The Persistent Pain Point Blocking Moms From Deep Work

00:00:00.000 | So let me, I'm going to get your take on, you can be a proxy for my audience here,

00:00:05.120 | on a complaint I get a lot that I feel that I don't fully understand it, though I'm very

00:00:11.600 | empathetic to it. So I'm going to ask you to sort of, on behalf of half of my audience,

00:00:16.080 | maybe unpack what's going on here. So I talked about this on the show, but I get this complaint

00:00:21.040 | a lot about the concept of deep work in particular. And it's typically from working moms,

00:00:27.280 | and it's typically either the form of the complaint is either,

00:00:31.200 | how can you do deep work if you're a parent? Or easy for you to say, but deep work is only

00:00:40.880 | possible if you have a partner doing all the labor. And there's a lot of emotion behind these

00:00:49.280 | complaints. And so at first, in my typical sort of guy technical mindset, I was, well,

00:00:55.600 | logically speaking, I do not understand these complaints. Deep work is just talking about the

00:00:59.200 | relevant, in the hours that you're normally working already, regardless of your situation,

00:01:03.200 | just allocating the email checks and minimizing context shifts and batches,

00:01:09.680 | making optimal use of cognitive. It says nothing about how much you should be working or whatever.

00:01:13.680 | But I quickly learned, now there's something much more deeper and emotional and true going on here.

00:01:17.520 | So I'm going to put you, you can help me proxy for this. Yeah, I mean, but what, so maybe educate

00:01:24.640 | me a little bit on where's the pain point? Because I want to understand well, when there's a real

00:01:32.800 | sort of visceral pushback to the idea of deep work from the context of being a working parent,

00:01:41.920 | in particular, working mom. Yeah. I think that the deep pain point relates to sort of the envy of

00:01:53.360 | often husbands, fathers who have a setup that is more conducive to longer stretches of work time.

00:02:00.560 | What's ironic though, I think is that part of why it's hard as a mom, and I'm saying this with a

00:02:07.760 | lot of stereotypes in hand, and I recognize that and I apologize, is that part of what makes it

00:02:12.160 | hard to have those long stretches is the guilt that interrupts. I could put my children in much

00:02:18.400 | more childcare and my husband would be fine with it, but I feel really uncomfortable about it.

00:02:22.480 | And I certainly felt desperately uncomfortable about it when my children were infants.

00:02:26.880 | And that wasn't something he struggled with. Now, whether that's socially driven,

00:02:31.520 | by the lessons that were taught as young women and young men, as we age, or whether it's

00:02:36.080 | biological, I think is a really complicated question to answer. I think there's evidence

00:02:39.680 | on both sides, but the fact of the matter is moms tend to feel more guilty about time away

00:02:44.560 | from their kids than dads do just on average. This isn't always the case. So I think that's

00:02:51.200 | one of the tricky points. And so when you use the word deep work, people automatically think

00:02:56.080 | it's many hours, although you define it in a much more nuanced way that you can do deep work in

00:02:59.840 | shorter chunks of time. And that's really what I advocate in my book is figuring out how to more

00:03:05.040 | mindfully drop into work, how to use some of the behavioral science that we know is really helpful

00:03:10.080 | for getting into the mode of deep work more quickly and efficiently. And also recognizing that

00:03:16.480 | while task switching or role switching does cost us something in terms of the energy that it takes,

00:03:22.560 | the more we do it, the more we practice doing that role switching, the more facile we get at it.

00:03:28.400 | But also, it's a both and. Also, we don't want to do it too much because then we really do end up

00:03:33.040 | with what Bridget Schulte calls confetti time, time confetti, I think it's the term. So it's

00:03:39.200 | complicated. It is emotional. And it can feel like an injustice. Like, why do I feel so guilty when

00:03:46.000 | you can sort of be free to go to work? And I think that is the part that I'll at least just speak for

00:03:51.360 | myself that I used to get very, very hung up on. So. - That's really useful, actually. I mean,

00:03:57.360 | I really appreciate that. I mean, just to echo it back, but I think I understand what you're saying

00:04:01.040 | is, no, it's not about the physical act of deep work, which is just, oh, I have an hour to work.

00:04:07.360 | Like, why don't I focus on one thing for the first 45 and then do the small things at the end

00:04:13.680 | instead of interleaving it? Like, yeah, anyone in whatever their situation is can change their ratio

00:04:18.240 | of deep to shallow work. But it's the reality, which I point out. So fair enough. Like, I make

00:04:23.280 | this point in my book that the more deep work you can do tends to be correlative to career success.

00:04:29.840 | So more deep work is better than less. Men have an easier time doing more deep work than women

00:04:34.960 | for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual ability to do the work.

00:04:40.720 | That is very frustrating. I mean, if someone said, okay, here's the thing,

00:04:44.400 | people from most states get to work their jobs normally, but people from Maryland have to,

00:04:51.840 | whatever, call in to the department of whatever every hour or so. And there's all these other

00:04:56.960 | things that they put on citizens of Maryland. It's like taking up our time. I would be really

00:05:01.360 | frustrated. Like, look at all these people in Virginia. They're getting more done. They're

00:05:05.760 | not as interrupted. It's not fair just because I live in Maryland. So if I'm echoing that back,

00:05:10.320 | right, that actually is very helpful. And I could imagine that being, I can empathize. I mean,

00:05:16.560 | I can kind of understand as best I can in my position. That kind of sucks.

00:05:20.800 | - I think it does. The other thing to think about is, what do we reward in our society? And what

00:05:27.120 | we do reward tends to be accolades and more lines on your CV and more money. And one of the things,

00:05:35.280 | one of the gifts I think of working parenthood, and this is particularly true for mothers,

00:05:39.600 | because they tend on average to be more involved in the parenting role, is that we tend on average

00:05:46.320 | to be stronger in the relational department, in the empathy department, in the perspective-taking

00:05:50.720 | department, in the patients department. And those skills are really useful at work. They just tend

00:05:54.240 | not to be rewarded or acknowledged as being as important. And so I think that is another piece

00:06:00.320 | that can get under people's skin. And I think for very good reason, and I don't really know what to

00:06:04.720 | do about that, other than to recognize that they have inherent value, even if they aren't

00:06:09.360 | acknowledged with a promotion or a pay raise. Although I think that they should be.

The Persistent Pain Point Blocking Moms From Deep Work

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