Professor Mommy

On one of my favorite work-life books

I’ve written a lot about the productivity authors that I find overly idealistic and insufficiently inclusive—i.e., the majority of the mainstream, bestselling productivity authors out there. So many of them don’t acknowledge how the difficult realities of life—especially all the work of caregiving—affect how we work. In response, I’d like to highlight, in few posts over the weeks to come, productivity books that I in fact really like. There are a number of them—often books that are slightly off the beaten path.

First up is Rachel Connelly and Kristen Ghodsee’s book Professor Mommy: Finding Work-Life Balance in Academia (2011). While this book is aimed at mothers in tenure-track academic jobs (and to be honest, most of its content is indeed specific to this audience), it contains a few insights into productivity that are applicable beyond academia and beyond motherhood. I’d like to draw those out here.

To begin, the book must be lauded for truly acknowledging the messy, busy lives of its target audience. The authors start out with a story about leaking breastmilk during a job interview, which gets us right into the heart of the intersection of motherhood and work. The book goes on to give advice about topics such as navigating subpar parental leave policies, work travel with children, and the degree to which you should talk about your children at work.

The book gives solid advice for getting work done given the realities of having children to care for. As someone who has experimented with creative sleep schedules—in part because my wakeful children demand it—I find the following passage particularly intriguing:

Because Kristen was a single mom for much of her time on the tenure track, she rarely had long chunks of time to really concentrate on research (except when on leave). When she did extended writing, Kristen sometimes worked between the hours of 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., when the house was quiet, her daughter was asleep, and there were no distractions. She tried to make up the sleep by taking power naps during the day, or by going to bed really early with her daughter at 8:00 p.m. (easy to do if you do not have a partner). The key was that she used her most productive brain time for the thing that required the most extended concentration.¹

I think the key here is not that we should all be working at 2:00 a.m. I certainly have no plans of doing so! The key is that this unusual schedule worked for Kristen Ghodsee in her life as a single mom to maximize both her research productivity and her time for her child. I find inspiring the lesson here that what works best for us may require breaking free from expectations and doing something truly wild, like waking up at 2:00 a.m. to work. Indeed, a lot of our expectations around work schedules and work habits come from a patriarchal understanding of work and society. Freeing ourselves from these expectations (primarily possible if we work in a flexible job) could be essential to figuring out how to juggle work and life in a world in which we don’t have stay-at-home spouses to handle all of our family’s care work.

Connelly and Ghodsee also give strategies for doing research when you don’t have big chunks of time:

Another strategy that Kristen still uses is the topic-sentence outline. Once she has an idea for an article, she will sit down and do a detailed outline that includes the topic sentence of each paragraph that she needs to write. Then she uses the little bits of time she manages to scrounge throughout the day—the hour between classes, the bus ride, and the twenty minutes in the morning while her daughter gets ready for school—to write one paragraph at a time. The first draft of a paper written in this haphazard way is usually a mess, but it does give Kristen a starting place.²

In this passage I love the acknowledgment that small bits of time can be useful, even for cognitively demanding work. This is precisely what I advocate with my concept of tending: we can make progress by doing just a little bit here and there, regularly. We can also imagine that writing paragraph-by-paragraph “in this haphazard way” is a way of moving forward despite the difficult circumstances of a few semi-distracted minutes between meetings: e.g., not waiting for the perfect long chunk of time to write the perfect page of text. This, too, is at the heart of what I write about in this Substack: don’t sit around waiting for fully formed perfection to manifest itself; just get to work. Because, indeed, once you have a draft of your writing, however disconnected and messy, you can work step by step to make it better. (It’s hard to make better a draft that you haven’t written yet, by contrast.)

There’s a lot of sage advice in Professor Mommy that is more targeted to academics, as well as some solid productivity advice that is more general (don’t spend your best time of day on email, for example). What I particularly like about the two passages I quote above is that they suggest adapting work to life, rather than adapting life to work: i.e., making work work for us in our rich and full lives. Working in the middle of the night is for Ghodsee a way of prioritizing both when her concentration is at its best (in the quiet of the night) and her need to care for her child for much of the rest of the day. Similarly, writing during the few minutes between activities is a way of making work happen during the lulls in our lives—rather than making life happen during the lulls in our work.

In order to work while also caring for ourselves, our homes, and our children, we must—as much as possible—abandon outdated expectations around what work looks like. We must work in a way that fits our bodies and our circumstances.

1. Rachel Connelly and Kristen Ghodsee, Professor Mommy: Finding Work-Family Balance in Academia (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 118.

2. Connelly and Ghodsee, Professor Mommy, 118–19.