I just watched this video over at Jezebel where the self-help author Marcus Buckingham shares his ideas about how professional women can be happier and succeed in their careers. (You might have seen his writings over at the Huffington Post, where he pontificates on this topic quite a bit.)

One of his basic points — which the blog post at Jezebel also points out — is that working women need to juggle less, outsource more, and learn how to focus on the moment vs always having several tracks running in their heads. (As in, making a shopping list during a work meeting.) At first look, it makes a lot of sense. A lot of my stress comes from the fact that I have too many things I feel I need to do on a daily basis — from getting work done to buying my daughter’s winter coat, organizing my dad’s 60th birthday party, sending a birthday gift to a friend’s newly born son, cooking dinner for the week, and so on. If had less things to juggle I would absolutely positively be less stressed and probably happier.

But here’s the deal: While it would be great to have an assistant do a bunch of these things for me, how many of us can really afford that kind of help? When we lived in New York City and I worked at an insane finance job, we had an amazing full-time nanny. In addition to taking care of our kiddo, she also frequently cooked dinner and cleaned up around the house, although we never asked her to do it. It was an enormous help and a huge, huge stress reducer, but we paid a lot of money for that kind of help and we couldn’t do this for more than a few years. Even more so, I realize how lucky we are to have the jobs that we have and know that a significant percentage of families out there simply can’t afford this kind of help.
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Oh, yes, this post is about the frequently-discussed but not-enough-practiced topic of some “me” time. I’ll come right out and admit that I am one of the worst when it comes to the lots of talk but not a lot of doing category: I talk (and write) a lot about how it’s really important to take some time just for myself but I do it a lot less than I should.

It used to be that I felt so much working mom guilt that I literally would not leave my daughter’s side if she was awake. I’ve since replaced my mommy guilt with some separation anxiety, but it’s still a pretty pathetic reason for why, say, I don’t spend more time with my friends or catch a movie on my own on those nights when we can’t get a sitter.

My next popular excuse for not taking time for myself is that I have too much to do. When my daughter is sleeping - as she is right now, during her nap (yes, we’re lucky, she still takes a weekend nap) - run to catch up on work or cook or clean something or organize something or write a blog post or do something else on my ever-long to-do list. Am I pretty sure that reading a few chapters from a book or checking out my latest copy of In Style while nibbling on some dark chocolate would be really really really good for me right about now? Yes, but the to-dos call my name louder than my “me” time.
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When I lived in New York and worked in finance the question of whether or not to dress up for work wasn’t a question: Yes, looking business sharp was a must. I still have a full collection of suits — well, to be honest, I hate suits, so I only have three — blazers (now those I love), shirts and numerous black pants hanging in my closet from those days. The company where I worked didn’t require us to be fully decked out in suits but you wouldn’t see jeans or t-shirts in the office unless it was the middle of the summer and the bosses were definitely out golfing networking.

Since those days we moved to Boston — a much more casual city, I find — and I now work for a software company where the office uniform is jeans with a t-shirt. (For some reason our group, myself included, are also into funky sneakers, which make our workplace uniform even more relaxed andunformal ). For the first few months after I started this job I was happy to work in such a casual environment. Getting dressed for work required a lot less planning and effort than what I was used to and I was really comfortable during the day.
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After you read what I am about to write, you’re going to think I am either very silly, very stupid, or … something worse, so I won’t give you ideas:

I was away for most of this week on a business trip. Since I am horrible at sleeping on planes and in hotel rooms and since this trip involved a three-hour time difference, I got very little sleep, even less than my usual miserable amount. On top of this, the trip involved some extra celebrating sessions with my team, which — as you might guess — brought with them some alcoholic beverages. When I landed on Thursday after a sleepless five-hour red-eye flight, I felt like I’d been punched all over. I went home, slept for three hours, and got right back up to take my daughter to our work Halloween party.

That night I slept like a baby but I woke up on Friday feeling not much better than before. I went to bed later than I should have — c’mon, I had to have at least one real conversation with my husband after a week of short text messages and “gotta run!” calls. On Saturday morning, I was still exhausted. But… (and now we get to the point of this longish story)
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I’ve never watched Dr. Phil and to be honest, the small bits of the show that I’ve caught here and there, while flipping through channels at the gym, didn’t exactly draw me in. I find him blunt, but in a bad way, intrusive, but in less-than-helpful way, and just overall not a kind of guy whose opinion will sway me. So when I read about the show he did recently about stay-at-home moms vs. working moms, I didn’t rush to YouTube to check it out.

It turns out it was a very good thing. According to the many, many blog posts about it — most filled with the kind of sharp emotion only the mommy wars can bring on — the show would have made my blood boil. One of the guests was Jessica Gottlieb, who is a stay-at-home mom and who often blogs about the wonderfullness of moms who stay at home and the terribleness of moms who choose to work. Apparently she said things like working moms who choose to work (vs those who have to work) are selfish and “I wouldn’t outsource loving my husband, why would I outsource loving my kids?”
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For the first time in a VERY long time I work at a company where many of my colleagues are also friends. Not the best, close, share everything, talk all the time friends, but friends whose company I enjoy and whose lives I’m happy to be a part of.

I’ve definitely had friends from work before. (One of my great life friends is a woman I worked with for five years at a small firm — even though we now live in different cities and don’t see each other often, we’re still good friends.) But what I’ve missed during the latter parts of my career is working in an environment where I have a lot in common with many people — vs. just a few — and where people do spend time together outside of work. I’m now realizing just how important it is for me to be in a social work environment and how much I missed this energy during the last few years when I worked from home.
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When I sat down to breakfast with my kiddo this morning, she looked a little surprised. I realized why: For the past week, we hardly saw each other, not to mention share a meal. My absentee mothering — as I’ve called it during the few moments this week when working mom guilt kicked in stronger than usual — was due to the insanity going on at work.

Early in the week most of us realized that something BIG was on the horizon. Mid-week, some of the management changes were evident and we’d gotten an invite to an all-hands meeting for our group, to be attended by a super-senior manager. By Thursday morning, we were part of a significant corporate re-org and trying to figure out what it all meant for the group and for each of us individually. The usual office politics picked up steam and I think I literally spent 48 hours in a row talking to dozens of my colleagues.
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This is going to be a really short post. (OK, maybe not really short because I am not capable of really short, but short.) And the reason it’s going to be short is because I only have 18 minutes to write it, edit it, publish it, brush my teeth, wash my face, and get into bed.

Starting tonight, I am implementing a 3-day a week 10pm bed time for myself. Which means that three times a week I will get my butt in bed by 10pm. I can read once I am there, but I can’t work, or make to-do lists or look through recipe books (tried all of those and none lead to a good night sleep.)

This is going to be a HUGE challenge for me. On an average night my husband and I go to bed around 11:30 or midnight. We usually wake up around 6:15am, and two days a week I get up at the horrible hour of 5:30am to drag myself (usually cursing) to a 6am spin class. (Those are the days I definitely prioritize working out over sleep.)

Few parents get enough sleep and absolutely no working mom I know thinks she gets enough sleep or even close to it. But I consistently sleep an average of only 5 hours a night and it’s taking a serious toll on me. I’ve tried to deny it for a long, long time and make up excuses like, “Oh, I’m still young, I definitely can deal with this for a while” or “I have no other choice because of the amount of work and home stuff that needs to get done.”

But I need to cut down on the excuses because I am really really really tired and cranky and not my peppy self way too often. The lack of sleep is definitely affecting my mood, my energy levels, and how I am doing at work. I need to stop the denial and just admit it:

My name is Nataly and I need more sleep.
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When I read about a new study showing that working mothers and fathers often resort to unhealthy eating because juggling work and family leaves them little time and energy to prepare healthy meals I wasn’t going to write about it. At first glance it read to me like another indictment of working families — i.e. here is one more thing we’re not perfect at.

But then I changed my mind because I think this is a really really really really — did I write enough reallys? — to address. Just like you always hear the advice that a happy mom (and dad, but we usually tend to talk about moms here) leads to a happier family I firmly believe (and I am sure there are tons of studies that show this, although it’s kind of common sense) that a healthy mom leads to a healthier family. So if we skip meals, resort to unhealthy snacks instead of nutritional meals, and constantly eat on the go — all things that this study found that working parents do — our kids are more likely to pick up these habits. Not a good thing.
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I’ll just get right to the point:

My husband and I just returned from a 9-day trip to Berlin and Prague… during which our daughter was being spoiled silly by my mom and my grandparents and becoming an amphibian by spending hours swimming at the beach. Yes, this is the “make you jealous” part: We a vacation by ourselves, no kids involved.

I won’t lie, it was pure heaven. It’s been a really tough year on many fronts and both of us really needed a break and some time to just hang out with each other, without our work or laptops nearby. (This is a good time to mention my heroic achievement during the vacation — no Internet, no work, no checking emails, zero. I doubted very much that I could actually pull this off before we left but I realized just how much I needed to disconnect as soon as we stepped into our beautiful hotel room in the center of Berlin.)
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