My Time Doesn't Matter

if it's infinite like sands. And whether you are partnered with or without children, or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you for all family structures. We're here to take a time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim our time. Add I want to tell your story. I live for your stories. Well, this is something I think you can relate to. And I called the case of the drunk

Man's Jackets. So I woke up at five am one morning to catch a flight for one day work trips Seattle, right after Ben was born. And you can picture the scene right. I was carrying my breast pump my purse on my shoulder, my laptop, my carry on bag with tons of documents, and I remember I pulled up to the curve at departures around seven am, and I get a text from Seth. He set seems apparently loves to send me text the d d um. But his text said,

some guy left his jacket and beer bottle on our lawn. Okay. So I was thinking that's weird and gross, and more importantly, what was I supposed to do about it? From the road, So I put the drunk ey's jacket out of my mind for the day, and as the plane took off, I began prepping for the Family Foundation board meeting that I was leading that day. So I land in Seattle. I pumped for twenty minutes in the airport. How many of us have had to do that go into one

of those weird pods or more likely to stairwell. And I arrived in my client's boardroom and I lead this all day meeting with three generations of family members that have been feuding so badly when I met them that every time my client's son would open his mouth, my client would storm out of the room. This day, I felt really proud of myself that all three generations around the table were communicating with grace and humor and generosity. So the meaning finishes, and I knew I had to

pump again, but because of the sex noises. I don't know if they still do that a d D if your clients tell you that. But the sex noises my pump me. I was too embarrassed to use the family boardroom restroom, and so I found myself, as we said earlier, really pumping in a dark stairwell of the building parking garage, pumping into plastic bags before I raced on the plane

to get home. So I pull up to my house around ten thirty that night, completely exhausted as you can imagine, and as I'm dragging my carry on bag, I see a crumpled up jacket and a broken beer bottle. It was still there. Add you know, I decided to give Seth the benefit of the doubt because I figured, you know, maybe he was dead or maybe trapped under a giant boulder. So after I put the breast milk bottles in the refrigerator, I started lugging myself up the stairs and guess what

I find? Seth outstretched on the bed, but definitely not dead. In fact, he cheerfully told me that he had four hours after the kids went to bed to check email, watch Sports Center, work out, and finish a power Point deck, plenty of time to decompress from his long day, yet not enough time, apparently to clean up the drunk guys stuff he discovered on our lawn sixteen hours earlier. And so I go back downstairs because actually, why did I

do this? That I reflect on this now because what jackets are gross, but more importantly because I had a toddler at the time, and the shattered beer bottle felt like a safety hazard for my kids. And so I put on a pair of rubber gloves I had left over from school sandwich duty. I grabbed a trash bag, I walked outside, I threw the gross stuff in the bag. I throw the trash bag into the bin, and I come home. But my active resistance that night, as I

was doing this was that I finally timed myself. And all in all, it took twelve minutes, twelve minutes from putting on those rubber gloves to finally peeling them off and dropping them at the foot of seth side of the bed, where I looked him in the and said, you're fucking welcome as I stormed off. Why I want to talk about this as an intro to this episode today is I realized I was so upset because sess morning text wasn't a can you believe this text, but a I don't have time, this is on you? And

I began thinking about twelve minutes. Those twelve minutes multiplied by thousands over the course of almost a decade of marriage and two kids at the time of this is on you required to get through each of my days, and that's when I realized that women are racing against the clock from the moment we wake up. This episode is about why, Why was this on me? Why is

this on us? So? What's so fascinating to me? This idea of time is so unique to women versus men, And not only do women value time differently than men, but also across the lifespan, we value time so different. And you and I have talked about this before. We are both moms and wives, and our husbands are amazing.

We married feminist husbands who totally support our decision to work and thrive and be working mothers and have a dual income household and all of these things, and yet these stories continue to happen to us and women everywhere. I have several patients women who are cancer patients, and they, you know, have had families and work hard, and then they get that diagnosis of cancer. So many of these women that have come to me will often say that it was their cancer diagnosis that was that wake up

call for them or that aha moment. So I've seen from my patients women may have had a certain kind of job or a different kind of family structure and then completely usurp and change everything about their life, so they might quit their job or go into a line of work that they've always wanted to do. I've had some patients suddenly decided to be children's authors or painters or fashion designers. But it's their hearts calling. They weren't

listening for decades. And it's always shocked me that it takes something like a life altering cancer diagnosis for women to reclaim their time. And I've had patients who have been healed. But the crux of all of that is that they finally start valuing their time on a deep

cellular level. Oh my god, I love this so much because I think about the healing versus a cure, right, The idea that there's a cure to this on you text is a fallacy because it's a practice, and so healing is so much more of a active verbs because you can take agency in your own life. And what I like to say, and as Seth is so proud of me now and brings fair play everywhere that my

healing journey. When people say what started it? Or how did you get to a place where your time is now being valued within your marriage, my prescription is, well, just write a book about your partner that portrays them in a terrible light, because that was my healing journey. But the good news about this podcast is you don't need to do that. We're going to do it for you and with you, and it starts with communicating with yourself.

And the premise of this episode is that I wish I could talk to myself back then and say, this is not about you and Seth. You have a great partner. You are in a messed up society and system that values and treats Seth time as if it's finite and condition. As you and your partner and the ones around you to treat your time as if it's infinite. What I mean by that is that if women enter male professions,

salaries automatically go down. We hear from society that breastfeeding is free when it's really hours, it's a full time job, but somehow apparently it's free only in a world where women's time is infinite. And finally, I will say that the things that's been hardest for me though, as we talk about reclaiming our time, is that it starts with the messages we tell ourselves. And so these were the

four most popular ones. And I'm centering women married to men right now, because even though this occurs in many different family structures, this is where often the problems start, with these heteronormative societal roles that we get stuck in. One my partner makes more money than me, or somehow my job is more flexible. When we know that if a woman is a lawyer and a man is a doctor, she thinks her job is more flexible. If the woman is the doctor and the man is the lawyer, her

job is toda more flexible. Number two women across the globe in seventeen countries said to me that they're wired differently for care that they are better multitaskers. For that one, I had to go to another doctor, a neuroscientists, and I had to ask him are our women wired differently? Are our brains wired for multitasking caregiving? And indeed he just looked at me and said, well, I guess culturally, definitely not neurologically. That was a hard one for me

to hear. Number three And the time it takes me to tell him her they what to do, I should just do it myself. That's a classic devaluing of your future time. According to professor and friend Dan Arielli, who's a behavioral economist and popular author, and finally, the one that makes me laugh the most, my partner is better at focusing on one task at a time, and I can find the time. And so I like to say, unless we're Albert Einstein, we can funk with the space

time continuum. There's actually no way to find time. There's no way to find time, and so what happens does that just leave to burnout if we think our time is infinite. So, as you were sharing each of those toxic messages, in my mind, I was saying, yep, number two, yep, number three. Yep. So what I've seen in my clinical practice, and many doctors will attest to this as well, is that men and women, like you said, inherently see time differently.

Women will say I don't have enough time. That typically means that they don't have enough time to do all of the things on their to do list that they need to do, which includes work responsibilities, family responsibilities, home responsibilities. But when you ask them where do you fall on that list, they are not even on that list. So we often say in pop culture, put yourself first, or fill your own cup before you feel someone else's. But it is truly a paradigm shift because many women do

not even put themselves on that list. Men also feel time crunched, but in a different way. It's very work centric, and the women I'm talking to, they have jobs outside the home or even in the home. They work so much, so this is not a career specific view. This has been very much a gendered view. Wow, I love that so much, And I want to go back to something you said about women inherently valuing their time different than men, because I think the word inherent is important in here

because it's not neurological it's not biological. Inherently is because we have been conditioned from birth to believe that having it all means doing it all, and once you're done with wiping the asses and doing the dishes and securing childcare, there's literally no time left. Everything I had been taught about having time choice over how I used my life. Being in the best decade ever women can do what the same as anybody else does was was really it

was really a lie. You know. It's interesting about multitasking is that it actually has a negative impact on the brain. We've talked about this idea of women doing everything and feeling like it's a badge of honor to be able to do it all and have it all, and I'm so on top of things. It actually is not healthy to multitasks. So that's another societal norm that we need to blow up that doing it all at the same time isn't a badge of honor. It's actually impacting your

health in a negative way. You know. In mindfulness, we talk a lot about the timelessness of the present moment. So even if it's fifteen minutes or ten minutes a day, it's that sense of timelessness that childlike wonder that we can create, which has so many therapeutic benefits apps. And by the way, thank you for saying that, because I'm sort of sick of productivity books as I read each one of them. It seems like we just get these ridiculous messages like wake up an hour earlier or find

two uninterrupted days a week, and it's unrealistic. It doesn't speak to people without extreme amounts of privilege. And so the last toxic time message I want to talk about before we get to bring on Bridget Chalty, who is the queen of talking about productivity and time, is this

message of if you're so overwhelmed, get help. So many people say that to women, and I find it really toxic because not only does it not recognize that most of the work that is leading to women being diagnosed with twice as many anxiety disorders as men is the cognitive labor. The way we've looked at time, the way we talked to women about time since we are born. It needs to be blown up and needs to be seen as toxic and there has to be a new

way forward. So we're going to get to talk to my great friend and fellow activists Bridges Shelty today who literally wrote the book on being overwhelmed, and I cannot wait to welcome her into the studio. Bridge Shelty literally wrote the book on being overwhelmed. She's the author of the New York Times best selling book over Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, And it's really a book about time pressure, gender expectations, and the overwhelm of modern life. So we're so happy to have

her here today. High Bridget, Hi, great to meet you. Do you know that I've read your Guardian piece multiple times from two thousand and nineteen. You know it's so funny about that pieces. It keeps showing up on Twitter, like from all around the world, and that peace came out of such a moment of frustration. And I tried to write it for a year, and every time I went to sit down, I was like, mom, can you

do this? I thought it was like a cosmic joke that I couldn't even find the time to write that piece. And for our listeners who don't know it, can you tell us a little bit about what the article it was Bridget that went so viral. So I'm a journalist and a writer and spent most of my career at the Washington Post, and I kind of fell into writing about time and women and work life issues that resulted

in this book called Overwhelmed, Work, Glove, and Play. When no one has the time really thinking about women and time. And I'm working at the Better Life Lab and there's a kind of a million balls in the air, but my identity is always as a writer first, and I was feeling just this real pain that I didn't have time. I wasn't making the time to write and create and think. And so somebody at a conference said, oh, you should read this book about how the great artists made time.

Maybe that can give you some advice. So I read this book. I got it for myself for Christmas. This was going to be like the key for me to understand how I could make more time to be creative and write. And I started reading and they were really interesting. They were sort of the back stories of a lot of great artists. But about ten pages in and I just started getting really kissed off because just about every

single artist was a man. And it's like the writer he didn't even understand the picture that he was painting, you know. He talked about Freud and how he had all of this time and space to think, and part of it was because his wife laid out his clothes every morning and even put his toothpaste on his toothbrush,

you know. And they talked about Gustaf Mahler, and you know, he was married to this young, really up and coming composer, but he wanted her to walk with him while he thought about music, and he didn't want her to make a sound, and she wasn't allowed to create, or you know,

her whole purpose was to help him create. The more and more I read these pieces, the angry and angrier I got because it was such a reflection to me about how women have never had this kind of space or time to create and think that that's considered selfish. We talk about me time as if it's something that only weak, stupid people would want, and a woman's work

is never done. And so it may me angry that the author couldn't even see that the men were able to have this space and they were able to really have this wonderful full family life and the women, for the most part, we're not. And it was sort of one more indication to me of how we just don't get it. Women have never had a history or culture of having time to themselves, And I just thought, what have we lost? Wherever you sat on the gender spectrum, we all deserve time to be as fully human as

we are. All time is crazy equal, and you are our leader and fearless warrior. And I will just reflect on how powerful your work has been to me. A lot of what you talked about is time choice. You know, when Seth was coming home from work and he had four hours after our kids went to bed too work out, check powerpoints, finish a deck, b Shakespeare or Freud, or

have as time to think great. I was doing things in service of our house until my head hit the pillow, and um, I remember going to him and saying, I just want equal time choice. I want as much choice over how I used my day as you have. And that is why I'm resenting you so much, because you look so free, and I think the problem is all the productivity researchers. Besides, you assume that we can have this uninterrupted time for deep work that is just not

afforded to women. You know, when you look at the history of women's time, women have never had concentrated, uninterrupted time. Think about it. The good wife kept the children and everything away from the husband so that he could be in the study. The good secretary her time was interrupted so she could protect the boss's time. So women's time has always been fragmented, interrupted, moving from thing to thing. Leisure for women tends to always have this moment of

your checking everybody else's emotional temperature. Is everybody else having a good time? Did I plan this right? Somebody described it to me. It's like maybe you're at the pool, but you're like the fireman. It's not pure leisure to yourself. And I think that's what this fight is for women to see that they deserve this kind of time and to work together because your partners have to work with you as well. Just like they need and want unstructured,

concentrated time, women need that too. And then we need to work on these larger work systems and policy systems to make sure that all people have access to that. You know, as I was doing research, I came across this quote. To be interrupted is to be disrespected, And so think about it. With women's time being so interrupted throughout all of human history, it's a sign of enormous disrespect. So R. E. S. P. E c. T. It's time.

It's time for women to respect ourselves, to demand it, but also for others to recognize that we deserve it. So indeed, is gonna ask you a couple of practical questions about how we can start reclaiming our time. But before that, I never asked you this personally. I've never given you the toxic time quiz. I thought it would be fun to ask you how many of these messages you heard in your research? I love it as long

as you know, like full disclosure from the outset. I may research this stuff, but I'm still working on all of it. So how many of these messages have you heard or said to yourself? My paid hours are worth more than your unpaid hours. It's not worth it for you to work. What did you do all day? Why are you wasting time doing that? You're so lucky you don't have to go to work. Well, if you don't have enough time and you're so overwhelmed, just get help.

I don't have time, so can you. You're a better multitaskers, so you should just do it. My partner travels or goes to work early, so it's on me and the time it takes me. To tell my partner what to do, I might as well just do it myself. Yes, more time for myself would be great, but I really should go clean out the freezer. You know. I have to say all of them. I hear them all the time still in the research that I do. I have to say, my husband and I have been doing the awful lot

of work. And it was really through the process of doing the research of the book that I recognized that I had to begin to respect my own time because nobody else was going to. I had to learn to disrupt my own mental models of everything that I had been taught. I had a breadwinner father, distant. I work, That's what I do. Don't bug me. And then I had a mother who she was a homemaker and drove the car pools and did nothing on her own and signed her checks Mrs Arthur A. Shalt Jr. It's like,

who is that, you know? And she started sending things to me, Mrs Thomas M. Bowman. I started to send them act her saying I don't know who this is. That is not me, you know. So I have heard all of those messages, and they are very potent, and they're very powerful, and they get into your psyche. So the first step is just to be aware that it's out there and that you can make a choice. You can choose to think differently and honest to God. Awareness,

education and recognizing that this is a choice. You know, it's not a baby step. That's an enormous leap. If all you do is work between your ears, that's going to pay off because then it will come out in day to day life. So it's sort of like constantly catching yourself. Somebody wants asked me, what's your best productivity tip, and I just said, compassion, because you know what, this is hard, and you're going to screw up and your

partner's going to screw up because this is hard. We're pushing back against centuries of status quo thinking that's really outdated and really painful for women and honestly for men and anybody across the gender spectrum. So policing you into these very narrow roles that takes work. That's hard. So fall down, take a breath, forgive yourself, have some compassion, and begin again. I still picked up the drunk man's jacket and it was on my lawn for six So we still have a lot of work to do. But

it's a practice. It's a practice. I think that's the best way to look at it. I'm working on my next book. It's about overwork. Guess what, I'm overworking working on my book about overwork. I mean, I know that I know that I'm doing everything wrong. We fall down begin again. You know. I love that you said that your first step is often the hardest, but the greatest leap that sense of awareness. It seems like it might not be a lot, but it actually is a great awakening.

Can you talk to us a little bit more about what people can do to feel the greatest sense of equity or not feeling as overwhelmed as your book suggests. Yeah, so a couple of things. So when it comes to that sense of time to yourself, the sense that you don't have to be the one that does everything at home. I was really struck by this one study that was done back in the nineties asking women across the globe about leisure time and what do you do or what

do you deserve? And what so struck me is that it didn't matter what country it was, how old the women were, what your religion was, Almost two have one every single woman in this study said, I feel like I don't deserve time to myself. I have to earn it, and the only way to earn it is to get to the end of a really long to do list. So I bring that up because the first step is to give yourself permission to let that go, give yourself

permission to recognize you don't need to earn it. And once you make that switch that it's important that you deserve it, that it's okay, that you don't need to feel guilty or ashamed. There's lots of really great strategies, and the easiest one is thinking about it as a practice and putting time in your calendar. So you want time to learn how to play the guitar, Okay, can you find thirty minutes on a Saturday on a Tuesday evening and put it in your calendar. Let everybody around

you know so that they'll support you. And if they see you clean out the fridge, it's like, you know, Hey, wasn't this the time you were going to try to learn how to play the piano or watch this Ted talk? You wanted let people know what's important to you, get their support because sometimes it's hard. We can feel guilty or selfish. Get people on board and practice it. The other sort of great advice that I got was start small. Don't think that you're going to completely rewrite your calendar

next week. Put on a timer and do something that that might be fun, that your soul might be calling out for. And sometimes we don't do that because we don't know. We get so busy, we don't really know what we want. When I've talked to leisure researchers, that's the one thing that they'll say, like people tend to not enjoy their vacations because they don't take the time

beforehand to think what do I really need? And what their research has found is that if you take just like ten minutes before you plan a vacation and just take that breath and think, what do I really want? You know, do I want to go swimming outside? Do I want to make sure that I connect with certain people? Kind of get in touch with your own intuition, and then proactively say, Okay, this is what I'm going to

use this time for. So take that pause to figure out what it is you really want and then kind of create that schedule or that time or that expectation that you'll have it. You can't manage time. You can't. What you can manage are your expectations, and you can

manage your priorities for what you do in time. The last thing I'll say about that is in the United States and women in particular, we think of about it's like a pantry and you just got to cram all this stuff in there, and then we get all these kudos. Look at how busy I am. Look at all this amazing stuff I crammed onto my calendar. Rather than think about that cramming and kind of busy treadmill, think about your time and your schedule like an art gallery. Very mindfully.

Choose those beautiful paintings that you want to spend time looking out or dealing with. And then in between the paintings, give yourself some white space to recover, to reflect, to prepare. Don't think about going from one thing to the next, to the next to the next. And there are days that we do get into code red. No matter no matter what you want, you know what you try. But

it doesn't have to be like that every day. You can recognize that there are choices that you can make so that you'll have more energy when code red does come, and then you can give yourself the permission to have a code green the next day. Our culture does not make it easy, there's no doubt about that. But the thing about practice is the more you do it, the better you get at it. And it all begins, as you said, with being able to take agency in our

own lives in the midst of these messy systems. So thank you for giving us that ability to give ourselves the compassion to make it a practice. Thank you for your advice and wisdom. Bridget Oh well, thank you, thank you all for thank you both for doing this and for really keeping these conversations going. Hi, it's me Eve, and I want to tell you about my latest book, Find Your Unicorn Space. So you're playing fair and have established equity in your home, but now what it's time

to find your Unicorn Space. My new book will help you set personal goals, rediscover your interests, and reclaim the creative expression of self that makes you uniquely you. Find your Unicorn Space is a mix of research space, how to advice, and big picture inspirational thinking. I hope it can show you a clear path to reclaim your permission to be unavailable and manifest your own unicorn space. Find your Unicorn Space is available now wherever books are sold.

So every episode of this podcast will be ending with an action atem for you are listeners that we call a time out. This is really a time for you to focus on yourself and reflect on what you're hearing today. And we're starting the conversation first with ourselves and then ultimately with our partners and others. I think Bridget has some important wisdom for us here a d D, and especially in this idea around having it all does not

mean doing it all. And for me, when she talks about a crowded pantry, I feel like in that pantry are societal expectations. Things that we do by de fault, all the extra unpaid labor that possibly we should be distributing to. Our partners are roommates, our parents are colleagues, and so I want to take a page from Bridget and start thinking about how our lives can look more like art galleries and less like stale pantries. And I'll

start with what I want to throw out. For me, it's a lot of societal expectations around gratitude, and so the first one would be thank you notes I hate writing them. I love gratitude, but not in that way, and so I'm done. I'm going to figure out how to express gratitude in a way that's simpler and easier for me than write handwriting and stamping thank you notes.

You know. In reflecting on Bridget's work, I've thought a lot about my to do list, and in medicine, when we're seeing our patients in the hospital, to do list is literally what gets us through the day, and I am a master of to do lists. But what's happened

over the years is that life has gotten complicated. You get married, you have kids, you have more and more work responsibilities, so that to do list just grows and grows, and what once was a four to ten box checklist now becomes a to do list of thirty items that

you absolutely can't get done in a day. So for me, also in reframing bridgets lessons of moving from a pantry to art gallery, I'm going to really think about my to do list and instead of focusing on what do I need to do this week or this month, just focus on the day and the rest of the stuff

can all wait. And so in this week's time out, we would love for you to think a little bit more deeply about what's crowding your pantry and how you can streamline that into a beautiful, curated art gallery with lots of works of art, but also plenty of white space. So this week we discuss why we have a time deficit, why we're always running up against the clock from the moment we wake up. Now if we get that time back, though,

what do we do with it? When you have an extra time, when you have that white space, when your life is more like an art gallery and less like an over stuff pantry, what do you even do with that found time? We like to call that unicorn space? What makes you you and how you share it with the world, and we're going to teach you how to find it next week. Thank you for listening to Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller of

fair Play and Find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social media at ev Rodsky and learn more about our work at fair Play Life and I adoptor Adity Car, Harvard physician with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout and mental health. Follow me on social media at dr A d D The Root Car and find out more about my work at doctor a d d dot com. That's d R A D I t I dot com. Our Hello Sunshine team is Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker.

Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett and Jessica Friendshitch. We hope you all love taking a much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows