Procrastination gets a bad rep and I can see why. I had a difficult work email to write earlier and I spent a half hour procrastinating — reading Huff Post entertainment articles, cleaning up the kitchen, staring at my computer screen and wishing it would write itself. I wasted a bunch of time, during which the email was weighing on my mind, and I wasn’t the better for it.

But I don’t think all procrastination is bad. Or rather, I think it’s impossible to avoid completely. Sometimes you have a task to get done that you completely loathe to start or are intimidated to begin. There are mornings when I come to work, for example, and feel so overwhelmed with what’s on my plate that I need some kind of a a warm-up to roll up my sleeves and get into the working mode. So my new motto is that if I’m going to procrastinate, I’m going to try and be productive about it. Here are my three favorite ways:

• Read an article online, but just one, and hopefully not one related to the task I’m procrastinating to do. I often top to the New York Times health, technology, or style and fashion sections to find something interesting. But here’s the deal: Don’t click on any of the links in or around the article. The rule is just one article, then back to the task at hand.
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We’re full swing into sniffles/cold/stomach flu season and if you have a kiddo, you know how it goes: They get “it” in germ land… I mean, school or daycare, and then the “thing” makes its rounds through your family. Not the most fun thing for a family to share, but that’s just how it goes.

We’ve had a few of these rounds already, mostly with minor colds. Each time when our daughter got sick I put myself and my husband on a regime of tons of vitamin C, zinc, and other unpleasantly-tasting herbal remedies recommended by friends and Whole Foods employees. A few times I think we did this early enough that both of us coasted through the colds much quicker and with much less negative impact than we anticipated.

But my vitamin-blast strategy doesn’t always work and that’s when I end up with a choice I have a hard time making: Suck it up and go to work or stay home.
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I work in technology, which I feel is one of the career fields less prone to old-school stereotypes and norms than some older fields. It’s not all rosy or equal: We have a lot more men developers than women, there are too few women on the executive team, and women occupy most senior positions in areas where they’ve traditionally been more numerous, namely, marketing and HR. But I can’t point to any time when I felt like I was given less chances because I was a woman and generally it feels like if you’re good, you’ll do well, regardless of your gender.

But in a conversation with a friend recently he made a comment that caused me to pause for a bit. He said that women have to work harder to get ahead.

Do you agree?

I started to think through my own career to see if this were true. Right out of college, I worked for a top consulting firm where every entering business analyst worked 18 hours a day, without exception. I then worked in a series of start-ups where everyone on the small founding team busted serious butt, all the time. Then came the world of finance and venture capital and here perhaps my friend was right. I’d often find that my male partners would get support for their proposals without needing to back them up with as much analysis as I’d put in. And too many times I felt like I had to prove over and over again that I was smart enough for my opinion to count when I was at a board meeting with other male investors, who’d known me for years.
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I’m a fairly emotional person. And by this I mean that I have strong emotions (you might call me the opposite of even-tempered) and I express most of them openly. Good or bad, it’s who I am and I guess the good news is that I’m well aware that it’s who I am and can try to adjust to different situations if needed.

Lately I’ve been thinking about whether or not I should be adjusting my tendency to show my emotions at work.

On the one hand, I’m a big believer in just being who you are, wherever you are. Sure, my mom “persona” is different from my “work” persona, and both are different from what I’m like when, say, I rock it out in my Zumba class or catch up with a friend over lunch. But at the core, I’m me, and for me this means being open about my emotions and sharing them with others. And this means that when I’m happy about something at work my colleagues can’t miss it and when I’m stressed or upset about something, it shows.

Don’t get me wrong: You won’t find me slamming doors or crying in my office when things go wrong. That goes beyond showing emotions and into the inappropriate-at-work territory. I have a fairly senior gig and also manage a team — both of these mean that I have to be aware that my emotions affect others and I can’t just let them pour out unedited. But still, my mode of operation has always been to be honest about how I feel at work and this has held true in various work environments, from small companies to bigger corporations.
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Yesterday was Labor Day, which I think is funny because it’s a day most of us spend not doing any work (hopefully!) But I did read something about work in the New York Times that I wanted to share. In this article, the authors highlight a study which “shows that Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before. People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do.”

Yikes.

I don’t think you have to love your job all the time — and sometimes loving what you for work comes with consequences. But if you spend so much of your life working I do think you should get more out of it than just money and benefits. Plus, if you’re unhappy at work, it seeps into other parts of your life, a lesson I’ve learned first-hand, several times over.
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I was in a meeting at work the other day and at one point realized that I was doing three separate things at the same time: Listening, answering emails, and working on a presentation I needed to finish by end of day. To be honest, I multitask, especially in long meetings with lots of people. My rationale is that there isn’t enough hours in the day and I need to get a lot done, so I try to cram every hour with getting as much work done as possible.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that all this multitasking means that I’m not really doing any of the things I’m working on really well. There have been plenty of meetings where I tune out (doing other work) and miss important parts. And I bet my presentation would be better if I didn’t work on it while trying to listen to another one in the meeting.

My multitasking isn’t limited to work. When I cook I often try to catch up on work email when I have a few minutes free from stirring/cutting/pouring, which has often resulted in dishes burning or overflowing. I’ve made a conscious effort to not multitask when I’m hanging with my kiddo (meaning, no answering emails while we’re sitting in the park or having dinner together), but you’d definitely catch me catching up on emails during her piano lessons.
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We were sitting down for a Friday dinner together and as I yawned, my daughter asked me: “You’re tired, right mommy?” I told her yep, I was pretty tired from a crazy day and a pretty crazy week. She gave me a sweet smile that melted me and said: “Your work makes you tired. You’re always tired after you come home.”

Can’t argue with that. It’s not just work, of course, although if my job gets any more nutty I might need a visit to the nuthouse. (OK, I am joking, so my dear colleagues reading this, you’ll have to deal with me for a while yet.) It’s everything combined, the full juggling act that you’re all very familiar with. Most days, it leaves me exhausted and while I try to be as peppy and energized when I get home from work, I can’t hide it from my fairly perceptive kiddo most of the time.

I’ve always been a proponent of being as honest as possible with kids and not trying to color everything in positive colors. But lately I’m worried that the impression my daughter has about my working is mostly negative. I come home exhausted. I complain about having to do work late at night after she is asleep. Sometimes I work on weekends while she plays near me or in her room and tell her that I’d much rather be playing with her. If I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I told her something about my work that was positive.
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Here’s what my typical workday has been like for the past several weeks:

Get into work by 9am (8:45 if the traffic fairies are nice 9:15 if they are in a bad mood). Run into my office, close the door, tune into a Pandora station and do work for an hour or so. (I never check email first thing in the morning. It is one of my favorite productivity tips and I’m not alone — check out Britt’s post about it at the Full Time, All the Time blog.)

At 10am the meeting marathon starts. If I’m lucky, I get out for lunch, but many times it’s a business or work-related lunch. Back to the office to continue the meeting marathon, that usually ends around 5pm. There are days when I literally have no time between meetings and I go from one to the other, my water bottle or tea cup and laptop in tow.

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This morning I had coffee with a friend and was telling her about the last few weeks at work and how they kicked my butt. It was a combination of a ton more work than usual, some changes that weren’t entirely smooth, and some tough conversations I’ve had to have with my colleagues and my boss(es). I recounted one of those tough conversations to my friend and she told me she was surprised how gutsy I was.

Gutsy? OK, I like being called gutsy, but here’s the thing: I didn’t think what I was doing was being gutsy. I didn’t question for a minute whether I should be having these conversations — it seemed like a normal thing to do. And I wonder if I were a guy if my friend would still call me gutsy.
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I almost didn’t write this post because (1) I don’t want to stir up a stay-at-home vs working mom debate and (2) it’s the holiday season and I want to think good thoughts. But I can’t get it out of my mind so I’m going to share it with you guys.

The other day I was in a toy store, buying a few gifts for some upcoming birthday parties. As I was trying to figure out which mosaic set to get for one of my daughter’s friends, two women walked up and stopped near the same display. From what I overheard from their conversation — and OK, yes, I was overhearing actively because I got very curious — one of them was sending out her resume and looking for a job. She was going back to work after taking some time to stay home with her kid(s) and told her friend that she was nervous and unsure about making this change. Her friend asked her why and then I heard something I didn’t expect:

“I feel really selfish doing this… I feel selfish wanting to go and work and not stay at home any more.”

I’ve had or overheard or been part of dozens of conversations about going back to work after staying at home with the kids, many on this very blog and site. Like most decisions parents make, it’s a difficult, filled with lots of emotions of all kinds, and extremely personal for everyone. For some reason, hearing that this woman thought of her decision to go back to work as selfish really struck me.

Is working selfish when you’re a mom?
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