have to grocery shopping, or someone else in the office could help put the patient billing information into the system.

Once you’ve finished that look back, marked up your calendar, and taken a few minutes to think about the bigger picture, look forward, applying the same thinking and approach to the week ahead—this time, with an action orientation. If you don’t have to be at an upcoming meeting, for example, decide to bow out and free up the hour; if you’re supposed to get back to the school on whether or not you’ll volunteer again next week, resolve to say no; and if you’re buying the same household products each week, set up regular delivery. Even if at the beginning of the audit your docket looks packed with code-red tasks, by applying a keen and critical eye here, you should be able to eliminate a few and identify some new “found time.” If you’ve ever decluttered your closet or garage, you know this process already, and how satisfying it is.

Exactly how much of your time you can win back through this exercise will depend on your personal circumstances, but whatever those are, try to set yourself a target of 5 percent. Even though you’re a busy workparent, 5 percent is a realistic amount. You’re never going to be able to divest yourself of 25 percent of what you’re currently doing or audit your way to whole free days or weeks, but by making the kinds of small cuts we’re discussing, 5 percent is eminently possible. And while it doesn’t sound like much, it is. In a standard forty-hour workweek, 5 percent gives you back two hours to do the morning school run, or exercise. In the fifty-two weeks of a year, it gives you an extra two-week vacation—or twelve more work days to spend on that business plan. It’s a small change that creates a noticeable, meaningful sense of “give” in your calendar, moving you from all-out frantic to merely extremely busy. At the same time, it stays well under the noticeability threshold: even in the most pressured, roll-up-the-sleeves work environments, it’s unlikely that your boss will ever say, “Gee, we’d love to promote you, but we notice you’re doing only 96.2 percent as much as you did before.” Besides, your boss is most likely using some version of the Calendar Audit strategy for himself, and thinks of it as leadership or efficiency.

From a practical perspective, a Calendar Audit can create some much needed slack in your calendar and shorten your to-do list. Strategically, it lets you see, quickly and practically, if you’re backing up your priorities with your time and actions, or if you’re “spending” those resources on things that matter less. Emotionally, it gives you a sense of agency: you’ve moved out of that overwhelmed-and-helpless place and are instead being proactive and taking charge. And the personal insights that come out of the audit (“I say yes too often”; “I can be a perfectionist”) help you make more-conscious judgments about your time and your commitments for the future. Best of all, the Calendar Audit process is surprisingly quick and easy—and the more often you do it, the more benefit it brings. Think about setting aside a quarter of an hour every Friday morning for this process, or some other time when you’re in a reflective mood and have comparatively more mental energy. Gradually, the process will become ingrained and automatic, and help create a sense of control over your busy days.

Containment: What, When, and How

Alright, you’ve prioritized, and pruned off some of your to-dos. But hang on here: let’s circle back to that Workparent Priority Setter for a moment. In our example, what becomes of the cooking, housework, and volunteerism? And in your real, day-to-day life, what becomes of all the other activities you don’t enjoy, or that you consider low-priority, but that still need to get done? How do you handle your taxes, your work inbox, the kids’ endless laundry, the dentist? Even if they’re not priorities, those things don’t just disappear.

For these items, try using a strategy of containment. If you’ve ever taken an exam in a difficult subject and had the satisfaction of throwing your pen down just as the proctor says “time’s up,” or if there’s a room in your house you keep tidy save for a single drawer crammed with a jumble of household supplies you don’t like looking at, then you’re well familiar and practiced with the containment strategy already. Containment simply means “placing something within clear and defined limits.” You draw a box, and keep necessary but less enjoyable things firmly inside.

If you’re fortunate to have an extra little bit of disposable income, you can certainly use it to help contain some of your working-parent to-dos: you can hire a tax preparer or a housekeeper, for example, to limit the amount of time spent on personal accounting or tidying. But most of us aren’t long on cash, and anyway, many of the less enjoyable, less high-priority to-dos we face aren’t delegable. You can’t send anyone else to the dentist on your behalf or ask someone else to respond to personal messages. Containment is therefore usually a matter of personal timing.

To put containment into practice, try looking ahead on your calendar for the coming week, finding a few short time blocks free, and marking them as “catch-up time” or “life admin.” When each block comes, use it to do nothing but the tasks you’ve been avoiding or haven’t gotten around to: returning those emails, folding that laundry, running those errands, etc.—taking no breaks, fielding no distractions, and working as fast as you can, using getting this off my plate as your guiding goal. Feel free to rope in others: If the house is a mess, set your phone alarm for ten minutes and have the kids join you in speed-round cleanup until it rings. Or gather the project team in the breakout room for a dedicated thirty-minute crash-revision of the big presentation. Or go larger scale and set aside half a Saturday every other month to do nothing but handle items you’d rather contain: getting the car serviced, cleaning out your office files, and so on.

Whichever specific approach you take, it’s likely that you won’t finish all of the work that’s on your list. You’ll probably only make a dent—but for most containment activities and in working-parent world, a dent is good enough. Use this strategy regularly, and you’ll have the satisfaction of getting through what you need to, without those things taking over your calendar or, more crucially, your mind.

Time and Busyness as Part of Your Professional Brand

If you feel a little overcommitted, tired, or frazzled, that’s completely normal. Like every other working parent, you’ve got a lot on your plate. But to be seen as, and to actually be, an effective leader—whatever your line of work—means coming across as if you have control over your time. Appearing anxious, frantic, hounded, exhausted, and curt won’t play well with a promotions committee, with your boss’s boss, or during an interview. On the other hand, being seen as active, calm, deliberate, focused, efficient, and energized redounds to your credit, and can draw your colleagues toward you.

To send the right professional signals without overthinking how best to do so, or feeling like you’re an actor playing a role, consider:

• Sharing your calendar.  Let your colleagues see and understand how you’re using your time—and how confident you are in that. Let them peer at your schedule and think, “He’s busy, but he’s got his act together.”
• Using an impossible-to-ignore visual.  Keep a whiteboard up in your workspace, with a list of key projects by deadline and status. If you’re working remotely, hang this up in the background wherever you do your videoconferencing. Add detail and updates, and never let the information become obviously outdated or too spare. Your message: I’ve got a lot on my plate, and I’m in demand, but I’m on it.
• Having a “time investment” elevator speech.  If you can answer the question “How’s it going?” with a crisp, upbeat “We’re almost finished reconfiguring the curriculum for the September launch—it’s busy, but great to see it all coming together,” it will speak much better of you than a rapidly recited task list or commenting about how “there’s so much to do in the next three weeks!”
• Minding your adjectives.  When a colleague asks how your day has been, be wary of responding with words like overwhelming, endless, too much, or crazy. Of course it feels that way, and it is, but those aren’t the messages you want to send about yourself, or your relationship with whoever’s asking the question. Think about using balanced terms like active, engaged, productive, or busy instead.
• Setting “priority percentages”—and sharing them with your boss.  Figure out how you’re spending your total work time, and ask your boss if he agrees that 50 percent devoted to product development, 30 percent to regulatory reporting, and 20 percent to recruitment sounds right (fill in the blanks with your own specifics). Not only will these time-priority conversations let you sound thoughtful, judicious, and aligned with your boss’s interests, they will also allow you to recalibrate as needed—and avoid surprises at your performance review later on.

Making Your Working-Parent Calendar Work Even Better

It cannot be said loudly or often enough: having a single, shared, visible, usable, all-in-one calendar is critical to making the moving parts of your working-parent life come together effectively. You want to be able to see job commitments next to school breaks, dentist’s visits, vacations, work trips, caregiver time off, and anything else that may affect the efficient running of your complete workparent system—and see it all quickly, without confusion or fuss. Whether you’ve already set up a working-parent calendar that feels like it’s doing the job, or you’re just now facing that task, here are the guidelines for making it all as easy and as useful as possible—and for keeping it that way over time.

• Do it your way.  Your family calendar should reflect how you think about time, what your work and home obligations really are, and how you personally operate day to day. A “good” workparent calendar is one that enables easy coordination and swift retrieval: it lets you sidestep conflicts and timing gaffes, and lets you put your hands on the right information quickly. How and if you color-code or label things is just a matter of personal choice.
• Keep it simple.  Beware of setting up a system that takes more time to manage than it gives you back. While it may be tempting to adopt the newest, most complicated technology, or a twelve-shade color-coding system, avoid those things if a more basic, streamlined version works for you and your family.
• Treat the calendar as sacred.  A calendar only works if you actively use it and add to it. Make a plan to review it weekly, both on your own and with other family members and/or your caregiver. Consider having a dedicated time to look over the coming week, especially when there are changes to the regular schedule or special events looming.
• Grant access more broadly.  Before kids, you could keep your calendar private. Now, your partner, your caregiver, your child’s Third Parents, and maybe even a trusted colleague at the office should have access (even if “read only”). Sharing the calendar is the most powerful way to bring your Village together, to distribute responsibilities, and to make sure everyone knows what needs to happen and when. If the idea of allowing a caregiver to see your full calendar freaks you out a little, remember that that person already has total access to the thing that’s most precious in the world to you: your child.
• Adapt the system, based on age.  When your first child is a baby, the Google Calendar that only the adults can see is just fine. But school-age kids should be in on the act of keeping themselves on track and on schedule. Even if they’re not fully computer literate yet, they can develop good time-management skills. Print out the weekly schedule and post it in the kitchen, flagging that playdate on Thursday, or reminding the kids that it’s their job to remember to bring their instruments in for band practice.
• Avoid recreating it.  Many stressed-out workparents, keen to make the calendar feel more “real” and visible and to get various members of the family on board with it, will do things like handwrite a version up on a big whiteboard in the kitchen, in addition to keeping the online version. While this is a good instinct, it’s a terrible technique, because now you’ve essentially committed yourself to maintaining two calendars instead of one. If you do want to focus the family on the week’s schedule, print it out and display it, or better yet, print, display, and discuss it.

The Real Meaning of “Balance”

Before you became a parent, your days were busy, but they unspooled in a relatively linear way—you knew what was important, you dug in where you needed to, and you moved on. Now you feel as if you’re constantly lurching from one priority to the next, lunging from the work sphere to home and back again, diving to catch any spinning plates at risk of falling, spending most of your time listing far to one side, and afraid of falling down yourself.

And this, as strange and nonintuitive as it is, is working-parent balance: not some state of perfect, graceful equilibrium; not some elegantly described concept in a corporate work/life brochure; not some blissful-sounding but unachievable schedule that lets you do precisely the same thing, at the same time, each day—but the ability to go deep on what’s important, where you need to, and when you need to, and then deliberately correct in the other direction.