Productivity For Women®

There exist people who like shopping. I am told that all women like shopping. When I needed new orthotics, and they did not fit into my existing shoes, the doctor excitedly told me that now I had an excuse to go shopping for new shoes. He couldn’t have chosen a more discouraging thing to say.

The Jones family was gathering at Linda’s house for the Christmas dinner party. As the guests came to the table for dinner, they noticed something terrible. There was no turkey served.

In my previous post about women acting as reminder services, I talked about the exhausting and frustrating job of remembering things on behalf of other people. There is a limit to how much energy you will have for your own endeavors if you are remembering several other peoples’ worth of stuff.

This post is the first in a two-part series about the role of being the family’s reminder service.

I’m talking about being the person who always knows when the appointments are, what needs to be packed for school, whether a kid has an assignment due, what forms need to be filled in for a school excursion, and who needs the soccer uniform to be clean for a specific game. And so on.

When a kid turns up to school with scruffy hair and wearing mismatched clothing, nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to say “What was the dad thinking, sending the kid to school like that?”.

You’ve probably come across the analogy of our responsibilities and tasks being represented as rocks, pebbles, and sand, and trying to fit them into a jar.

We should all be more frugal. Or so we are told. People have written entire books about it. 

No, you haven’t missed a hundred and ninety five articles since I wrote the original post titled The Conspiracy to Keep Women Busy. In fact, this is the second article I’m writing on this topic. But, please, put your hand up if you feel like there is nowhere near one hundred and ninety seven things that are going on that keep us busy. Nobody? Yeah, I thought so.

Have you ever got into a state of mind where you thought, just one more weekend, just one more intense day, just another round of catching up, and you’d be all caught up, and then you’d have time for the things you actually want to do?