S3 E54: Valuing your time to prevent burnout
with author and activist Eve Rodsky
Key Takeways
A lot of the pivots I took that actually I thought were my choice were actually forced decisions, based on systemic inequity and sexism. Most of us come to this from our own personal experiences where there's a point where we realize that this whole lie of girls ruling the world women being able to do anything the same as men, where that lie just becomes unsustainable and you can't live it anymore. So either it forces you out of the workforce. It forces you into an unequal marriage. It forces you into, as my one friend said, court ordered custody because of the resentment and rage of that unequal marriage. So something usually happens where we realize this lie that we've been sold.
The skills stay with you, but so do the scars and I will say that having a community or a coach understanding that this was not me, that I didn't have to blame myself. Everything I do is as the ghost of Christmas future, so that the people around me feel like it's never too late. And the people behind me understand what they're up against and to normalize it so they never blame themselves. It's become so part of our identity to give away our time, our most valuable currency to others for free.
There's a delicate dance between saying systemic issues are keeping you down and understanding your individual agency within those systems. So the way I like to think about it as a metaphor . We can acknowledge that we're breathing polluted air, but we still have to breathe just because I'm breathing polluted air I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna breathe. I'm waiting for clean air. If you do that, then you're gonna suffocate. You're gonna die. So I think that you can acknowledge that you're breathing polluted air, that things are harder and they are systemic while also taking agency in your own life.
And so when you start to say why am I so resentful that I'm holding all these cards, right? Maybe it is because I really am sick of wiping asses and doing dishes. Other times it could be I'm losing my identity and I don't have any time off, like you said, however you come to this work, the questions are gonna change your life, whether or not you implement the system.
Other people need their unicorn space and their reason to have that break and that sustained attention for themselves to ultimately get to a version of fair play for them and that's why these books are sisters, their companions, because you will get to this work eventually, if you hear these ideas. This is not self-help. This is a book about mutual aid and what communities around you do you wanna support yourself with so you have this permission to be unavailable from your roles?
That because we're not trained as women to ask for what we need we've been conditioned since birth to be seen and not heard in many ways, right? The idea of a woman being loud and wrong It's pretty subversive, right? I'm allowed to be quiet and wrong, but loud and wrong is not easy. So we're not really trained or conditioned to use our voice, to ask for what we need. So often what happens is that we end up in a rage and resentment cycle where it is hard. There’s really no excuses right now anymore in the 21st century for allowing assumptions of gender to decide and dictate who does what in the home.
So lawyers, we're always looking how society's designed based on how we do governance and legislating. This is basically legislating for the home. It's deciding what governance, what laws, what decision making you wanna do in advance of the decision? I remember one man said to me well, in my home, we just wait to decide who's taking the dog out, when it's about to take a piss on the rug. And I said Fair Play is that, but the exact opposite. Whatever you're doing in your home, I just want people to do the exact opposite of that.
An appropriate version of mental health is to have the appropriate emotion at the appropriate time and the ability and strength to weather it. And so when you think about unicorn space, do we want to have an umbrella for the rain that, that ability and strength to weather it, or do we wanna just drown? And so many of us are drowning because we don't give ourselves that umbrella. We don't give ourselves that space. As you said, to just be with ourselves, be in active pursuits. We give ourselves space to stay small and diet. Maybe to exercise, maybe to dye our hair, things that are in service of other people. But when do we get a chance to just have uninterrupted attention for something we love to do?
It's an understanding that we deserve our permission to be unavailable from our roles. We deserve to vanquish guilt and shame. We deserve to ask for what we need. And then when you're there, when you vanquish those hurdles, you can arrive at a place of curiosity, connection and completion. That is so beautiful. It fills us up. It becomes our umbrella.
Who does it benefit, who benefits when women give away their time for free our most valuable currency? And what I realize is that it doesn't benefit us, what benefits society is to convince women that our time is worthless because then we'll use it in service of others, which is basically the social safety net of America. And so what I realized, what was so dangerous about convincing people that time is money, as opposed to that we just get the same amount of hours in a lifetime as our male counterparts. It has women making decisions about their time that I don't believe serves them.
And that's why so many men are on board because they're like, my life is so much better now because I know my role. I know what I'm responsible for. We check in when we're having high cognition, low emotion conversations. It's a system, it's not a list. And that's ultimately how things start to change for these thousands and thousands of couples and it doesn't have to be that everybody uses the system in the same way. It has to be just an understanding that your time is valuable. That understanding alone changes every single relationship whenever is reported back to me, every single one.
But what I realize is gratitude is an output of the system. It's an output of recognizing that all time is created equal. Then all of a sudden, you say, wait a second, this person's hour is important. And I see their invisible work. I see what they're doing. So gratitude and humor come out of the system. When you start to recognize that when you value an hour of your partner's time, it's so beautiful because you get it back in spades because then they start to value your time.
So the point is that this is a practice. And I think that this is the hardest thing. The truth is that people look at communication, the opposite of a practice, which is highly dangerous. So people were saying to me, I communicate to get my husband, to get him the information about where to go for the pediatrician or I'm communicating with my kid to remind them to charge their phone. Or I communicate with my boss because we have to work on this project. Not one person ever says to me, I communicate with my partner to get better at communicating with my partner. That's what I'm looking for.
The way Seth and I do it now is biweekly. We decide, okay if there's a problem at school, someone gets sick there's an interruption. This is your week. This is your interruption week. I have interruption week next week. And so if it happens on our dime or on our time, it is what it is. And the more you start practicing the better it will get.
I think the most important thing I would say is that it doesn't happen overnight. And the most empowering thing to remember is that private lives are public issues. And that's why advocacy doesn't have to be so hard. For me, it was just one question, right? We all can ask questions. Back to the power of questions. What would this world look like if we treated our homes as our most important organizations? I do organizational management for a living. And so this idea that wow, we don't look at our homes as organizations. We don't look at them as places to invest in to empower ourselves and to learn about, to research.
What I'm asking right now is how do we really put into practice that all time is created equal? And to put that into practice, we need a couple things we need fair pay, fair play, and fair day. And what I mean by that is for an hour in the pediatrician's office, really, to be as valuable as an hour in the boardroom. We have to really invite men into their full power in the home so that women can step out into their full power in the world. And so the question I'm asking is what are the barriers to men for valuing and doing unpaid labor? And there are a lot of barriers to men, this toxic masculinity idea that men have to be the only breadwinners being defined by money. There's a lot of different issues that are holding us back.
We also, as a society have traditionally thought of unpaid care as free. We say things like breastfeeding is free when it's really an 1800 hour a year job. We have occupational segregation where women, when they enter male professions, salaries automatically go down. So there are lots of areas in our country, in America, where we are telling women their time is less valuable than men's time. And then the hardest part is when women start internalizing.
And so I'm fighting really hard for women first and foremost, to assert that their time is equal. And that means never saying to themselves, again, I do more unpaid labor in the home, cuz my partner makes more money than me. It means never saying I'm a better multitasker. I'm wired differently for care. It means never saying in the time it takes me to tell him her, they what to do I should do it myself. It's never saying I can find the time. Because those are all toxic time messages that I want to erase from women's vocabulary so that they can start understanding that we can value our own time.
And then that leads to reverberations out in a way that when we take agency in our own life, that it leads to these bigger systemic issues being righted, these wrongs being righted. So that's what I'm really working on. I'm working on fair pay fair play and fair day. Fair play is what we've been talking about this whole time. About time. Fair day is understanding that we should value caregiving in the workplace and not hide it. And then fair pay of course, is paying women equitably for the same amount of hours in the workplace.
Bio
Eve Rodsky transformed a “blueberries breakdown” into a catalyst for social change when she applied her Harvard-trained background in organizational management to ask the simple yet profound question: What would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations? Her New York Times bestselling book and Reese’s Book Club Pick, Fair Play, a gamified life-management system that helps partners rebalance their domestic workload and reimagine their relationship, has elevated the cultural conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care. In her highly anticipated follow-up, Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World, Rodsky explores the cross-section between the science of creativity, productivity, and resilience. Described as the ‘antidote to physical, mental, and emotional burnout,’ Rodsky aims to inspire a new narrative around the equality of time and the individual right to personal time choice that influences sustainable and lasting change on a policy level. Rodsky’s work is backed by Hello Sunshine—Reese Witherspoon’s media company whose mission is to change the narrative for women through storytelling. Rodsky was born and raised by a single mom in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband Seth and their three children.
Learn more about Fair Play and Unicorn Space at fairplaylife.com
Links to Additional Resources
