Productivity For Women®

I’m told that for mothers, the bathroom is their favorite room of the house—where they can get away from people. Or can they?

Every mother talks about this. Losing your privacy the moment you have kids. You’re in the shower, or you’re on the toilet, and it’s at that very moment that somebody in your family finds out that they really need your help with something. I couldn’t have been five minutes earlier, it couldn’t have been five minutes later, it had to happen at that moment.

This is not a blog about tidying, but if a tidying method works particularly well, I suggest we take notice. Ever since starting to use the KonMari method on my stuff, my stuff has pretty much kept itself tidy. In fact, it’s so much easier to keep it tidy than let it be messy, that it feels like my stuff tidies itself. And no, it’s not magic. Although, Marie Kondo does actually call it magic, since of course, the book that describes this method is titled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

I have some big news to share: I have a book coming in Winter 2026/2027! The title is:

Productivity For Women: How to Find Time For the Important Things When You Don’t Have a Wife to Do Everything Else.

What would any blog be without a post on how to say no?

If we don’t say no to things, we get to a point where we need to have three of us, all three of whom can never get enough sleep.

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.