I Know How She Does It
I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam
“This book is about how real people have created full lives.”
While 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam teaches you how to think about your time differently, I Know How She Does It shows you “how successful women make the most of their time.”
Yes, there are days that you may leave the house before your kids get out of bed, and you don’t get home until they’ve gone back to bed for the night, but there are also days where you leave the office early to watch the softball game, followed by ice cream cones in the park, dinner together, and an extra long bedtime story.
Discussions about time management don’t always have to be bleak laments about how little time there is.
In I Know How She Does It, Laura shares the stories and time logs of real-life women who make it work. They have impactful careers, fulfilling family lives, time for themselves, date nights with spouses, outings with friends, and even time for hobbies and exercise.
What’s Inside I Know How She Does It?
Part 1 Of I Know How She Does It: The Mosaic
“I want to tell a different story.”
I Know How She Does It is based on “a time diary study of 1001 days in the lives of professional women and their families.” Laura called this study The Mosaic Project.
You have to look at the big picture, not just the individual tiles (minutes or hours) that make up your days. Your life as a parent is far more than the one time you missed your daughter’s ballet recital because you were out of town for work.
Her goal was to show that there are lots of successful women with fulfilling careers and balanced lives outside of the office. They have busy families but still enjoy time for hobbies, volunteer work, and quiet Sunday afternoons dozing in the hammock.
As Laura says, there are 168 hours in a week. Even if you work 50 hours a week and sleep 8 hours a night, you still have 62 hours left in the week. Sixty-two hours is a lot of time.
If you are intentional with your time and willing to be creative, you can fit a lot of life into those 62 hours. The book is full of time logs that show you how other women do it.
Part 2 of I Know How She Does It: Work
“Many of us have space to lean deeper into our careers if we wish, but stories and assumptions—that leaning in will require harsh trade-offs—have great power over our lives… But we can change our stories if we want.”
The section on work covers strategies for building a career while still maintaining balance at home. One example is split shifts.
Split shifts would be doing things like working at your office until 4:00, leaving to get home and have dinner with the kids and get them to bed, then spending another couple of hours on work after they’ve settled down.
Other ideas include working remotely, working some on the weekends to free up weekday hours for things like school events, or being “strategically seen.” The “strategically seen” concept is positively brilliant.
Part 3 Of I Know How She Does It: Home
The Home section is filled with ideas for making the most of your time at home.
For example, don’t come home, crash on the couch, and binge on Netflix. Be as intentional with your evening hours as you are with your work hours. Plan things you can look forward to. Plan things to do with your children. Something as simple as a picnic in the backyard brightens up the evening, makes special memories for your kids, and is more fun than the routine dinner around the table.
Speaking of dinner, another suggestion is to let go of the idea that quality family time must include dinners together. Maybe for your family, having breakfast together every morning would be a better fit. There’s no law that says dinner is THE meal all families must eat together to reduce the possibility that your children will end up living under a bridge as adults. Do what works for your family.
There’s a wide variety of time studies and suggestions in the Home section. The key is to adapt the ideas so they work for your home and family.
Part 3 Of I Know How She Does It: Self
This section covers the importance of taking care of yourself. Getting enough sleep, getting enough exercise, and finding some downtime.
My favorite was Laura’s response to the idea that getting up at 5:00 am to workout was impossible.
“So here’s an idea: don’t set the alarm for five a.m. daily. Yes, daily rituals are nice, but they’re not the only strategy for building a productive life. Stop looking for a time to exercise that is perfect every single day. Instead, look at the whole 168 hours that make up a week. Maybe just one day a week you can get up half an hour early, go for a half-hour run, and compress your morning routine by a few minutes to make up the time. Maybe on a different day, you can take a brisk walk at lunch. Then you run around the soccer field for thirty minutes on Saturday during your kid’s ninety-minute practice.You exercise on Sunday at some point while the rest of the family is passed out on the couch in front of the TV, not requiring your presence. None of this happened at the same time every day. But it’s still occurred four times per week, which is not bad at all.”
When you look at working out that way, rather than a rigid get-up-early mentality, it makes exercise seem much more doable.
The Self section is filled with practical ideas and wisdom like the above.
The Problems With I Know How She Does It
There is definitely an element of white collar privilege in I Know How She Does It.
The time diaries collected are from professional women earning more than $100,000 a year. Of course, a lot depends on cost of living where you live, but very generally speaking, that much income leads to having some disposable dollars. Not all the strategies used by these women are doable for everyone.
In one example, one suggestion for finding some additional “me time” was a woman who elected “to sit in Panera by herself on a Friday morning just to recharge.”
Another woman took a half day off “to go to the mall when she needed to decompress” as she wasn’t “getting much done at work, so it was better to realize that and go relax in the mall food court than to sit at her desk.”
These two examples won’t be much help to the woman who is working for an hourly wage. If you’re expected to be in an office on Friday morning to answer the office phones, recharging at Panera isn’t an option.
Nor would it be an option for a stressed out nurse to leave the operating room and head for the mall to take a much-deserved break.
And a hotel housekeeper probably can’t afford to take time off and lose her hourly pay just to relax in the food court.
But here’s the thing.
“There is much to learn from seeing how people use their hours to achieve their goals… it reminds us that we have the power to shape our lives too.”
You can use what you learn from reading how other people do things and adapt it to fit your circumstances.
For example, I can’t afford to hire a house cleaner either. But what I can do is pay my teenagers to take charge of extra household chores for me—aside from their regular “you-live-here-too-so-you-need-to-pitch-in” chores. It’s a win for all of us. They make some extra pocket money, and I have fewer things on my to-do list.
You just need to say, “Hey, that’s a great idea. How can I make that work for me?”
Final Thoughts on I Know How She Does It
If we listen to the media, to our family and friends, to ourselves, it’s very easy to believe that we don’t have enough time for anything. For work. For family. For ourselves.
But Laura Vanderkam shows us we have enough time. Plenty of time. We just need to change how we think about our time and be more intentional with our plans for it.
If you want to see how it’s possible to have a successful career, fulfilling family and home life, and still have time for yourself, order your copy of I Know How She Does It today.
Other Recommended Reads
If you enjoy I Know How She Does It, you might also like:
168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam
Start Finishing by Charlie Gilkey
