JUST SAYING IT'S VERY INTERESTING THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF RESPONSES TO THIS QUESTION ARE FROM PEOPLE WHO SIGNAL THEMSELVES AS WOMEN IN SOME WAY, JUST SAYING
I REALLY wish the responsiblity for tracking things for work and the family didn't somehow land on me managing the systems so as to avoid managing a crisis - AND YET.
My partner participates actively in household labor and we have a relatively equitable division, but setting up systems to keep things running is on me. I've made clear that this counts as labor and that I'll do it while he cleans the bathroom, at least, which is a partial win.
Right same. I also have a partner who is good at household labor and staying ahead of daily tasks and childcare, but managing our calendar, social schedule and putting systems in place is part of my deal. Without google calendar, it would be so much harder.
My partner also struggles with priorities—if it’s in front of him, he wants to do it right then. It’s great for things like dishes and picking up things, but terrible when we have several competing priorities and are on a schedule. We don’t have time to suddenly dust the ceiling fan bc we need to pack up the baby and put away the dishes before we leave for something, for example.
OMG SAME! Like I appreciate you want to handle a task you see without being asked, but also the baby needs fed and there are dishes to be put away.
He also is really bad at losing his keys and I keep telling him he needs to leave them in one place all the time. That’s what I do! It took him years to finally decide to do it
We just moved house and one of the first things my husband did was set up a place for our keys to live on a bookshelf… so of course I put my keys there when I come home.
EVERY SINGLE DAY he asks me where the keys are and every single day I have to tell him they are in the bowl on the bookshelf where HE decided they would live
My spouse, frustrated with my key-losing, finally bought us Tile. It has made a huge difference. The few times I forget to hang them up, I just click the app.
Same - but my husband won't even use his Google calendar even when I "invite" him to events. So I keep up my home and work calendars on my phone, but if I don't keep up the hand-written wall calendar at home, my husband and daughter don't know what's going on. Drives me bonkers that it's always me, but if I don't do it, no one will. I agree though on the division of labor -- he does other things that I don't do...
I struggle that my husband (it feels almost insincere in this thread to say partner) will see and agree to what’s on the calendar when we add it, but weeks later, act surprised or exasperated because “he didn’t realize that was today,” or “that never made it to his work calendar.” Sometimes it’s a hard same, (my biggest non-relationship struggle is that my company gate keeps our work calendars so almost daily I have to reconcile them both), but the difference is I then need to take on the work of RESCHEDULING or fielding this thing or parts of this thing myself.
Yeah, same. I keep trying to explain how the arranging of everything and organizing and scheduling is an entire job unto itself, but it's been almost 25 years and I haven't gotten far. I wish it weren't so exhausting, but more than that I wish everyone were raised to understand what goes into all of this work!
Yes. This is why I created what I call my "Emotional Labor/Mental Load" Google Workbook and named myself as the CEO/Family Project Manager because once I put it into white-collared terms and systems my husband FINALLY started understanding how much work I do. A previous therapist suggested I do this and I brushed off her suggestion for years because it was once again assigning me more work, but it allows me to remove a lot of anxiety from my brain and onto a Google Sheet that I can minimize in daily life.
The most critical parts of this workbook are the budget sheets and the chore sheets. Once I started tracking literally every dollar we both understood where our money was going. Once I broke down household chores into 110 tasks he understood that "doing laundry" wasn't just one line item but several - "Make sure all dirty clothing and towels are in hampers: inside out if unsoiled, right side out if soiled," "carry clothes downstairs and check lint filters as needed," "Use Spray and Wash on stains", "Hand wash laundry when needed," "Wash laundry in washer (adjust temperature and load size/type first!)," "Hang dry delicate laundry on rack," "Dry rest of laundry in dryer (adjust temperature and load size/type first!)," "Carry dry and clean laundry upstairs in basket(s)," "Fold and put away Laundry".
I think a lot of people would say that I broke it down too much, but as someone with chronic health issues, I need every step to be clear because steps like carrying laundry up and down multiple flights of stairs and folding and putting away laundry can be physically intensive for me.
It's amazing how well the workbook has helped me, if for no other reason than pointing out how little I ask of my husband and how much I do every single day. Suddenly, he feels pretty stupid that he didn't put a new trash bag in the trash can as part of the one chore he was responsible for while I spent my entire evening doing a well-documented list of chores.
Hopefully you'll all get a notification with this reply. I go into more detail in a comment on Anne's latest post ("The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture") but in brief: I'm still working on it and will share it as soon as I can!
My spouse, who is a couples/family therapist, built a survey for couples to look at this. But whoa- I love the idea of an ongoing sheet, and my spouse would probably appreciate being able to share something as well.
This is kind of an amazing idea! I'd be interested to try it in my own life. I was trying to explain some of it to my teen son yesterday and got tangled up in my own overwhelm.
Yep. My husband doesn't keep a personal calendar and never looks at my Google personal/family calendar. He also doesn't look at my "Emotional Labor/Mental Load" workbook on Google Sheets, either, which includes our master budget, payment schedule, day-by-day breakdown of everything we spend money on, birthday and holiday cards/gifts, doctors and medications, 110 regular chores sorted by room and frequency, diary of chores completed, packing lists for various scenarios, and lists of various routines. I resented creating all of these lists and calendars for family project management until I realized that doing so would allow me to let go of so much stress in my brain (and it really has lowered my anxiety!) Now that I consider myself to be CEO/Family Project Manager, weirdly enough my relationship with my husband has improved because HE FINALLY UNDERSTANDS how much work I do. So when he complains when I instruct him to finish one measly chore I can point to the five I did.
Aww thank you! Because I have a lot of personal information in there, I don't feel comfortable sharing the original, but what I'll do is create a sharable template version of it when I have some free time this weekend and let you know when it's finished!
Add me to the list!! I feel overwhelmed by creating these kinds of things. And somehow keep berating myself for not being more organized and on top of all the fucking things. Thank you!
Hopefully you'll all get a notification with this reply. I go into more detail in a comment on Anne's latest post ("The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture") but in brief: I'm still working on it and will share it as soon as I can!
Finally getting into this *because working/studying full time while also parenting 3 kids* and YES to everything you shared. I was less proactive and more reactive in addressing the division of labor in our home, but this is exactly the core issue. I would love the google doc because mine is a list on a shared Note.
Coincidence or not, my sister and I were talking about the emotional/mental labor of running a household last night and how it lands so heavily on certain genders, especially in heterosexual relationships. I sent her that French comic by Emma on "You should have asked" and the mental load of making a household function and taking care of kids and all that. I think about it a lot.
I stopped doing any of his "stuff". I only washed my clothes. There was food in the fridge. I ate dinner when we planned, if he didn't like it, oh well. He stepped up for a while and then complained that none of his other friend's partners did the same. He did nothing and bitched constantly. I told him to find someone else and left. I thank God that we never had children.
I will only have relationships with men that step up. If I don't have a relationship, so be it. I have found a few but most want a Mom to take care of everything. I am not that person.
The complaints comparing partners--that's absurd. He can't have known what was actually going on in their lives, so using it as a standard for you to uphold was not only unfair, but, well, just as asshole thing to do.
I had a friend who was in a situation where she was constantly getting gaslit by her partner, had high standards of cleaning, had her do all the housework, and I finally had to step away from the friendship as she never realized that the problems stemmed from being matriarchal, not an equal. She even said that they couldn't have kids together because he was enough of a child for her. I think the guy was nice, he just was looking for a mom.
I also need to note that, as the person in my relationship with the attention deficit issues, I am the opposite end of this. My husband carries the OVERWHELMING share of the mental load in our home. Admitting this, in a room full of (female) colleagues talking about the frustration of the weight can be a really tough thing. I acknowledge that it is, hugely, women who carry this load, but neuroatypicality can flip the script on this one.
Isn't it? I am kind of in awe about how well the comic creator captured a dynamic that's actually very difficult to describe precisely because of the invisibility noted.
Others are noting how, of course, in heterosexual relationships the burden of calendar management is disproportionally one more thing that's piled onto the category of unseen/undervalued "women's work"... as I reflect on my own last fifteen years, while I now am the more flex/primary caregiver/household maintainer parent, not long ago I was in one of those (still disproportionally male) executive roles where there is somebody else (almost always a woman, still) who "manages your calendar" and so of course this is one more of those situations (like all caregiving professions) where the "women's work" assumption is permeable between both the domestic and professional sphere and how I 100% wouldn't have thought about that if my wife and I both still worked out of the home.
Yep, yep, yep. My husband has never had to manage a calendar at work because when he was a lower-level employee his tasks were assigned to him (by his boss's secretary) and now that he's established he has his own secretary to manage his calendar.
One of the most challenging parts of my teenage years in relation to my parents was that my dad changed jobs and started a business where his office was in the house. He’d always had a secretary and he was terrible at things like filing. Filing became part of my “chores” (I think maybe he wrote off my allowance that way?). If I left it to do too long, or he couldn’t find things he just couldn’t handle it; he was holding me to the standard of the adult women whose job it had been before, To this day, I loathe filing and try never to do it.
My dad ensured that I would hate all future office jobs by having me cover for his secretary when she went on holiday. Absolutely loathed the role.
Gradually I tried a few more office jobs, and but myself well enough to not ever try to run someone else's schedule/be an office mom. It has somewhat limited my career path, but I'm okay with it.
we have a pair of friends, and their kids, who actually say "if it's not on the calendar, it's not real". One partner has hard-core trained her family to PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR.
Yes, this! I am the main scheduler in my family and the amount of time it takes to make calendaring work for me (I need google for home + outlook for work + written planner for my brain) + then jiggering it to work for my spouse is enough to make flames come out of my ears. I subscribe to the "he's an adult, he can make his own fucking sandwich" (see above) model of living, but if I want him to show up/don't want to have a disagreement about it for the 10,000th time, well, 🤷🏻♀️
As the main care-person of our home and a full time employee of a company, I use a digital calendar to offload both the bullshit and important things into one space because my heart and brain simply aren’t that big.
“Follow-up on X’s mammogram results” (care, important) sits next to “All Hands Onsite Meeting” (bullshit, also…important?), which is a little gross.
Also, my teenager refuses to use Google Calendar (outright ignores my invites) bc he says can hold it all in his head. And he’s right…for now.
LOL the point of the calendar is that he doesn’t have to hold it all in his head—the calendar does. This sounds like some early efforts to offload this work on a woman
Oh I KNOW. And not in a “haha, boys… so funny way, what can you do???” way. You better believe this is an ongoing discussion with him about gendered and invisible labor. Thank you for calling that out, you are 100% correct.
I’m a little extra sensitive to these things because 1. My parents heavily buy into gender roles despite routinely not following themselves and 2. My MIL (a SAHP) raised 3 boys and, in some ways, she did a really good job because they are good at pitching in without being asked, cleaning up after themselves, etc. But in other ways, they are clearly used to someone taking care of things for them as evidenced by the fact that all three of them still call mom for input on fairly routine decisions. Luckily, my MIL is great and doesn’t butt in or anything, but it’s a difference I’ve definitely noticed
I've been the calendar manager in almost two decades of marriage, but something interesting happened when I moved across the country for a visiting gig for two years. During the first year, my husband accidentally double-booked a visit from an out of town friend the same weekend he had tickets to fly to see me. It was the inciting incident for us to shift to a hard copy family calendar hanging on the kitchen wall that we both put notes on and consult. (I have a work Google calendar with some notes overlap.) It has worked very well, even after having a kid, although the kid is only 2 and I know things will just get more complicated.
I will be sending this to my spouse, who is the person in our house who carries the mental load/does the bulk of the scheduling/keeps the calendar functioning. He has the unenviable task of trying to keep an ADD spouse ( and 2 pretty-much adult kids, also with ADD, when they're around) on the same scheduling page.
I will formally and freely admit that I suck at time management, but not in the sense of necessarily actual poor management, but mostly because I am natural night owl and people demand rigid adherence to their time scripts even in the age of artificial lighting and urban living. (Buddy, shut up about the damn cows, you ain't milking Bessy tomorrow morning. Aside from that the fact, that the vampire jokes have been made many times over the last 35-40 years so howabout you maybe try and come up with something original since I hate all fucking vampires, except Blade.)
On the other hand, I am pretty good at managing a household if allowed to do so (especially when there were the very modern blessings of 24-hour grocery stores).
So: 1) I notice that people, in the era of diversifying sexual orientations actual (or avowed) practical feminism and the like, cling ever more intensely to rigid gender roles, very much including women (even when they are complaining about them). I first encountered that when I was 17 and cooking something and an old lady came in to gawk at me cooking, ask me if I was gay (she was displeased when I said no, since obviously...), and then insisted she never heard of no man cooking. Then I was caught by surprise; these days, I would say something like, 'Have you ever considered fucking off, lady?'
2) I frequently observed the case when a woman in question is 'doing the housework' and then finishes, proceeds to drag out the wooden cross and three long nails. The problem of course, is that if you do those chores for them, they then get angry about it: you've deprived of something to complain about.
3) On the other, I have certainly noticed that people who do the housework (i.e. me, a not-female person) get dunked on for doing the housework. The problem is gender-identified but not about gender per se: cleaning the toilet is low-status work. (See all those dudes who don't clean the toilet when they're single.)
4) On the history of the rigid imposition of time standards, there is nothing better than this episode of Connections by James Burke: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e05 (It was made in 1978, so it totally has 70's hair and giant computers and punch cards and also just about everything everyone complains about with computers and modern life is right there.)
Yes, the tick tock of keeping up with demands was imposed for good reasons and also a number of bad ones.
elm
does the toilet paper goes over the top or underneath the dispenser?
Can I also add that so many women have set themselves reminders to buy and send birthday cards. Does anyone know of any men under the age of 70 who buy and send birthday cards? I don’t know any. I don’t even get cards from friends. Ia this a regional/cultural thing?
It HAS to be, because no one I know does it. We keep a birthday calendar of birthdays of people who we need to get presents for - maybe 10 people total? Including my mom and my nieces? But also my husband gets the presents for his side of the family so that's a shared calendar.
I LOVE Google Calendar. I love it so much. I developed a whole course about becoming a more attentive friend and another about meal planning using Google Calendar, in fact (and stopped course development because while I love G:Cal, I do not love coaching).
Everything that needs to happen goes on my calendar; between G:Cal and ToDoIst, I keep myself on task and punctual, because I never know what time it is, what day it is, or what year. I'm not even sure I qualify with 'time blindness' so much as I have 'time? what even IS that?'
The TL;DR of how I've harnessed digital calendars like G:Cal to run my home and work responsibilities:
1. Meal planning has its own calendar ("Dinner") and my family and I assigned certain days of the week to a rotating schedule of meals (Tuesdays, for example, are tacos, then burgers and dogs, then breakfast, then burgers and dogs, etc) and I repeat meals that everyone likes on a 3- or 4- (or 6-) week schedule. So if everyone loves cashew chicken, I can schedule that for Mondays, repeating every four weeks, and everyone is very happy about that.
2. For being a better friend and correspondent, I put people's birthdays on my calendar, repeat annually, and then add notifications with enough time to either get and send a gift (3 weeks prior) or send a card (4 days prior). I also add things like anniversaries of people's deaths so I can send a card or note to let someone know I'm thinking of them on a sad day.
I've also helped people create calendars to track mental or physical health (color coding all day "appointments" with red/yellow/green) and for awhile I tracked my cycle using G:Cal. That calendar was called "SHARK WEEK."
Oh - another example: when classroom Valentines were my nemesis, I set an annual appointment on Feb 15: "Go to CVS, get lollipop or not-chocolate valentines for next year, put in X spot in closet." Then on Feb 12: "The valentines are in X spot in the closet."
Basically, past me and present me work together to help future me because all of me never knows what day it is.
Meredith, me too. Direct quote to my best friend this morning: "it's unbelievable how much I rely on the LG." (Actually, I said 'sad' instead of unbelievable, but I didn't mean sad at all, I meant... unbelievable.)
i would also check out the popcast with knox and jamie (@thepopcast on insta) they're friends with kendra irl and kendra thinks of erin their coo/producer as her muse!
Yes! But also I still feel bad about myself because I’m still more overwhelmed/anxiety ridden to consider myself either fully lazy or a genius, more a deer caught in headlights 80% of the time.
My meal planning calendar is just a bunch of dinner "events" that I shuffle forward in time and organize into a menu for the week. It's so easy. Google Calendar is so powerful when harnessed for good.
You're so right. And I find that at 4pm when it's time to think about dinner, I don't have the brain energy to decide what to make and hunt down the ingredients. If I look back at past menus, or I have pre-populated suggestions I can move around, coming up with a meal plan (and a grocery list) is a lot easier. I do So Much with G:Cal to avoid decision fatigue.
I'm so thrilled to find others who use Google calendar for meal planning!
I have tried to introduce others to the wonders of a meal planning sub-calendar and have been met with skepticism and responses like I'm really odd.
Personally it's life saving, I set stuff to repeat. I started with dinners that went over well (say spaghetti) and thought "I should make this again!" But then I weighed how often the family could tolerate it being served and how often I could tolerate fixing it. So I 'd set an initial interval of 6-week repeat, say. Maybe tweak it after a few repeats, longer or shorter. Build from there.
Currently I have a bunch of theme nights (bean & rice, tacos, soup, pasta, etc) that I do on a 13 week repeat during the school year, which is to say 13week intervals X3. So we only have cuban black beans with brown rice 3x during the school year, everyone is happy when it comes back around.
Summers have such a variation in schedules and available produce that I break with the school year menus and haven't quite gotten much of rhythm going
I will note that my daughter was diagnosed with Celiac when she was 5 (as well as a dairy allergy), so we eat at home way more than others, and 14 years ago there was way way way less GF "convenience" foods nor could we easily eat out, so it was vital that I got organized for meal planning
I love it! I manage a weekly meal calendar pretty well, but I’m not disciplined enough for this wonderfully efficient approach. And I have a family that “likes spontaneity.” So we eat a lot of eggs. Ha!
Eggs are breakfast/lunch, my 16yo son is an ovovore when scrounging his own meals.
Also I have "cancelled" whatever planned dinner was on the calendar if there's too much leftovers in the fridge. This hasn't happened as much in the teen years, especially with the 16yo having reached 6'6". Leftovers are now sacred for packed lunches.
And I will totally bail on the calendar plan if I am just not feeling the planned meal. Say the weather doesn't match, it's cold and rainy and everyone has a head cold, let's do chicken noodle soup. Or it's an unseasonably warm day in April, let's grill something and eat outside. But the schedule has my back when I don't want to think/decide.
Hello! I use Google Calendar for meal planning too. One thing I find useful is using the function where you can import from a spreadsheet, so we have a big list of meals we all enjoy as a family and create a spreadsheet for a whole month if we find the mental energy - we sometimes create a basic plan for one week and copy that across the month, then change it ad-hoc when we fancy a change. Sounds a bit boring I guess but Friday is always pizza night, Monday is always spaghetti, why fight it ;) - I guess that's like what you were saying about decision fatigue. Having said all this, in practice over the last couple of months we've been quite busy and life has been chaotic, and we've ended up planning only a week or two in advance.
Generally once we have the meal plan sorted, my wife and I share putting the weekly online order together - I are sure we have all the evening meal stuff, and she gets the breakfast/lunch bits. Then we have a shared list on Todoist for stuff like washing powder and toilet paper that we add to through the week and between us we make sure all that is added before the order is finalised.
Ah, Matt, you and your wife are our kind of people! I'm totally entranced by the concept of importing the spreadsheet data, and will be figuring out how to do this soon.
Thank you! I really wanted to be a better correspondent, and I LOVE when I get birthday cards from faraway friends, so I wanted to do the same for the people I like. :) The calendar event for someone's birthday can also serve as a log of what I've sent in past years, and if I see something that I know would be perfect, I can either order it and leave a note on my calendar where it is, or I can leave a link in the calendar description field, and use that when it's time.
SAVED. MY. BACON so many times. The key is to buy Valentine's (if candy is allowed in the first place) that aren't chocolate. So sour candy, lollipops were one of my favorites. And on Feb 15 they're all 50-75% off.
I'm already doing some of this (birthday and deathday reminders), but wow, these are absolutely genius ideas. Love the Valentine one. Thank you for the idea!!
I feel all of this in my BONES. Though, I should also add that my partner participates equally for the things that he notices. Our family agrees that "if it isn't on the calendar, it does not exist!"
Wait, what's this course and where can we find it? I think I'm like... 2/3 of the way in to what you're doing there and it needs refining, I want to pick your brain.
Also, if it helps anyone else: I have shared calendars with my husband for family stuff (we each see where the other is supposed to be), and each kid has a calendar (they're too young to manage their own, my oldest is 8). Both parents see all calendars, and they're all color-coordinated.
This means that I can look at the week's calendar and be like 'Middle Kid has pizza day Wednesday, and Oldest Kid has a dentist appointment which Parent 1 is driving her to on Friday, and Youngest Kid has an emergency apt at that time so it's gotta be Parent 2' in a glance via color-coding, as opposed to trying to figure out which calendar line is for who - because they're still at the age where THEIR appointments rely on and impact our schedules. It seems complex but it DOES work.
Specifically, I'm currently looking for tips on shared task management via google calendar - google does tasks, but not recurring shared tasks that I can find, and that's the current block on my household. We combine it with any.do but that's been bugging - any resources or things you can think of? Because omg, functional systems save lives...
I LOVE the meal planning calendar idea and I'm definitely borrowing that now that I'm getting back into the swing of cooking dinner more often, with a new not-soul-sucking job and a very hungry toddler.
I'm curious how you use Gcal and Todoist together? What kinds of tasks live in one vs. the other?
G:Cal is for A Specific Thing Must Happen at a Specific Day and Time. So birthdays, appointments, that kind of thing.
ToDoist I use for "this is a task that has to happen today or this week but I can choose when it happens. I'm self employed so I control some if not most of my schedule.
The thing I like about ToDoist is that it's intuitive. I can type, for example "Do X the last Thursday of every month" and it'll pop up on the final Thursday. "Every six months: schedule oil change." Or, "Every other Monday, water this plant."
I don't know if they can "talk" to each other without a third party service, though.
I am in a calendar-obsessed industry, and myself am a very punctual person who has traditionally seen punctuality as a virtue. Time is all we have in this world; please don't waste mine.
BUT I took a seminar from a DEI agency on monochronic vs. polychronic cultures, and it sort of blew my mind. (It's a part of a larger education course from the group, and it's excellent, and I'm not affiliated with them besides being a happy client: https://whitenessatwork.com/ ). It made me realize how rigid my own punctuality (and valuation of punctuality) is—I am elevating the calendar beyond my human relationships. If someone is late to meet up with me, I see that as them not valuing my time, and therefore me. But someone who is chronically late because they get caught up in conversations with other people, or even just the moment they're in, are also likely to give that same devotion to *our* conversation and *our* time together.
I'm not sure what to do with this information, besides use it to think through my own reactions when someone is late, and to do my best at work to respect people's use of open time. The fact is, we are in a meetings-heavy time for "knowledge workers" (ugh), and I don't know how we work around that while respecting polychronic orientation, because we're busy. But that's what it comes down to, right? That we're TOO busy, and so our time becomes more valuable than our people.
There are so many attributes that are absolutely part of white supremacy culture that many people in Western culture don't question because those norms have been hegemonic/dominant for so long as to become fully normalized. Of *course* it's better to be punctual, etc etc. De-normalizing is part of what I hope to do with this piece on calendars!
JUST SAYING IT'S VERY INTERESTING THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF RESPONSES TO THIS QUESTION ARE FROM PEOPLE WHO SIGNAL THEMSELVES AS WOMEN IN SOME WAY, JUST SAYING
I REALLY wish the responsiblity for tracking things for work and the family didn't somehow land on me managing the systems so as to avoid managing a crisis - AND YET.
My partner participates actively in household labor and we have a relatively equitable division, but setting up systems to keep things running is on me. I've made clear that this counts as labor and that I'll do it while he cleans the bathroom, at least, which is a partial win.
Right same. I also have a partner who is good at household labor and staying ahead of daily tasks and childcare, but managing our calendar, social schedule and putting systems in place is part of my deal. Without google calendar, it would be so much harder.
My partner also struggles with priorities—if it’s in front of him, he wants to do it right then. It’s great for things like dishes and picking up things, but terrible when we have several competing priorities and are on a schedule. We don’t have time to suddenly dust the ceiling fan bc we need to pack up the baby and put away the dishes before we leave for something, for example.
Omg, same. My husband doesn’t have a reliable to do list system so he has to do things right away or he will forget, and it drives me bonkers.
OMG SAME! Like I appreciate you want to handle a task you see without being asked, but also the baby needs fed and there are dishes to be put away.
He also is really bad at losing his keys and I keep telling him he needs to leave them in one place all the time. That’s what I do! It took him years to finally decide to do it
We just moved house and one of the first things my husband did was set up a place for our keys to live on a bookshelf… so of course I put my keys there when I come home.
EVERY SINGLE DAY he asks me where the keys are and every single day I have to tell him they are in the bowl on the bookshelf where HE decided they would live
My spouse, frustrated with my key-losing, finally bought us Tile. It has made a huge difference. The few times I forget to hang them up, I just click the app.
Same - but my husband won't even use his Google calendar even when I "invite" him to events. So I keep up my home and work calendars on my phone, but if I don't keep up the hand-written wall calendar at home, my husband and daughter don't know what's going on. Drives me bonkers that it's always me, but if I don't do it, no one will. I agree though on the division of labor -- he does other things that I don't do...
I struggle that my husband (it feels almost insincere in this thread to say partner) will see and agree to what’s on the calendar when we add it, but weeks later, act surprised or exasperated because “he didn’t realize that was today,” or “that never made it to his work calendar.” Sometimes it’s a hard same, (my biggest non-relationship struggle is that my company gate keeps our work calendars so almost daily I have to reconcile them both), but the difference is I then need to take on the work of RESCHEDULING or fielding this thing or parts of this thing myself.
Yeah, same. I keep trying to explain how the arranging of everything and organizing and scheduling is an entire job unto itself, but it's been almost 25 years and I haven't gotten far. I wish it weren't so exhausting, but more than that I wish everyone were raised to understand what goes into all of this work!
Yes. This is why I created what I call my "Emotional Labor/Mental Load" Google Workbook and named myself as the CEO/Family Project Manager because once I put it into white-collared terms and systems my husband FINALLY started understanding how much work I do. A previous therapist suggested I do this and I brushed off her suggestion for years because it was once again assigning me more work, but it allows me to remove a lot of anxiety from my brain and onto a Google Sheet that I can minimize in daily life.
The most critical parts of this workbook are the budget sheets and the chore sheets. Once I started tracking literally every dollar we both understood where our money was going. Once I broke down household chores into 110 tasks he understood that "doing laundry" wasn't just one line item but several - "Make sure all dirty clothing and towels are in hampers: inside out if unsoiled, right side out if soiled," "carry clothes downstairs and check lint filters as needed," "Use Spray and Wash on stains", "Hand wash laundry when needed," "Wash laundry in washer (adjust temperature and load size/type first!)," "Hang dry delicate laundry on rack," "Dry rest of laundry in dryer (adjust temperature and load size/type first!)," "Carry dry and clean laundry upstairs in basket(s)," "Fold and put away Laundry".
I think a lot of people would say that I broke it down too much, but as someone with chronic health issues, I need every step to be clear because steps like carrying laundry up and down multiple flights of stairs and folding and putting away laundry can be physically intensive for me.
It's amazing how well the workbook has helped me, if for no other reason than pointing out how little I ask of my husband and how much I do every single day. Suddenly, he feels pretty stupid that he didn't put a new trash bag in the trash can as part of the one chore he was responsible for while I spent my entire evening doing a well-documented list of chores.
I would love to see this template!
Same here! Please!
I will pay money for this.
Hopefully you'll all get a notification with this reply. I go into more detail in a comment on Anne's latest post ("The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture") but in brief: I'm still working on it and will share it as soon as I can!
Is there a way we can compensate you for this? It's work!
My spouse, who is a couples/family therapist, built a survey for couples to look at this. But whoa- I love the idea of an ongoing sheet, and my spouse would probably appreciate being able to share something as well.
This is kind of an amazing idea! I'd be interested to try it in my own life. I was trying to explain some of it to my teen son yesterday and got tangled up in my own overwhelm.
I would pay money to see this
Yep. My husband doesn't keep a personal calendar and never looks at my Google personal/family calendar. He also doesn't look at my "Emotional Labor/Mental Load" workbook on Google Sheets, either, which includes our master budget, payment schedule, day-by-day breakdown of everything we spend money on, birthday and holiday cards/gifts, doctors and medications, 110 regular chores sorted by room and frequency, diary of chores completed, packing lists for various scenarios, and lists of various routines. I resented creating all of these lists and calendars for family project management until I realized that doing so would allow me to let go of so much stress in my brain (and it really has lowered my anxiety!) Now that I consider myself to be CEO/Family Project Manager, weirdly enough my relationship with my husband has improved because HE FINALLY UNDERSTANDS how much work I do. So when he complains when I instruct him to finish one measly chore I can point to the five I did.
Your husband may not look at your Google sheets doc, but I’d like to! Seriously, if you had a shareable version of that I’d love to see it.
Aww thank you! Because I have a lot of personal information in there, I don't feel comfortable sharing the original, but what I'll do is create a sharable template version of it when I have some free time this weekend and let you know when it's finished!
Add me to the list. The last thing I want to do is to make a new chore for you by de-personalizing it ... but if you do it, I'd love to see it!
I would LOVE to see the template as well. That is amazing.
absolutely! thank you!
Let us know how we can compensate you for this!
Yes! Please do.
I would love to see this too! Thank you!
I would also love to see it!
I would also love to see it as well, if you are open to sharing with me too
absolutely! thank you!
Yes, I would pay for this! Would love to see the template!
I think that you probably have a crew of humans who would pay for this!
Add me to the list!! I feel overwhelmed by creating these kinds of things. And somehow keep berating myself for not being more organized and on top of all the fucking things. Thank you!
This sounds amazing! Count me in the list of folks who'd love to see it!
I'm feeling like we need a Culture Study post of a de-personalized Wren's Emotional Labor/Mental Load Workbook. It sounds amazing!
Hopefully you'll all get a notification with this reply. I go into more detail in a comment on Anne's latest post ("The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture") but in brief: I'm still working on it and will share it as soon as I can!
Finally getting into this *because working/studying full time while also parenting 3 kids* and YES to everything you shared. I was less proactive and more reactive in addressing the division of labor in our home, but this is exactly the core issue. I would love the google doc because mine is a list on a shared Note.
Just now reading these comments and I would also love to see it!
Coincidence or not, my sister and I were talking about the emotional/mental labor of running a household last night and how it lands so heavily on certain genders, especially in heterosexual relationships. I sent her that French comic by Emma on "You should have asked" and the mental load of making a household function and taking care of kids and all that. I think about it a lot.
https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
I stopped doing any of his "stuff". I only washed my clothes. There was food in the fridge. I ate dinner when we planned, if he didn't like it, oh well. He stepped up for a while and then complained that none of his other friend's partners did the same. He did nothing and bitched constantly. I told him to find someone else and left. I thank God that we never had children.
I will only have relationships with men that step up. If I don't have a relationship, so be it. I have found a few but most want a Mom to take care of everything. I am not that person.
The complaints comparing partners--that's absurd. He can't have known what was actually going on in their lives, so using it as a standard for you to uphold was not only unfair, but, well, just as asshole thing to do.
I had a friend who was in a situation where she was constantly getting gaslit by her partner, had high standards of cleaning, had her do all the housework, and I finally had to step away from the friendship as she never realized that the problems stemmed from being matriarchal, not an equal. She even said that they couldn't have kids together because he was enough of a child for her. I think the guy was nice, he just was looking for a mom.
I've lost track of the number of times I've sent Emma's comic to people (women) who wondered why they were so frustrated by *everything* around them.
I also need to note that, as the person in my relationship with the attention deficit issues, I am the opposite end of this. My husband carries the OVERWHELMING share of the mental load in our home. Admitting this, in a room full of (female) colleagues talking about the frustration of the weight can be a really tough thing. I acknowledge that it is, hugely, women who carry this load, but neuroatypicality can flip the script on this one.
It's invaluable! I've lost track, too.
Yep - I send people this, and this Captain Awkward column about household chores - https://captainawkward.com/2013/08/22/506-507-it-is-2fucking0fucking1fucking3-so-why-is-it-so-hard-to-divide-up-household-chores/ - all the time.
Damn right:
"Repeat after me: 'Fucking adults can make a fucking sandwich if they are fucking hungry.'”
LOL!
this comic is amazing. thank you for sharing!
Isn't it? I am kind of in awe about how well the comic creator captured a dynamic that's actually very difficult to describe precisely because of the invisibility noted.
Others are noting how, of course, in heterosexual relationships the burden of calendar management is disproportionally one more thing that's piled onto the category of unseen/undervalued "women's work"... as I reflect on my own last fifteen years, while I now am the more flex/primary caregiver/household maintainer parent, not long ago I was in one of those (still disproportionally male) executive roles where there is somebody else (almost always a woman, still) who "manages your calendar" and so of course this is one more of those situations (like all caregiving professions) where the "women's work" assumption is permeable between both the domestic and professional sphere and how I 100% wouldn't have thought about that if my wife and I both still worked out of the home.
Yep, yep, yep. My husband has never had to manage a calendar at work because when he was a lower-level employee his tasks were assigned to him (by his boss's secretary) and now that he's established he has his own secretary to manage his calendar.
One of the most challenging parts of my teenage years in relation to my parents was that my dad changed jobs and started a business where his office was in the house. He’d always had a secretary and he was terrible at things like filing. Filing became part of my “chores” (I think maybe he wrote off my allowance that way?). If I left it to do too long, or he couldn’t find things he just couldn’t handle it; he was holding me to the standard of the adult women whose job it had been before, To this day, I loathe filing and try never to do it.
My dad ensured that I would hate all future office jobs by having me cover for his secretary when she went on holiday. Absolutely loathed the role.
Gradually I tried a few more office jobs, and but myself well enough to not ever try to run someone else's schedule/be an office mom. It has somewhat limited my career path, but I'm okay with it.
lol howwww many conversations of
me: "wait but we were talking about doing x thing on Saturday"
him: "you did not put it on the calendar, how am i supposed to remember" /myfault
we have a pair of friends, and their kids, who actually say "if it's not on the calendar, it's not real". One partner has hard-core trained her family to PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR.
Yes, this! I am the main scheduler in my family and the amount of time it takes to make calendaring work for me (I need google for home + outlook for work + written planner for my brain) + then jiggering it to work for my spouse is enough to make flames come out of my ears. I subscribe to the "he's an adult, he can make his own fucking sandwich" (see above) model of living, but if I want him to show up/don't want to have a disagreement about it for the 10,000th time, well, 🤷🏻♀️
That last point can be a crux of a lot of the issues, and why it's all so maddening.
As the main care-person of our home and a full time employee of a company, I use a digital calendar to offload both the bullshit and important things into one space because my heart and brain simply aren’t that big.
“Follow-up on X’s mammogram results” (care, important) sits next to “All Hands Onsite Meeting” (bullshit, also…important?), which is a little gross.
Also, my teenager refuses to use Google Calendar (outright ignores my invites) bc he says can hold it all in his head. And he’s right…for now.
LOL the point of the calendar is that he doesn’t have to hold it all in his head—the calendar does. This sounds like some early efforts to offload this work on a woman
Oh I KNOW. And not in a “haha, boys… so funny way, what can you do???” way. You better believe this is an ongoing discussion with him about gendered and invisible labor. Thank you for calling that out, you are 100% correct.
I’m a little extra sensitive to these things because 1. My parents heavily buy into gender roles despite routinely not following themselves and 2. My MIL (a SAHP) raised 3 boys and, in some ways, she did a really good job because they are good at pitching in without being asked, cleaning up after themselves, etc. But in other ways, they are clearly used to someone taking care of things for them as evidenced by the fact that all three of them still call mom for input on fairly routine decisions. Luckily, my MIL is great and doesn’t butt in or anything, but it’s a difference I’ve definitely noticed
I was not a calendar person until my ux product spouse and big law wore me down. I think I was more a routine person.
I do use them differently, though. But they shaped my relationship to calendar keeping.
I've been the calendar manager in almost two decades of marriage, but something interesting happened when I moved across the country for a visiting gig for two years. During the first year, my husband accidentally double-booked a visit from an out of town friend the same weekend he had tickets to fly to see me. It was the inciting incident for us to shift to a hard copy family calendar hanging on the kitchen wall that we both put notes on and consult. (I have a work Google calendar with some notes overlap.) It has worked very well, even after having a kid, although the kid is only 2 and I know things will just get more complicated.
I will be sending this to my spouse, who is the person in our house who carries the mental load/does the bulk of the scheduling/keeps the calendar functioning. He has the unenviable task of trying to keep an ADD spouse ( and 2 pretty-much adult kids, also with ADD, when they're around) on the same scheduling page.
I will formally and freely admit that I suck at time management, but not in the sense of necessarily actual poor management, but mostly because I am natural night owl and people demand rigid adherence to their time scripts even in the age of artificial lighting and urban living. (Buddy, shut up about the damn cows, you ain't milking Bessy tomorrow morning. Aside from that the fact, that the vampire jokes have been made many times over the last 35-40 years so howabout you maybe try and come up with something original since I hate all fucking vampires, except Blade.)
On the other hand, I am pretty good at managing a household if allowed to do so (especially when there were the very modern blessings of 24-hour grocery stores).
So: 1) I notice that people, in the era of diversifying sexual orientations actual (or avowed) practical feminism and the like, cling ever more intensely to rigid gender roles, very much including women (even when they are complaining about them). I first encountered that when I was 17 and cooking something and an old lady came in to gawk at me cooking, ask me if I was gay (she was displeased when I said no, since obviously...), and then insisted she never heard of no man cooking. Then I was caught by surprise; these days, I would say something like, 'Have you ever considered fucking off, lady?'
2) I frequently observed the case when a woman in question is 'doing the housework' and then finishes, proceeds to drag out the wooden cross and three long nails. The problem of course, is that if you do those chores for them, they then get angry about it: you've deprived of something to complain about.
3) On the other, I have certainly noticed that people who do the housework (i.e. me, a not-female person) get dunked on for doing the housework. The problem is gender-identified but not about gender per se: cleaning the toilet is low-status work. (See all those dudes who don't clean the toilet when they're single.)
4) On the history of the rigid imposition of time standards, there is nothing better than this episode of Connections by James Burke: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e05 (It was made in 1978, so it totally has 70's hair and giant computers and punch cards and also just about everything everyone complains about with computers and modern life is right there.)
Yes, the tick tock of keeping up with demands was imposed for good reasons and also a number of bad ones.
elm
does the toilet paper goes over the top or underneath the dispenser?
Can I also add that so many women have set themselves reminders to buy and send birthday cards. Does anyone know of any men under the age of 70 who buy and send birthday cards? I don’t know any. I don’t even get cards from friends. Ia this a regional/cultural thing?
It HAS to be, because no one I know does it. We keep a birthday calendar of birthdays of people who we need to get presents for - maybe 10 people total? Including my mom and my nieces? But also my husband gets the presents for his side of the family so that's a shared calendar.
I LOVE Google Calendar. I love it so much. I developed a whole course about becoming a more attentive friend and another about meal planning using Google Calendar, in fact (and stopped course development because while I love G:Cal, I do not love coaching).
Everything that needs to happen goes on my calendar; between G:Cal and ToDoIst, I keep myself on task and punctual, because I never know what time it is, what day it is, or what year. I'm not even sure I qualify with 'time blindness' so much as I have 'time? what even IS that?'
The TL;DR of how I've harnessed digital calendars like G:Cal to run my home and work responsibilities:
1. Meal planning has its own calendar ("Dinner") and my family and I assigned certain days of the week to a rotating schedule of meals (Tuesdays, for example, are tacos, then burgers and dogs, then breakfast, then burgers and dogs, etc) and I repeat meals that everyone likes on a 3- or 4- (or 6-) week schedule. So if everyone loves cashew chicken, I can schedule that for Mondays, repeating every four weeks, and everyone is very happy about that.
2. For being a better friend and correspondent, I put people's birthdays on my calendar, repeat annually, and then add notifications with enough time to either get and send a gift (3 weeks prior) or send a card (4 days prior). I also add things like anniversaries of people's deaths so I can send a card or note to let someone know I'm thinking of them on a sad day.
I've also helped people create calendars to track mental or physical health (color coding all day "appointments" with red/yellow/green) and for awhile I tracked my cycle using G:Cal. That calendar was called "SHARK WEEK."
Oh - another example: when classroom Valentines were my nemesis, I set an annual appointment on Feb 15: "Go to CVS, get lollipop or not-chocolate valentines for next year, put in X spot in closet." Then on Feb 12: "The valentines are in X spot in the closet."
Basically, past me and present me work together to help future me because all of me never knows what day it is.
"Basically, past me and present me work together to help future me because all of me never knows what day it is." - This <3
Are you into the Lazy Genuis?
TLG has my whole heart
All of it. It is becoming a personality.
Meredith, me too. Direct quote to my best friend this morning: "it's unbelievable how much I rely on the LG." (Actually, I said 'sad' instead of unbelievable, but I didn't mean sad at all, I meant... unbelievable.)
Team LG unite! She's such a kind permission-giver.
i would also check out the popcast with knox and jamie (@thepopcast on insta) they're friends with kendra irl and kendra thinks of erin their coo/producer as her muse!
I'm going to have to look this up!
Do it! Such a gentle frame for achieving outcomes
Yes! But also I still feel bad about myself because I’m still more overwhelmed/anxiety ridden to consider myself either fully lazy or a genius, more a deer caught in headlights 80% of the time.
I bet you are doing a lot better than you give yourself credit for. And LG principal of being kind to yourself & your people!
My meal planning calendar is just a bunch of dinner "events" that I shuffle forward in time and organize into a menu for the week. It's so easy. Google Calendar is so powerful when harnessed for good.
You're so right. And I find that at 4pm when it's time to think about dinner, I don't have the brain energy to decide what to make and hunt down the ingredients. If I look back at past menus, or I have pre-populated suggestions I can move around, coming up with a meal plan (and a grocery list) is a lot easier. I do So Much with G:Cal to avoid decision fatigue.
I'm so thrilled to find others who use Google calendar for meal planning!
I have tried to introduce others to the wonders of a meal planning sub-calendar and have been met with skepticism and responses like I'm really odd.
Personally it's life saving, I set stuff to repeat. I started with dinners that went over well (say spaghetti) and thought "I should make this again!" But then I weighed how often the family could tolerate it being served and how often I could tolerate fixing it. So I 'd set an initial interval of 6-week repeat, say. Maybe tweak it after a few repeats, longer or shorter. Build from there.
Currently I have a bunch of theme nights (bean & rice, tacos, soup, pasta, etc) that I do on a 13 week repeat during the school year, which is to say 13week intervals X3. So we only have cuban black beans with brown rice 3x during the school year, everyone is happy when it comes back around.
Summers have such a variation in schedules and available produce that I break with the school year menus and haven't quite gotten much of rhythm going
I will note that my daughter was diagnosed with Celiac when she was 5 (as well as a dairy allergy), so we eat at home way more than others, and 14 years ago there was way way way less GF "convenience" foods nor could we easily eat out, so it was vital that I got organized for meal planning
I love it! I manage a weekly meal calendar pretty well, but I’m not disciplined enough for this wonderfully efficient approach. And I have a family that “likes spontaneity.” So we eat a lot of eggs. Ha!
Eggs are breakfast/lunch, my 16yo son is an ovovore when scrounging his own meals.
Also I have "cancelled" whatever planned dinner was on the calendar if there's too much leftovers in the fridge. This hasn't happened as much in the teen years, especially with the 16yo having reached 6'6". Leftovers are now sacred for packed lunches.
And I will totally bail on the calendar plan if I am just not feeling the planned meal. Say the weather doesn't match, it's cold and rainy and everyone has a head cold, let's do chicken noodle soup. Or it's an unseasonably warm day in April, let's grill something and eat outside. But the schedule has my back when I don't want to think/decide.
Hello! I use Google Calendar for meal planning too. One thing I find useful is using the function where you can import from a spreadsheet, so we have a big list of meals we all enjoy as a family and create a spreadsheet for a whole month if we find the mental energy - we sometimes create a basic plan for one week and copy that across the month, then change it ad-hoc when we fancy a change. Sounds a bit boring I guess but Friday is always pizza night, Monday is always spaghetti, why fight it ;) - I guess that's like what you were saying about decision fatigue. Having said all this, in practice over the last couple of months we've been quite busy and life has been chaotic, and we've ended up planning only a week or two in advance.
Generally once we have the meal plan sorted, my wife and I share putting the weekly online order together - I are sure we have all the evening meal stuff, and she gets the breakfast/lunch bits. Then we have a shared list on Todoist for stuff like washing powder and toilet paper that we add to through the week and between us we make sure all that is added before the order is finalised.
Ah, Matt, you and your wife are our kind of people! I'm totally entranced by the concept of importing the spreadsheet data, and will be figuring out how to do this soon.
it's a bit fiddly to start with (or at least it was for me!) - here's a link and I can share a template if you like https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37118
Thank you so much for these examples! I'm over here furiously taking notes!
Stealing the birthday reminders thing, that is SO so smart!!
Thank you! I really wanted to be a better correspondent, and I LOVE when I get birthday cards from faraway friends, so I wanted to do the same for the people I like. :) The calendar event for someone's birthday can also serve as a log of what I've sent in past years, and if I see something that I know would be perfect, I can either order it and leave a note on my calendar where it is, or I can leave a link in the calendar description field, and use that when it's time.
Your Valentines plan ... OMG.
SAVED. MY. BACON so many times. The key is to buy Valentine's (if candy is allowed in the first place) that aren't chocolate. So sour candy, lollipops were one of my favorites. And on Feb 15 they're all 50-75% off.
birthday reminders have been the simplest way to keep up with friendships, specially now that i dont use facebook as often.
I'm already doing some of this (birthday and deathday reminders), but wow, these are absolutely genius ideas. Love the Valentine one. Thank you for the idea!!
I love keeping track of my friends’ birthdays this way
I feel all of this in my BONES. Though, I should also add that my partner participates equally for the things that he notices. Our family agrees that "if it isn't on the calendar, it does not exist!"
Wait, what's this course and where can we find it? I think I'm like... 2/3 of the way in to what you're doing there and it needs refining, I want to pick your brain.
I hosted them both at organization academy.com but please feel free to ask questions? I'm happy to explain for you!
Also, if it helps anyone else: I have shared calendars with my husband for family stuff (we each see where the other is supposed to be), and each kid has a calendar (they're too young to manage their own, my oldest is 8). Both parents see all calendars, and they're all color-coordinated.
This means that I can look at the week's calendar and be like 'Middle Kid has pizza day Wednesday, and Oldest Kid has a dentist appointment which Parent 1 is driving her to on Friday, and Youngest Kid has an emergency apt at that time so it's gotta be Parent 2' in a glance via color-coding, as opposed to trying to figure out which calendar line is for who - because they're still at the age where THEIR appointments rely on and impact our schedules. It seems complex but it DOES work.
Specifically, I'm currently looking for tips on shared task management via google calendar - google does tasks, but not recurring shared tasks that I can find, and that's the current block on my household. We combine it with any.do but that's been bugging - any resources or things you can think of? Because omg, functional systems save lives...
I use Todoist and export to G:cal. I think its functionality is primo and intuitive.
I LOVE the meal planning calendar idea and I'm definitely borrowing that now that I'm getting back into the swing of cooking dinner more often, with a new not-soul-sucking job and a very hungry toddler.
I'm curious how you use Gcal and Todoist together? What kinds of tasks live in one vs. the other?
G:Cal is for A Specific Thing Must Happen at a Specific Day and Time. So birthdays, appointments, that kind of thing.
ToDoist I use for "this is a task that has to happen today or this week but I can choose when it happens. I'm self employed so I control some if not most of my schedule.
The thing I like about ToDoist is that it's intuitive. I can type, for example "Do X the last Thursday of every month" and it'll pop up on the final Thursday. "Every six months: schedule oil change." Or, "Every other Monday, water this plant."
I don't know if they can "talk" to each other without a third party service, though.
ToDoIst can be added as one of "My Calendars" in GCal, I think the directions on how to add it are in ToDoIst FAQs.
I am in a calendar-obsessed industry, and myself am a very punctual person who has traditionally seen punctuality as a virtue. Time is all we have in this world; please don't waste mine.
BUT I took a seminar from a DEI agency on monochronic vs. polychronic cultures, and it sort of blew my mind. (It's a part of a larger education course from the group, and it's excellent, and I'm not affiliated with them besides being a happy client: https://whitenessatwork.com/ ). It made me realize how rigid my own punctuality (and valuation of punctuality) is—I am elevating the calendar beyond my human relationships. If someone is late to meet up with me, I see that as them not valuing my time, and therefore me. But someone who is chronically late because they get caught up in conversations with other people, or even just the moment they're in, are also likely to give that same devotion to *our* conversation and *our* time together.
I'm not sure what to do with this information, besides use it to think through my own reactions when someone is late, and to do my best at work to respect people's use of open time. The fact is, we are in a meetings-heavy time for "knowledge workers" (ugh), and I don't know how we work around that while respecting polychronic orientation, because we're busy. But that's what it comes down to, right? That we're TOO busy, and so our time becomes more valuable than our people.
There are so many attributes that are absolutely part of white supremacy culture that many people in Western culture don't question because those norms have been hegemonic/dominant for so long as to become fully normalized. Of *course* it's better to be punctual, etc etc. De-normalizing is part of what I hope to do with this piece on calendars!
The seminar I mentioned from The Adaway Group is available for free—it's 60 minutes and worth it IMHO. May be helpful as you research the piece. https://whitenessatwork.com/replay/?mc_cid=cda20dd169&mc_eid=4b544815e0