Recessions are obviously tough in many ways. Losing a job is demoralizing, and not being able to pay the bills is one of the most stressful experiences a family can have. But there’s also an insidious, long-lasting woe that crops up because of the labor market’s stickiness — a broad mismatch between jobs and skills.

When economists refer to the labor market as “sticky,” they mean that it is hard to move people and price points. While capital flows relatively freely between investments, always seeking out the highest return, people are not interchangeable. People also have a bias against change. So it takes a lot of effort to switch jobs or to hire someone. There is inadequate information — people don’t always know about jobs. The right job may not be open when someone is looking. It also takes a lot of effort to move to a different location, particularly if there are kids involved.

The result is that as the unemployment rate rises, people seek out whatever relatively local jobs they can find that will pay the bills. And so there is a broader mismatch between jobs and skills in a slack labor market. Over the past few weeks, over coffee in the morning, I’ve been reading several stories in the Wall Street Journal highlighting this reality. On June 2, the WSJ profiled Carlos Araya, a former trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange who is now working as a host at the Palm Restaurant in Tribeca. This morning, the WSJ got a little more creative, finding Tim Ryan, a former construction worker now working as a “wolfman” at Clark’s Trading Post, a tourist attraction in New Hampshire. He leaps out of the woods at tourists to add a little element of fright to their visits.

Both men have relatively specialized skills, which their new jobs are not using (though Ryan does seem to have a bit of a “wolfman” appearance — a talent he didn’t know he had). The jobs also pay a lot less than they were earning before. Multiply this by millions of people, and you have an economy that’s going to take a while to grow out of its trough.

But the interesting thing is, while Araya and Ryan took their jobs to stave off catastrophe, many people inflict similar woes on themselves even during good times by not using the tighter labor market to seek out their “dream” jobs — that is, jobs that utilize their core competencies, and challenge them at close to the extent of their abilities.

I’m arguing in 168 Hours that “following your passion” is not just a nice phrase for commencement speeches. There is a business case for being in the right job. Happier people are more productive and creative. They take risks and try new things. They spend time solving problems related to their jobs, rather than coming home and watching TV (unhappy people watch about 20% more TV than happy people). And they perform better. Ocean explorer Sylvia Earle (who I also interviewed for the book) put it best:  “If you do what you love, you’re likely to do that thing the best of all the things you can do, because you’ll do it with passion.”

As usual, her advice was pretty blunt (I’ve interviewed her several times; she’s a bit brusque!). “We live in a country that has latitude to follow your dreams…if you don’t love what you’re doing you should do something else. No one’s forcing you to do it. But people do somehow let themselves get boxed in sometimes for whatever reason.”

Currently, that reason is more compelling than usual — 3.9 million people have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, and have depleted whatever savings they had and possibly their unemployment checks, too. The danger is that the labor market’s stickiness means people will stay longer in these jobs than they should– which will slow the recovery. Solving this problem is one that economists have been trying to figure out for a long time.

One of the major tenets of the time-crunch crowd is that Americans don’t get enough vacation. It’s hard to know, exactly, what is “enough,” but I found an interesting statistic while poking around in Princeton’s alumni surveys done of members of classes having major reunions. Among members of the class of 1994 (that is, people in their mid-late 30s), a full 74% took 3 weeks or more of vacation last year, with nearly 45% taking 4 or more weeks. Another 19% took 2 weeks, meaning that only about 7% took less than 2 weeks.

Note that the question didn’t ask “how many vacation days do you have available?” In recent years, a number of groups have claimed that Americans are leaving vast numbers of vacation days on the table. This survey actually asked how much time people took off. And the answer doesn’t seem to suggest an epidemic of vacation-less Americans.

Of course, one can’t extrapolate from Princetonians to the rest of the country. But if anything, the number of work hours Princetonians claim (with the vast majority working more than 40 per week) would seem to suggest the “workaholism” that the time-crunchers claim leads to forgone vacations. If hard-charging Princetonians are taking their vacations, then maybe the situation isn’t as bleak for everyone else, either.

This is a version of a piece I wrote last June for USA Today; I’ve updated to take into account more issues raised in 168 Hours.

What Moms Can Learn From Dads

by Laura Vanderkam

When Andrew McDade’s first daughter, Ana, was born nine years ago, he and his wife, Eliza, made a very modern decision: He would stay home to raise their kids. The reasons were partly financial — Andrew was a teacher and Eliza worked in finance — and “I’m more suited to it,” he adds.

Indeed, McDade, who now lives in Ridgewood, N.J., took to fatherhood with gusto. But he soon realized there was another part of the job description: dealing with unsolicited maternal advice. Moms “would walk up to me and say, ‘The baby’s head is tilted!’ ” when he carted Anna around in the BabyBjorn. On the playground, they’d check whether he was doing OK. “It was funny,” he says, “They thought, ‘I know better.’ ”

Perhaps they were right. Women still do the bulk of child care these days. On average, full-time working fathers provide about 40% less child care on a daily basis than do their female counterparts, according to the Census’ annual American Time Use Survey of married parents with kids younger than 6.

Families such as McDade’s, in which the dad is the primary caretaker, are still rare. When I interviewed McDade, he ignored a call from a mom friend who then left a message saying, “No national publication wants to talk to me about being a primary caregiver! You’re so special!”

Growing trend

But these families are less rare than they once were. “I’m not the big exception anymore,” McDade says. Not only does he see more men on playgrounds during the day — sometimes by choice, and sometimes in this economy, due to circumstance — there are growing online communities of men discussing parenting issues. This morning’s USA Today features an article on “The New Daditude” with a focus on the DadLabs.com blog. A recent Families and Work Institute study found that fathers under age 29 actually spend more time with their kids on a daily basis during the workweek (4.3 hours) than moms in their 30s and 40s (3.7 hours). Part of this is that the kids of a 20-something guy are likely to be younger (and hence need more intensive parenting) than those of a 30-something woman, but in 1977, younger dads spent just 2.4 hours per day with their kids while older moms spent 3.5 hours. Clearly, attitudes are changing.

As men are taking on primary parenting roles, researchers are discovering that these dads do things a little differently — and sometimes a little better — than more traditional families. While moms thought they had a lot to teach McDade, primary parent dads have four main lessons they’re teaching moms, too:

1. It’s OK to keep a hand in the workforce. Though the number has risen about 50% in the past three years, there are still only about 150,000 “pure” stay-at-home dads such as McDade around the USA. But 2002 Census figures show dads are the primary parent in about 20% of families with young kids and working moms.

This means that the more common experience is that of Jeremy Adam Smith, a dad in San Francisco. When he was the primary parent for his son, Liko, he woke up early every morning to write and consult for four hours before going into daddy mode. As a result, Smith, author of the book The Daddy Shift (which I’ll be reviewing for City Journal) was able to transition into full-time work at Greater Good magazine — at least for a while — once Liko was older. With women, the plethora of mommy-war books present motherhood as a stark choice: You work or stay home.

Men like Smith understand there is a middle ground. “We don’t really have a good word for combining primary caregiving and worker roles,” he says. Many men and women do both. But men he interviewed “feel a lot less anxiety” about maintaining a professional identity.

They’re also, anecdotally, less likely to fall prey to that occasional female tendency to use children as an excuse for permanent retirement. Over at my other blog (LauraVanderkam.com), I’ve written a few times about Linda Hirshman’s 2005 American Prospect article, “Homeward Bound,” which reported that a high percentage of moms whose weddings were covered in the New York Times Style section expressed a desire never to work again. When Smith learned recently that his job was going to disappear due to budget cuts, he told me that he didn’t plan to do a second stint caring for his son full time, in part because the child is now 5. The implication was that the boy didn’t need a full-time parent who was out of the labor force, which I emphatically agree with. But we all know moms of teens who are still not back at work. Anecdotally, again, many of the women I’ve interviewed who have had stay-at-home husbands fully expected their partners to re-enter the workforce once their kids were in school.

2. You don’t have to do the laundry. Moms who take on primary parenting duties often assume they must cook, clean and run errands as well. According to the American Time Use Survey, married, non-employed moms of young kids spend 1.61 hours a day on housework, and 1.41 hours on food prep and clean-up. Some dads excel in these areas. But statistically, married non-employed dads of young kids spend just 0.42 hours a day on housework and 0.64 hours on food chores. Clearly, with men, domestic work and child care are being negotiated as separate jobs.

“When you think about it, the task of caring for kids is logically different from doing the housework,” says Joan C. Williams director of the Center for WorkLife Law at Hastings College of the Law in California. There’s no reason that the person who rocks the cradle also needs to pick up the dry cleaning.

Separate duties

This can frustrate breadwinning moms who assume they’re getting a package deal. But “guys have it right here,” says Williams, who has studied the caregiving arrangements of hundreds of families. If all couples negotiated housework and child care separately, “that would ultimately help a lot of women.”

One of the ways a reduced housework burden might help moms? They might actually spend more time with their kids. This part is fascinating to me: In families in which both parents work full time, dads actually spend a little bit more time playing with their kids than moms. It’s only a few minutes per day, and moms do much more of the physical care of children. But on the other hand, in dual income families, moms spend .91 hours per day on housework and .79 hours on food prep and clean up, vs. .28 and .32 hours for dads. Some housework has to happen, but I also suspect that not all of those .91 hours and .79 hours actually needed to get done — which means that dads may be choosing to play with the kids instead of vacuuming. This is really something dads can teach moms: in the 168 hours we all have per week, time with your kids is more important than a pristine floor.

3. Parents are people, too. Aside from playing with their kids, what do dads do with the time they’re not dusting? “They give themselves more permission to have leisure time — to watch ball games or go out,” says Bill Doherty, a professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota.  He counsels families and finds that “men tend to have almost no ambivalence” about this.

Many moms would likewise enjoy life more if they demanded that their husbands take the kids two nights a week and part of the day Saturday so they could run, shop or whatever makes them happiest. There is plenty of time for leisure in our 168 hours, and time to work, and time for kids too. Which leads to the last point:

4. Kids need both parents. In traditional families, dads tend to delegate most child-related decisions to mom. But women, even when they are breadwinners, are “not willing to outsource their children’s childhoods, even to their husbands,” says Williams. While Smith was the primary parent, his wife worked about 35 hours a week (rather than 70), and took care of their son every morning.

McDade’s wife has now transitioned to a shorter work week and volunteers at school on her day off. This leads to a more equitable distribution of parental quality time. That, in turn, might lead to a more equitable view of life.

“My daughters don’t see the world as mommy stays home and daddy goes to work,” McDade says. “They don’t use the conventional logic.” Plus, they have no cavities and “no big facial scars,” he jokes.

He must be doing something right.

While perusing Real Simple the other day, I came across an ad that perfectly sums up the differences between the modern philosophy of child and house care, and the more dominant one 40 years ago.

The ad was for Solo paper products, noting that “L is for learning. T is for together.” Under a photo of a mom and a preschool-aged kid, the text noted that “Numbers and letters on our new Sesame Street cups, plates and bowls make anytime a great time to learn that “F” is for fun!”

There is, of course, a certain humor to the idea that every moment needs to be primed for learning – even if the kid is just having a snack. But what’s also funny about the ad is that the mom and her kid are clearly in their kitchen where, presumably, there are real dishes. Yet they’re eating off paper plates. Why?

Some would say it’s wasteful, and it is, but here’s the deeper message. The mother sees her job as teaching her son his letters and numbers, not washing the dishes. Indeed, if she’s washing the dishes, she’s not sitting there experiencing that “T is for together.” According to various time-usage surveys, in 1965, married moms spent, on average, 5.1 hours per week washing the dishes, and 1.5 hours engaged in interactive/educational activities with their children. By 2000, this had changed to 1.3 hours doing dishes and 3.3 hours doing interactive/educational activities. The Solo marketers seem to have caught on to that (even if they may be a bit off on the green marketing message).

As I’m writing 168 Hours, I’m getting some fascinating tips. One is to figure out, exactly, how long the things you’d like to include in your life will take. That way, you can schedule in appropriate blocks of time. For instance, say you want to exercise. You decide to take up brisk walking as your activity of choice. How much do you want to walk? Four hours a week in 1-hour chunks would put you far above average in terms of health outcomes. So you look at your calendar and find 4 1-hour chunks where you can write in “walk.” I’m trying to blog more often. I figure this should take me half an hour, three times per week. This is even easier to schedule in.

You can do this with long-term projects, too. One busy attorney I spoke with decided to write a book. Her publisher gave her a 6-9 month time frame, so she aimed for 9 months. She decided this would be a 300 page book. Looking at how fast she researched and wrote her legal briefs, she decided that writing a 300 page book would take (roughly) 900-1000 hours. She calculated that over 9 months (36 or so weeks) this comes out to 25-30 hours per week. So she had to find that time in her schedule (it came out to 4 hours on weeknights and 1.5 days per weekend). Was it grueling? Yes. But knowing that she had carved out a certain amount of time to work on the project vastly increased the chances that it would actually get done.

This essay ran in the Wall Street Journal several weeks ago, and will be partially used in chapter 6 on the changing home economics.

THE JOY OF HOUSEWORK

by Laura Vanderkam

Confession: I’ve never done a proper spring cleaning. Perhaps the warm breezes have inspired me to sweep up my toddler’s Cheerios more frequently. But I had no idea that, come April, I was supposed to vacuum the ceilings, launder the area rugs and scrub all the windows — inside and out — with equal parts white vinegar and water.

At least that’s the procedure described in the newly released “Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Home: No-Nonsense Advice That Will Inspire You to Clean Like the Dickens.” Mrs. Thelma A. Meyer (former Iowa housewife and mom of nine) is the inspiration behind the upscale Mrs. Meyer’s line of natural cleaning products that includes a 32-ounce bottle of all-purpose cleaner for $8.

But Mrs. Meyer isn’t the only one instructing women in the art of intense, pricey cleaning these days. Real Simple magazine spent 10 pages in April urging its upper-income readers to (among other things) make a grout scrubber by mixing fresh lemon juice with cream of tartar. Williams-Sonoma hawks a $135 Australian lamb’s-wool duster set. Caldrea, which sells a $9 Sea Salt Neroli scented countertop cleanser and a $75 “cleaning-essentials set” in a retro mop bucket, promises that these treats will deliver the “premier home cleaning experience.”

There is an irony to this — women who can pay $75 for soap can also pay $75 to outsource the “cleaning experience” to someone else.

But this recasting of cleaning as “luxurious” (Caldrea) or as fantasy (vacuumed ceilings?) was also, in some ways, inevitable. Once, women complained of being chained to the stove. Now, yuppie couples who could eat out every night carefully select Whole Foods heirloom tomatoes for their made-from-scratch pomodoro sauce. The same thing is happening to cleaning. But fret not, feminists — the rise of the cleaning fantasy is actually a sign of how far women have come.

In our era of dishwashers and dryers, we often forget how laborious housework used to be. One hundred years ago, moms of large broods spent whole days bent over washboards and wringers. But even in the 1960s, after Norge washing-machine ads filled Good Housekeeping, housework still vacuumed up the time of women like Mrs. Meyer. According to time-diary studies analyzed by researchers at the University of Maryland, married moms in 1965 spent 34.5 hours on activities like cleaning, laundry and cooking each week. This is the equivalent of a full-time job.

Fast-forward to 2009. Now, according to the American Time Use Survey, women log fewer than 20 weekly hours on these chores. One big reason? Many of us hold paying jobs; moms who work full-time spend a mere 14 hours per week on household activities. But even stay-at-home moms are down to 25 hours — beneficiaries of a spillover change in attitudes that employed women have inspired.

Glenna Matthews, a historian and the author of “Just a Housewife,” once told me: “When I was a young housewife” — nearly five decades ago — “somebody who didn’t like me came over one time and then a week later said, ‘You think you’re so hot, but I’ve seen the dust under your bed.’ ” Now, Ms. Matthews says, no one views dust as “a mark of shame.” As with cooking, some of us outsource cleaning, and most of us minimize it by nixing ceiling vacuuming in favor of quick touch-ups (the equivalent of one-pot meals). Moms use the saved time to work and also to interact with their kids. Women spend more than double the time reading to and playing with their children these days than they did during the must-dust era of 1965. This is a huge victory.

Of course, once you no longer have to clean, you can afford to be nostalgic about it, just as we have elevated our kitchens from hidden galleys to galleries of high-end appliances. A lemon-scented grout cleaner is nice to read about when you’re kicking your feet up with a magazine. And if you spend just 1.3 hours per week doing dishes, as opposed to 5.1 hours in 1965, why not indulge in “liquid loveliness” (as Caldrea touts its $9 dish soap) and turn the whole thing into aromatherapy? Our modern spring cleaning fantasies are much like Renaissance festivals. You wear fancy dresses and ride a pony — but drive your car to get there. Likewise, an $899 Williams-Sonoma Miele Celebration Vacuum does seem worth celebrating if — should the moment pass with the April breezes — you can always hand it over to Merry Maids or let the dust linger on the floor. Or ceiling. Few will judge you for it.

Here’s the chapter outline of 168 Hours (the book). I have written the opening two chapters, and the “personal life” module; now I’m working on the career module, with an estimated finish date for the manuscript at the end of July. That will give me time to edit. I’m looking for more case studies, so please let me know if you’re interested.

168 Hours
1. The Myth of the Time Crunch
You have more time than you think you do. There is enough time in a week to sleep 8 hours a night, work more than full time, spend more time with your kids than the average stay-at-home mom, train for half-marathons, volunteer more than 90% of Americans and still have time to relax! This chapter looks at why perceptions of time are so different than the reality.
2. Your Core Competencies
How do you get the most out of life? Just like successful businesses, by focusing — at work and in your leisure time — on the things you do best, and that others cannot do nearly as well, and outsourcing, ignoring or minimizing everything else.

- The Career Section –
3. The Right Job
Graduation speakers always say to do what you love, but guess what? There’s a business case for it. This chapter looks at what the right job looks like (it involves your core competencies, offers you lots of autonomy and challenges you at close to the extent of your abilities) and offers some hard truths about that job. It doesn’t exist — you’re going to have to create it, whether you work for yourself or someone else.
4. Clearing the Calendar
There are lots of books about work time management –corralling emails and the like. Here’s another approach. Anything done during your work hours that isn’t advancing you toward the career you want is wasted time. This chapter looks at how to get rid of it.
5. Anatomy of a Breakthrough
When you get rid of all the sludge at work, there is no conflict between dialing up your career and your personal life at the same time. Here’s how several people have taken their careers to the next level in the middle of very full lives.

- Personal Life Section -
6. The New Home Economics
It’s a little known statistic. As women poured into the workforce over the last 40 years, the amount of time they spent with their children actually increased. This chapter looks at the shifting home economics, at how moms in particular have drastically cut time devoted to housework in order to spend more time with their children, and how dads, too, have changed over the past 40 years. What do core competencies look like within the family?
7. Don’t Do Your Own Laundry
In 1972, Judy Syfers wrote a shocking essay for Ms. magazine called “I want a wife.” Here’s how to hire one — that is, outsource most domestic work  — so you can focus on your core competencies of work and family.
8. A Full Life
We have more leisure time than we think we do, the problem is that people waste vast hours of it in front of the TV, an activity that does not make you feel truly relaxed. Here’s how people use their leisure time more effectively to get in great shape, make a difference in their communities, or nurture their own souls.

– Conclusions -
9. The Hard Work of Having it All
This chapter features some make-overs of how busy people have taken control of their 168 hours to fill them only with things that should be there.