Hiring a Wife

I got some eye opening advice last year when I asked a friend about work-life balance. She said that the only way that she had seen a woman with children succeed at the top levels of an organization, without a stay-at-home husband, was when women hired a wife. I had never heard of hiring a wife (outside of the occasional mail-order bride news story) so I was confused. What she meant was hiring someone who handles the worry and responsibility of managing your home.

Initially I got pretty ticked off. How unfair is it that men just go off to work and don't worry about keeping their home life running smoothly? Is this just another case of the rich getting richer because they can afford to hire the help that allows them to achieve more at work?

Then I realized that I was relieved to find out that there weren't these magical women out there effortlessly hosting a dinner party for 15, after successfully managing a difficult merger at work. Penelope Trunk is a blogger that I admire that seems to be a woman balancing it all, she recently wrote about having to hire a house manager for $50,000 a year in addition to her nanny, cleaning service, and assistant at work. I don't have an extra $50,000 laying around so I have been using the following strategies for the last year or so to spread the wifely duties around:

• Negotiate up front with my husband about who does what. I spent many years of my marriage assuming that my husband understood that a laundry basket next to the stairs meant that he should bring the basket downstairs and start the laundry. I have tried to stop assuming he is a mind reader and actually ask when I want something done.
• Teach my children to be responsible for themselves. There is a great book called Parenting with Love and Logic that says only one person can really worry about a problem. If I spend my time worrying if my daughter has started working on her school assignment, she doesn't worry about it at all because she knows I have it covered and will nag her at the appropriate time. Letting her be responsible for her own stuff is great practice for the rest of her life and relieves me of a ton of stress.
• Buy Time. My husband and I own a dry cleaning and laundry delivery business, despite this fact, we were still arguing about who would do the weekly laundry. We finally decided that it made sense to drop off our own laundry and have it cleaned and folded so that we got that extra time in the day to have fun as a family. There are grocery delivery services, meal assembly stores, and a ton of people that offer housecleaning and yard care on Craigslist. Figure out what things make financial and mental health sense to outsource. I just signed up with a new service Ask Sunday. They handle making appointments, calling around for the best prices, and any other task that can be completed on the phone or online. In the first month of using the service I got through a ton of things on my to do list that had been there for months.
• Be efficient with your professional work. I have a great but time consuming job at a foundation, write this blog twice a week, and just started a professional development guide business for Gen X and Y. If I spent my days gossiping about American Idol and sending email forwards I would never get anything done. I try to strategize at the beginning of each day to figure out what the most important thing is that I have to complete and then I do that thing right away. I am also working hard on my delegation skills.

So I don't have a hired wife yet but I think I have some pretty good work arounds until Mary Poppins comes into our lives.

If you have tried to outsource part of your life I would love to hear how it is going for you.

Do you want to be a next gen VIP at COF?

New Voices of Philanthropy and Emerging Practitioner’s in Philanthropy’s blog EPIPhanies will be providing extensive coverage of the COF conference from the perspective of next generation leaders. We have assembled a great team of bloggers but we are still looking for additional writers. You can write about one session or all that you attend but we are really looking for a variety of perspectives of the conference. Blogging at the conference is a great way to give back to the field and is a fabulous way for you to raise your visibility as an up and coming leader (and get access to some of the quick to fill up Next Gen sessions). The team is filling up quickly so contact me at tristaharris (at) gmail (dot) com if you are interested.

Real Economic Stimulus

In the next few days Americans will begin to receive economic stimulus checks that are intended to jump start the U.S. economy. Home Depot and Walmart have been salivating at the thought of you plunking down your whole check for a new flat screen TV or a nice shiny stainless steel refrigerator. Some stores are even offering bonuses if you convert your entire check into a store gift certificate. My personal belief is that overspending got our country into this mess and overspending is not going to get us out but the checks are coming so it's time to do some real thinking about how to have the greatest impact with this windfall.

Jaclyn Schroeder is a community minded person that I work with that decided that the greatest way to improve the economy would be to donate her stimulus check to job training nonprofits. I heard this idea and realized that not enough people have been talking about how this stimulus check can be invested in our local communities to have the greatest bang for the buck. Nonprofits are really an economic engine and they have a long term positive impact on our community. Donating to nonprofits that you care about is one way to improve the economy but you could also purchase goods and services from nonprofits to stimulate the economy as well. We have some home remodeling to do and I am planning on purchasing some of the supplies from the Habitat for Humanity surplus store and the ReUse Center, which are both great nonprofits that employ hard to place community members like ex-felons and people with no job history. They also keep excess building supplies out of the waste stream.

Think about if you have the capacity to donate a portion of your economic stimulus check to nonprofits that you are passionate about or if there is a great nonprofit in your area where you can spend some of your stimulus check. Then think about how you can spread this message in your circles of influence. Our foundation's communication's director has been working on developing key messages and getting this idea out to media outlets but I think there is a lot of power in ideas that are spread from friend to friend and from colleague to colleague. I talked to my extended family about this idea recently and I shared the idea with CNN when they asked readers how they were going to spend their stimulus check. The idea will probably have more traction with my family because they (sometimes) trust my judgment and CNN readers don't know me from Eve. So if this is an idea that you can get behind, think about who you can bring along with you. Our communities will be much stronger for it.

The Story of Stuff

I have been doing research on good models of presentations, so that I can stop complaining about the abundance of boring nonprofit presentations and actually do something about the issue. During my research I found this great presentation on the story of stuff by Annie Leonard. Here is a description of this 20 minute presentation:

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever. The video can be found here.

What I love about this presentation is that it uses engaging visuals and a very conversational speaking style to bring an important message to the masses.

Putting out lots of small fires

I am a big fan of batching tasks, which is doing similar things like responding to email at the same time to increase your efficiency, since you lose time when your brain has to switch between doing tasks. I had a great opportunity to practice batching this week because I was out of the office all of last week for an out of state funeral and when I got back I had a ton of messages. I help manage our foundation's scholarship programs and we are right in the middle of deadline time. Students don't seem to have any questions in the months proceeding the deadline but the night before the online applications are due, the questions seem to come out of the woodwork (Procrastination can be a topic for a future post). Since we have a variety of deadlines, I usually spend the days proceeding the deadline fielding a ton of calls and email. Each answer takes 5-30 minutes as I try to figure out what the student's issue is and address it. Being away for such a long period of time meant that I had hours and hours of problem solving in my in-box. Looking at this mound of work I realized two things:
1) Most of the problems, when looking at them from the 20,000 foot view of my packed inbox were remarkably the same. Students (or their parents) were either having technical issues with on online system that were usually caused by not using the right internet browser or they had very general questions about our scholarship programs.
2) Most had probably already resolved themselves with time or were solved by our super capable scholarship assistant whose contact information was on my out of office email responder.

First I talked to our assistant about what questions she had answered and for those that were left I developed very generic answer templates that were either a technical support answer or a link to our frequently asked question sheet and answered a ton of questions in less than 45 minutes. Now I also have a resource that I can use for future problems and it only takes me a second or two to send it out.

This got me to thinking about other questions or issues that come up repeatedly like when are grant deadlines, how does the grant process work, and is my idea a good fit with the foundation guidelines, that might also benefit from more of a 20,000 foot view.

What are questions that you get constantly that might benefit from a more generic view?