Welcome to: Productivity For Women ™
Welcome! I’m Laura the Productivity Lady. This blog is about how to be productive, and find time for the important things, when you are a woman. Most likely a woman who has a male partner who has no idea how exhausting and complicated your life is.
Yes, this blog speaks to a stereotype that may not fit everyone, but it’s a stereotype that exists with good reason, because so many women, without wishing for anything of the kind, are living it.
Have you noticed how many highly regarded productivity books are written by men? Men whose books discuss work projects and email and never get around to mentioning how to manage the business of daily life? Because they have a wife in the background, quietly taking care of it all?
On the other hand, have you noticed how often productivity material specifically aimed at women, focuses so much on housework and kids that it only serves to embed us in that stuff even further? And even after we are told that meal plans and capsule wardrobes reduce the number of decisions we have to make, and that batching our email saves time, we are left with the problem that instead of needing to clone ourselves two times to get everything done, we now need to clone ourselves only one and a half times.
A few voices do indeed tell us to figure out our top five (or three, or some number like that) things and overwhelmingly focus on those. At which point nobody would do laundry again, ever.
In a similar vein, we are often told to be sure to make time for ourselves. Which immediately feels like another item for our to do list that we know won’t actually get done.
And heaven forbid actual life gets in the way of getting things done. Problems like illness in yourself, your kid, or your elderly parents. All while the family holds down two or more full-time jobs. As far as the books out there are concerned, people in those situations may as well wait for a few decades, get their lives in order, and then they will be worthy of attention from the productivity experts.
There are books and articles about how much more of not only the mundane tasks, but the more invisible things like planning and tracking, fall on women. After ranting about how hard that is – because indeed it is – they will conclude with a call to women to talk to their partners about dividing up the work differently. In other words, they leave us with no option other than to plead with our partner for attention, and hope that they’ll realize that despite being 100% tired, we are 200% tired, and that they’ll be motivated to take on more.
We need something where the control over what we do, and what we don’t do, rests with us. And I am here to tell you that such options do exist. Options that I had to figure out from first principles, that all the books out there, over my thousands of hours of reading and thinking, did not address.
This blog is about taking control of the things that are within our control. Without demanding or waiting for other people to change their minds, but taking action ourselves.
I have met way too many women who don’t see themselves as having options for how their day looks, how their to-do list looks, and whether they will ever have time to paint that picture, create that app, run that marathon, or write that book. I’m here to tell you that by seeing things differently, and doing things differently, we can find options to change our lives.
