If there's one wish I had for every working mother, it's for her to do less.
Whether that's in the form of removing things from her to do list, or through having more resources around her to take stuff off her plate, or by setting up and maintaining hard boundaries that protect her from overwork - whatever the form, the wish I have is ultimately, for us as a collective of individuals, to do less.
Why?
I hear it all the time. We're tired; there aren't enough hours in a day; we "do it all"; our partners don't do enough; there's too much on our plates; we can't afford the help to cook/clean/nanny for us. Whatever the reason, the overarching theme is that we have too much with too little. And so, my oversimplistic solution, is to do less.
...the overarching theme is that we have too much with too little.
Okay but really, what do I mean by "do less"?
At surface value, doing less is easy to understand. We simply do less than what we think we have to do. We let go of a few things, we drop some proverbial balls, or we deprioritize our list. If we were to go deeper though, we can understand (and possibly feel this understanding more than we are cognitively aware of it) that the act of doing less implies that we're falling short of some sort of imaginary line of success/productivity/enoughness.
So when I say my wish is for us is to do less, what I mean at its deepest meaning and core, is for us to be okay with doing less because we don't correlate the quantity of what we do with the value we feel about ourselves (read that again). In other words, I want for us to be able to do less without sacrificing how we feel about our own self worth.
There's a critical untangling between worth and productivity that needs to be done to achieve my wish of "doing less". This is a complex process that often requires going deep into our layers of what forms our self concept. However, as a harmony facilitator who supports working mothers in achieving work-life harmony, one thing I often offer overburdened working mothers to accelerate the "doing less" is one simple concept: leverage.
If we were to take a zoomed out look at our lives, we can use a simple mathematical equation to shift the productivity:worth ratio from a self-focused, inward-looking lens, to an outward, outcome-oriented lens. Here's what I mean:
Old You ("doing too much") might have an equation that feels like this:
I'm productive because I'm constantly busy = feeling accomplished and feeling good
In contrast,
New You ("doing less"):
I'm productive because everything I needed to get done was done = feeling accomplished and feeling good
Did you catch the nuance? If you zoom out, you'll see that productivity does not mean YOU have to be doing it all. If you could align to a definition of productivity as meaning "things that needed to get done got done" (removing YOU out of the equation), you can see that what I mean here is leverage. Leveraging resources, tools, systems, automation, and other people to complete the things that you wanted to complete. You're still productive, but this time, through leverage, and not through grit and white knuckling it. You're focused on achieving the outcome, and not on producing the outcome. Make sense?
Through a small shift in how we view productivity, we can begin to challenge ourselves to do less, without completely threatening our concepts of self worth.
Let's do less, shall we?
If you'd like to learn more about leverage and how to use it to achieve work-life harmony, re-mom now offers Harmony School, a workshop for couples and partners on how to leverage each other to create an equitable and productive split of duties in the home. This means reducing the invisible labour, domestic workload, and default parenting from one parent and shifting it to a more equitable split between two partners in a household. This is a form of leverage that is often underutilized within a household (and oftentimes chalked up to gender roles, societal expectations, and the general feeling of "impossibility" to get partners to participate more within the home). Join an upcoming workshop to leverage your partner for equitable homes, and increase your capacity for overall work-life harmony. Visit re-mom.com/harmonyschool to learn more and register for the next workshop.
Comments