ABOUT

What is this blog about and who is it for?

Hi, I’m Laura the Productivity Lady. 

The productivity methods I talk about in this blog are a product of my thousands of hours of research and experimentation. I have used these methods to survive our family having two full-time jobs plus a side business, during times when our family had health issues producing up to a dozen medical appointments a week. I have even squeezed some hobbies in there. In the process, I have figured out productivity methods that don’t appear in your standard productivity literature.

I have always wanted to be efficient and productive with everything I do. And by that I don’t just mean productive at work, or productive at keeping my house clean, but productive when it comes to my own dreams and goals.

I am addicted to reading, and have spent thousands of hours reading productivity books over the years. In addition to reading, I have, of course, tested the advice in all those productivity books, and spent many hours thinking about what worked and what didn’t, why some things worked and some didn’t. 

I needed productivity advice that worked. There was just one problem. Almost every book I read was written by men, for men. 

Oh, of course, those books didn’t advertise the fact. The pressures that women face, simply by being women, were not dismissed explicitly. They were invisible by omission. The expectations and tasks that so often fall on women – housework, planning, kids – how to actually have a life outside of those, were not dealt with at all. The assumption implicit in these books was that those tasks somehow didn’t even exist. Maybe in those authors’ worlds, they didn’t. After all, I didn’t have a wife who would pick up all the pieces for me, but those authors often did. My husband is as well-intentioned as anyone gets, but still, society trains us all into certain roles, with certain pressures. 

I did attempt to read productivity material written by women. There’s helpful material out there. Unfortunately for what I wanted, this material all too often focuses on how to be efficient at cooking and cleaning and have a magazine-worthy house. To achieve this, I would have had to spend more time on those tasks than I did already, and much as I love spending time in houses of perfect homemakers, that wasn’t my goal. Another theme I came across frequently is that quietly, in the background, a lot of these women had paid assistants – a bit like a wife, but one who was paid for it.

I also read books written by rightfully frustrated women, discussing how unfair it is for women to be pressured by society into a role of picking up the pieces after everyone else. These books generally had one action item for their readers – talk to your partner (usually a male one) and ask him to do more. Because, I gather, none of us had ever tried that.

Or else the books say that we need a cultural revolution. The problem being that I wasn’t willing to wait around for one of those.

So I started my own experiments. I noted what worked, what didn’t. I analyzed why things worked or didn’t. I updated my behavior accordingly and tried more things. These days, I am more productive and less stressed. More to the point, I am more productive in the things that I want to get done. I am noticing more and more that when my friends talk about the tasks that they feel they have to do, I find myself thinking one of the following.

“I used to do that task, but I don’t anymore”.

“I used to do that task, but someone else in my immediate family does that now, and there was no nagging required”.

“I used to do that task, but now it doesn’t get done at all, and our family is still ok”.

“I used to do that task, but I made a few tweaks that nobody else seems to be talking about, and I seem to have cut down on ninety percent of the effort involved.”

I am creating this blog to share what I’ve discovered through years of study and experiments. My target audience is, obviously, women. Mainly women living in the Western world. Specifically, women who have become sufficiently jaded with the daily aspects of female life to be willing to at least think about playing by a different set of rules.  

By definition, this blog is about my own real-life experiments and observations. I will refer to books or academic research when it makes sense to do so. Just like a lot of the things I plan to talk about haven’t made it into the world’s popular productivity books, some issues have not made it into academic research on account of not having caught that community’s attention. Some things we have official research on, and some, instead, we have a lifetime of experience with.

Enjoy.

Contact: info@productivityforwomen.com

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