Got time? What time?

If you ask most working women and moms, time is not only a hard commodity to come by, especially in the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also a fluid concept that doesn’t necessarily abide by all, or most of the official time management techniques…Not when interruptions are par for the course, and last-minute crisis management becomes a given on any day…

Managing time for working women and moms is far from being an organized, disciplined, scheduled day-to-day sequence of events and choices. Rather, it’s a spontaneous, change-laden, transition-filled and evolving process on the best of days. On the worst of days, it’s managed chaos under somewhat of a sense of serendipitous control.

The reason behind this is the long-lost realization that for working women and moms, time management is less of a choice than it is a constant, regular trade-off between what’s most important and what’s less important, what has to be addressed now versus what can wait another minute, what cannot be planned yet still happens and what happened without ever being planned…The COVID-19 pandemic was a harsh reminder of this fact, exposing the whole world to the fragile subjectivity and utter subordination of women’s time, energy and devotion to unending, unpaid and often un-rewarded, endless caregiving…

In her book “Year of Yes: How to Dance is Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person”, Shonda Rhimes says it well: “That is the trade-off. That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel 100 percent okay, you never get your sea legs, you are always a little nauseous. Something is always lost. Something is always missing. And yet. I want my daughters to see me and know me as a woman who works. I want that example set for them”. Yet, it’s this constant, often heart-wrenching trade-off, that also teaches our daughters and sons about not giving up on who they are while still giving of themselves. It’s this trade-off that has allowed the world to benefit from the indispensable contributions of women to all fields of work and life. Most importantly, it’s on the harsh yet generous foundational shoulders of this trade-off that so many of us stand today, to accomplish the work of our lives and leave the legacy of our existences.

Don’t get me wrong, time management is crucial. However, the traditional idea of time management, the one constructed around  the history, traditions and schedules of a patriarchal system, are no longer reflecting the realities of a working population made up by half of working women and mothers. We must re-think antiquated concepts of time and ways to manage it, as part of the now accelerated process of change and renewal our society is finding itself in the midst of. Part of this, maybe the most important part of this, is the realization that for working women and mothers, time is but a trade-off.

Do you agree that time management is a matter of a trade -off for working women and moms?

The Corporate Sister.