Multitasking and the Rise of the Life Manager

If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything
by Ann Crittenden

(Page 4 of 6)

"In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman."

— Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of Great Britain

Madeleine Albright, whose career trajectory went from stay-at-home mother to Secretary of State of the United States, has described multitasking as the essential parenting skill, the "ability that comes from having one eye on the child while you try to talk to the plumber and worry about something else (like your doctoral dissertation) at the same time." Multitasking is the only skill mothers are universally credited with possessing. Almost everyone acknowledges that the person who can run a household and raise kids, not to mention hold down a paying job at the same time, is an expert manager of life.

A rundown of all the things most life managers have to do could never be fit into a seven-second sound bite in response to the question, "And what do you do?" Ric Edelman, a financial services executive in Fairfax, Virginia, has calculated that mothers' responsibilities include components of at least seventeen different professions, making mothers, along with chief executives, the last nonspecialized generalists in the skilled work force.

Here's my own list of the dozen or so most important tasks of a life manager (bound to be incomplete).

1. Supervise child development: emotional, intellectual, and physical. This includes daily psychological support; listening to and resolving family problems; assuring and maintaining proper school environment; assisting with homework; nightly reading; interceding with teachers and school officials; responsibility for routine medical care; attending meetings at schools, sporting events, and neighborhood functions; and constant reassuring, supervisory presence.

2. Maintaining a home environment for family, including housecleaning, upkeep, and repairs; shopping for household items, from furniture to light bulbs to toothpaste to gifts to toilet paper. This effort to make sure the family is never out of X, Y, or Z involves a constant mental inventory of all the countless things it takes to keep a household stocked and in order.

3. Assuring family nutrition, including food shopping, preparation of meals, school lunches, cleanup, kitchen maintenance and repairs, and research to keep abreast of latest food trends and alarms.

4. Laundry and ironing, purchase and repair of clothing, from gloves and mittens to sporting equipment, new shoes, and back-to-school outfits to wardrobe monitoring to keep spouse as well as children presentable.

5. Crisis management, including handling accidents, fires, floods, auto accidents/repair, thefts, insect infestation, and calls from school principal.

6. Financial management, including managing the household budget; getting quotes and contracting for home improvement projects; investing the family's savings; budgeting for major expenditures, such as Christmas.

7. Project planning and organizing, including birthday parties, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, graduations, funerals, school events.

8. Provide transportation to school, afterschool sports, and other appointments, weekend sporting events, and so on.

9. Care for pets, from daily feeding, vet appointments, and delousing treatments, to repair of damage to household by puppies, cats' claws, and incontinent animals.

10. Maintain the family's social ties with friends, relatives, other supportive adults, and children's friends, through gifts, cards, thank-you notes, regular calls, and emails, and weekly planning of get-togethers with friends.

11. Nursing care for sick and injured family members, from doctor's appointments to emergency hospital visits to staying home from work to make chicken soup for laid-up children.

12. If married or in partnership, provide emotional support, business advice, psychological counseling, entertainment/toleration of business associates, and so on.

One of the funniest tributes to this Herculean performance was written a few years ago by Shirley Kenny, a mother of five, former English professor, now president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Kenny described a typical day during her teaching years at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.:

"Drag out of bed, get kids up, make breakfast and school lunches, pick up baby sitter, drive car pool ('My mom puts on her lipstick at the same stoplight you do'), hurry to campus for first class, teach, hold office hours.... sit on committee du jour, hurry home, return babysitter to home base, locate Hamburger Helper and fix dinner, supervise homework and lesson practice, give orders for cleanup and K.P. Duty, write notes to teachers, kiss kids, send big ones to bed, tuck little ones in, kiss them again, and again, drag out briefcase, grade papers or get back to research, stumble to bed in the wee hours, comfort Danny when he wakes up from a nightmare, sleep a little. Start over."

Can anyone be surprised that this woman ended up as the head of a major university? Or that once there, she would notice, as she later told me, "Administration really is like housekeeping, although men hate to hear you say it. Once I did make the comparison in an academic group and I got curious stares, followed later by a present of a can of Endust. But look at the similarities: hundreds of little chores that are never really finished; if you don't keep up every day it gets ahead of you; none of it is very important in the abstract; all of it is important in the concrete."

One of the first women to make this comparison between home and organizational management was Catherine Beecher, in her 1841 best seller, A Treatise on Domestic Economy. Beecher argued that running a household required the "wisdom, firmness, tact, discrimination, prudence, and versatility" of a politician and the "system and order" of a business. Domestic money management, she added, often surpassed the "desultory" practices of many businesses.

One hundred years later, Eleanor Roosevelt made the same argument, in almost the same language: "A home requires all the tact and all the executive ability required in any business."

The first serious conceptualization of business management as "multitasking," however, didn't appear until 1973, when Professor Henry Mintzberg published a now-classic book called The Nature of Managerial Work. At the time it was assumed that a manager sat in his splendid, isolated office thinking about the company's future direction and issuing commands to cadres of underlings. Mintzberg's data, based on time diaries of male executives, revealed that this picture was highly inaccurate. The executives actually spent very little time on planning or long-range strategy. What they really did closely resembled the day of a harried housewife: They answered calls, put out fires, reacted to crises, responded to people, and dealt with constant interruptions, all in a fairly incoherent pattern.

As Mintzberg put it, managerial work was characterized by "brevity, variety, and fragmentation."6 Any attempt by managers to stick to a task usually failed because of constant interruptions. Sound familiar? In the three decades since Minzberg's observations, managerial work has, if anything, become even more hurried and harried and more like a life manager's neverending day. The pace of action, around-the-clock economy, the constant juggling of projects, demands from different masters, rapid changes in technology, and frequent career reinventions all challenge managers and mothers alike.

Mothers today sew Halloween costumes, bake Christmas cookies, help with homework, and make major investment decisions, handle clients, teach courses, write reports. Mothers today include the executive at TIAA-CREF with triplets, an hour's daily commute into Manhattan, and a schedule that would put the Swiss railways to shame. They include her boss, who raised three kids, hosted a scout troop for eight years, threw regular Friday movie nights for preteens, did grocery shopping and meal planning and weekend chauffering while holding down a demanding job that required travel. (She left notes around the house when she was out of town, with messages like "I'm looking at you - don't forget to brush your teeth!") Mothers today include the divorced World Bank official with a young son. She arrives in the office at 8:00 A.M. with the sense that she's already worked a full day: up at 5:00 A.M., fix breakfast, pack a school lunch, plan dinner, clean up someone's mess, wrap two birthday presents, clean up dog poop, and answer emails. On her way to work one day, she spied a man coming out of his house in his robe to pick up his morning paper. Her thought: "That guy has no concept of what my life is like!"

Mothers today include the former top Justice Department official whose typical weekend calender included:

• Dan's soccer game
• Sophia's birthday party with Dana
• National Security Council meeting
• Groceries

Most people still assume that the birthday parties, the Halloween costumes, the soccer games, and the grocery store somehow detract from the performance at an NSC meeting. There is absolutely no evidence of that. On the contrary, female managers report that planning and prioritizing multiple tasks promotes efficiency, focus, and organization. As one female manager put it in a recent study, "Taking on all those roles... being a mother, tending a household, working with an au pair, being a spouse, friend... adds organization into your life so that you're much more efficient and organized at work." Intriguingly, evidence is emerging that there may be a biological reason for this.

Copyright © 2005 Ann Crittenden

About the Author

Ann Crittenden is an award-winning journalist and the author of three previous books, including The Price of Motherhood, a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, she has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Newsweek, and many other national publications. She lectures before dozens of diverse organizations each year and is on the board of the International Center for Research on Women.