Most of the chapter titles in 168 Hours are fairly vague (“A Full Life”). But one is quite specific: Don’t Do Your Own Laundry. The chapter covers getting all sorts of household chores off your plate, but I put laundry in the title because I think this is the household task that could most benefit from some different thinking.

According to today’s Wall Street Journal, “Americans Use Too Much Detergent” (it’s called The Great American Soap-Off, in the print version), and one of the reasons we’re using too much detergent is we do a lot of laundry, and hence think of ourselves as experts. Some 78% of household launderers claim to do 9 loads a week, which comes out to more than 450 loads per year. We have certain ways we do laundry, liking to customize the experience, which often involves using the amount of detergent we think is right (and usually isn’t).

But this raises an interesting question: why do people try to customize their laundry experience? I think it’s because it’s generally such a bad chore — Sisyphean, if you will, in that the clothes just get dirty again — and we do so much of it that we’d go crazy if we didn’t try to imbue some meaning into the task.

Personally, I hate doing laundry. If you do, too, then you should try to spend as few of your 168 hours as possible doing it. How? The same ignore/minimize/outsource strategy you can employ with any other task that doesn’t fit into your core competencies, or that doesn’t bring you joy.

Ignore: The most cold-turkey way to get laundry off your plate is to simply stop doing it. Eventually, other family members may realize that you aren’t doing their laundry any more, and they may start doing it themselves. Or they may not, and then this will be an interesting exercise in problem-solving for everyone!

Minimize: This is probably the more practical approach. While some household management books recommend doing small loads of laundry every day to stay on top of things, I think this is ridiculous. Then you are always doing laundry, always using a spare 15 minutes to fold shirts instead of doing something more meaningful like writing in a journal or reading with your kids, and people become used to wearing the same two pairs of socks. Buy enough socks and underwear that you can go weeks between loads. Re-wear clothes. Jeans in particular don’t need to be washed nearly as often as some people wash them. Especially if you’ve got little kids, they will get their shirts dirty immediately after you put them on, so there are no bonus points to be gained for the fact that they were clean for 2 minutes at one point during the morning. I re-wear exercise clothes. What do I care if my shirt smells at the start of a run if it’s just going to smell more 5 miles in? Using these strategies, my family (which includes 2 small children) requires about 4-5 loads a week, rather than 9, though I’m not entirely sure about this because of the third option:

Outsource: As I write in 168 Hours, I started outsourcing my laundry as a 23-year-old single gal, sending it to the wash-and-fold around the corner. In Manhattan, there’s one of these on every corner, but I have found people who use laundry services in cities from Philly to Honolulu (many dry-cleaners offer this as a side line). If you really hate doing laundry, this is not a bad option. If you have a regular babysitter, you can negotiate doing the kids’ laundry into your rates, or if you use a cleaning service, you can ask about adding this in. Or figure out what it would cost to use a laundry service, and then offer some percentage of this to your teens to take on family laundry duties.

Yes, outsourcing laundry costs money, but doing it yourself isn’t “free” because it takes time. Time is worth money. You may be able to figure out a way to make more more money, but none of us can make a week have more than 168 hours. When faced with scarcity, economic efficiency dictates that we allocate a valuable resource to its highest-value use. Time, viewed in this light, should be allocated toward nurturing our families, nurturing our careers, and nurturing ourselves–not toward doing 9 loads of wash a week, unless you love laundry, or have chosen it as a profession (and hence it is your core competency!)

My column, “Handmade is the new black,” ran in USA Today this morning. Though mostly about the rise of the craft economy, it relates, broadly to some themes in 168 Hours.

First, in this moonlighting economy, with technology platforms that lower the transaction costs of bringing together buyers and sellers, it is more possible to augment a family budget than it has often been in the past. Much of the frugality literature talks about using time to save money; I tend to think it’s just as possible to use time to make more money (indeed, it’s possible to make a lot more than you can save). Craft platforms like Etsy enable this.

And second, Americans increasingly want to do creative work. One tale in this column is from Alina Hayes, a potter, who used to be in medical billing. The problem, she told me in an interview, is that she was quite good at medical billing! That made it hard to quit her job. But medical billing didn’t make her happy, so eventually she did decide to move on, figuring that working 40 hours a week at a job that doesn’t fulfill you is, more or less, wasted time. Now she spends her working hours throwing ceramic cafe au lait cups and vases and bowls on a wheel in her garage and she is much happier.

One of the tips I learned while writing 168 Hours is to figure out exactly how long any given activity will take. Then you can look at your schedule and figure out if you have that amount of time available. If you do, and you want to do it, great. If you don’t, you either say no, or rearrange your schedule to create enough open blocks of time to make it happen.

I have currently been taking this approach to something that’s been on my “List of 100 Dreams”: run a marathon. I’ve done 2 half-marathons and a 10-mile race, but never 26.2 miles. Runner’s World recently named the Big Sur marathon as the if-you’re-going-to-do-only-one-marathon race, and after some cheerful teasing with my little brother, we elected to sign up over Christmas, because it was selling out quickly.

However, I still hadn’t made the decision yet if I was really going to do it (I was prepared to forfeit the entry fee; I just didn’t want the decision made for me by failing to sign up before it filled). I decided to take the 168 Hours approach to this decision.

First, I looked for a 16-week training plan that looked doable. I settled on the FIRST program, which advocates 3 purposeful runs (speed-work, tempo run, long run) and 2 days of cross-training each week. I calculated exactly how long that would take. The speed run would take 1 hour, the tempo 1-1.5, and the long run 2.5-4 hours (we started with a 13-miler and do 4 20-mile runs in the course of this training program). So that’s a max of about 6.5 hours of running, plus 2-hours cross-training, for 8 hours. I was already doing roughly 5-6 hours of exercising per week anyway, so this only required an additional commitment of 2-3 hours. That seemed doable.

The key stumbling point, though, was fitting in a 3-4 hour run, as my usual exercise pattern was to do 1 hour most days of the week. I didn’t think it would be fair to take that time out of my weekends, since weekends are really family time for us.

So what I decided to do was consciously take one morning off of work per week. If I planned my work activities in advance and budgeted my time carefully, I was willing to bet that working 3-4 hours less per week for a few months would not end my career. I understood this was a risk, as I’m already taking Friday afternoons semi-off as a calculated exercise in building in more leisure and kid time (I say semi-off because Sam is sleeping so I’m writing this now, on a Friday). With a newborn who stays up late, I’m also not back to having my evening shift. So I’m working more like 35-40 hours rather than the 45-50 I’m comfortable with.

But a marathon is on the life list, and soon Sam will be older and sleeping more and so I decided that I could make it work. And so, for the past 3 weeks, I’ve been following the training plan, and blocking the 3 runs into my schedule. One day per week I get up in the morning and haul myself down the East River, down around the tip of Manhattan, up through Battery Park, and up along the Hudson River, then turning around at a specified point (Halfway = 6.5 mi, then 7.5 mi, then 8.5 miles yesterday) and running back.

With this level of planning, I feel like the marathon goal is possible. One never knows for sure — injuries and illnesses happen. But I’ve been able to fit the training in without feeling too rushed and harried. Indeed, it’s kind of fun to toss out casually at a work meeting “Oh, I ran 17 miles yesterday” and see the looks.

As promised, I am finally starting to load some more “time makeovers” up on this blog! The good thing about putting these online is that there are no space constraints. I guess that’s a nice way of warning readers that this one is long…

Today’s comes from a young lady named Stephanie Graham. She wrote me this past summer and said “I am always in search of effective time management.  Here is my situation.  I have aspirations to be a internationally known photographer, right now I am at the stage of ‘emerging’ www.missgraham.com . I have worked in the film industry for three years and have recently made the switch to being a career adviser for photography students at Harrington College of Design (Chicago, IL). I made the switch with hopes of receiving a consistent paycheck to pay off loans and debts from  undergrad and to free more time for me to work on my photography career, while still being in a creative atmosphere and helping others. (In my past life I swear I have been a life coach).

“The issue is finding the time to build my photographic brand while being a successful advisor, and exercising (I need to lose weight) and of course being a social 26 year old.  I have 1-hour commutes into work each way. I also sit on the Chicago/ Midwest Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers and chair a committee.  I am involved in 2 other organizations and I would love to do more with my time.  But how? I spread myself so thin, and I would love to figure out how I can be more on the move.”

I wrote Stephanie back and said that I’d love to learn more about her schedule and her aspirations. I had her keep a time log for 168 hours. A little more than a week later, she sent the spreadsheet back and said “This was very interesting.”

It was interesting. She helpfully color-coded the different spheres of her life. The first thing I noticed is that not nearly enough of the squares on this Excel file were blue for “sleep”! She only slept 41 hours during the week in question, which is about 8-15 less than she should have. She got up quite early—at 6:30 on Monday, and Wednesday even earlier because she had an appointment with a trainer at a gym. There is nothing wrong with getting up early, but in Stephanie’s case, it was problematic, because she never went to bed before midnight, and sometimes as late as 2am. It was also problematic because there was no real need for her to get up as early as she did. Despite being up Monday at 6:30, she didn’t actually get on the train for work until 9am. While working out with a trainer can be a great option, she was driving an hour to get there, which didn’t seem like a good investment of time. If she worked out closer to home she could sleep an extra hour and still get a full work-out in.

Looking at her schedule, it seemed like Stephanie had a really tough time getting going in the morning. Some days it took her two hours to get ready for work, though she could do it in half an hour (as she did one day when she decided to clean the house with the extra time). I figured this was because of her low energy levels because she wasn’t getting to bed on time at night. While she had some good things in her evenings – such as a movie night with girlfriends and a nutrition class—generally these were over before 9 or 10. She just didn’t get herself into bed.

While she didn’t work too long hours – around 40 – the 19 hours she spent traveling really ate into her quality of life. She’d leave the house at 9, get to work at 10, work until 6 or 7 to get in a solid day, then spend an hour commuting home. By 8 or 9pm, having only slept 6 hours the night before, she’d be exhausted, and didn’t have the energy to work on her photography business. On weekends she also didn’t seem to be terribly motivated to work on the business after such draining weeks.

I had Stephanie answer some questions:

1. What do I like most about my schedule?

“Really I don’t like anything about it,” Stephanie said. “It seems that I have no time or that I am crunched for time.  I am a free spirit and I feel that I have to conform to a routine. I don’t like that at all.”

2. What do I want to do more of? (spending more time improving your photography craft? Exercising?)
“Having time to get my business up and running is key for me right now. I guess I want to have more time to just be a 26-year-old single girl.  Meaning I want to be able to go out more, and socialize and network.  Even with my boyfriend by the time I get to his house it’s way too late to go anywhere. I want to be able to have a schedule that is freeing yet has a little bit of routine, and maybe not such long days.”

3. What do you want to get off your plate?
“Nothing. I know that my photography, my regular job, exercising, and socializing are all things that I need to do to not be a hermit or a lame.”

4. I spend way too much time on ___ (fill in the blank)
“The DAMN train or commuting.  I really need to move into the city. Yet I have to get all of my credit cards paid off before I go anywhere. I am just over the debt.”

A week or so later, I wrote back to Stephanie:

“I really appreciate your taking the time to do this. Looking at your schedule and your emails, I had a few thoughts for you.

“The first is that you’re really not getting enough sleep – and this may be contributing to general feelings of unhappiness about your life, which is actually pretty good! You seem to have a relatively flexible job (i.e. you can get there later some mornings), a boyfriend, time to hang out with girlfriends, plus some great stuff like taking a nutrition class and working out with a trainer, and spending time with mom.

“You can make up some of the sleep time on weekends, but I also thought there were a few ways to do better on this front during the week. You seem to be spending a relatively long amount of time getting ready in the morning (or at least some mornings). Monday really looked that way, but Friday you spent a lot of time cleaning in the AM, and even Tuesday was a 90 minute transition. If you can streamline the AMs (put out clothes the night before? Figure out a different and easier hair or make-up routine?) this would let you sleep 20-30 minutes more and still get to work at the same time. You also seem to be doing what a lot of us do in the evenings — puttering around (a.k.a. “downtime”) rather than just getting in bed. It’s easy to get distracted by TV, computer, etc (or my downfall, flipping through the Pottery Barn catalog!) Commit to getting into bed by 11:30 or so most weeknights, and I think you’ll find that you have a lot more energy for tackling other things.

“Since you are a free spirited person, the daily grind of commuting is definitely going to tough to deal with. Since it’s not really an option to move at the moment for financial reasons, you need to figure out a way to treat this as found time. The reason I asked about a seat and a laptop is that on the 3 days you are commuting by train, you can use this additional 6 hours as business-building time. On the weekends, think through what projects you’d like to accomplish for building your business, and then break them up into 45-minute to 1-hour chunks. If you need internet access for them you can get a mobile connect card or something for your laptop, but maybe some you won’t (writing website copy, figuring out marketing ideas, etc). But even just looking through photography magazines or books will help you treat this time as valuable, rather than a total pain.

“I thought it was great that you were doing a nutrition class and working out with a trainer.” [Laura’s note: though when we looked closer and realized the trainer was an hour away, we decided this one could go]. “Could you and your boyfriend try to do something active together when you’re hanging out? There are a million options from running to playing tennis to going for a walk rather than sitting on the sofa, but this is a good way to get more physical activity into a week (which will also make you feel more energized). It’s also a good way to feel closer.

“You also said you wanted to spend more time networking. This is really going to be a matter of finding events or people you want to meet and then challenging yourself to invest enough time in it. I’ve been trying to commit to one event per week — for you, this can be as simple as a lunch with another photographer, or as elaborate as a convention, but will require you to get in the habit of looking for such opportunities. Probably the school where you work has some leads on such things, so use your time there to ask around. This is really just a matter of planting seeds. Over time a commitment to doing something network-building related once a week will really pay off.”

After another few weeks, Stephanie wrote back:

“First of all I wanted to thank you again for including me in this project. It was a real eye opener and I began using your tips right away.  11:30pm is my new goal time to make it to bed.  I have realized that if during the week I get to bed later than this it’s going to be a problem for me in the morning so I am trying to train myself.  I noticed immediately a difference in my fatigue. I quickly learned that as much as I wish to be a hustler, I need to take care of my body as well. LOL.
“I’ve eliminated some of these things since I have read your email. I am no longer working with my trainer. The commute to getting to him was tough and contributing I feel to my not getting enough rest. Since I had a long commute going home from our sessions. This has now left my Monday evenings open for me to take care of whatever I want, even if I am just relaxing catching up on my reality shows (Love! The Hills!)”

There had also been a bit of a lifestyle change in that Stephanie was now single, so the boyfriend was out of the picture. “However we did start to go on walks. So that was good while it lasted,” she noted. “So I am busy still but I have I feel room to play with.  I am not so to the minute, if that makes sense.

“I am trying to get better about my morning routine. I’m not putting big barrel curls in my hair in the AM as if I do it one really good time it seems to carry over for a few days to my liking. I sort of get home late still so I am pulling clothes out in the morning. We will see how that goes.

“I have yet to get internet access for my laptop, but I am reading articles and making notes and such for my businesses and utilizing my iPhone more, getting used to returning emails on it.
“I’ve decided to spend my lunch times at the gym , but what’s good about that is if I commit to going to the gym I can leave my lunch open for having more lunch appointments or whatever.”

As for professional networking opportunities, “1x week seems like a lot for me to commit to right now with a full time job but we will see how it goes.” However, she was hitting 2-3 a month, which was great. “I am already on a photo organization board so I go to all of our events but I want to commit to maybe 2-3 outside of that.”

She enjoyed the process of being accountable for her time. “I found this greatly helpful and it really had me look at some things that I was doing and give myself permission to simply not participate in some things.  I am a busy girl and I need to choose wisely what I decide to do so I don’t burn myself out.”

That last line is the philosophy of 168 Hours in a nutshell! We should choose what we commit ourselves to wisely. When you do, there is plenty of time to have the life you want in the 168 hours you’ve got.

I was fascinated to read a guest post at Lisa Belkin’s NY Times Motherlode blog from Dr. Simi Hoque of the University of Massachusetts. Prof. Hoque will be returning to work shortly after maternity leave, and was fretting about the fact that she wouldn’t see her daughter much during the week, since the nanny would be there from 9-6:30, and her daughter went to bed at 6pm and woke up at 7:00am, going down for her first nap at 8:30am.

At first blush, this does sound rather problematic. But there are several assumptions about time built into this question that are probably common, and that keep people from thinking work and involved parenthood are compatible in the 168 hours we have. The assumptions:

1. Work has to occur from 9am to 6pm.

2. Work has to occur away from your house.

3. Babies need to go to bed at 6pm and wake up at 7am, and perhaps the biggest one…

4. 90 minutes is a paltry amount of time.

The first two assumptions are pretty fascinating, considering that Hoque is a professor (of environmental engineering). Academia is a lot more flexible than, say, police work, where you have to report to your shift. As long as you show up for your classes and departmental meetings, and get enough work done to publish frequently and pull in the grants, most people aren’t too concerned about your whereabouts at other times.

That means that Dr. Hoque could work from home maybe 1 day a week, and thus see her baby during her breaks. She’d still need the nanny there, of course. Working from home is NOT a good way to save money on childcare. But that would give her a bit more family time.

She could also shift her working hours to grade papers and edit journal articles at other times. She could, for instance, leave by 4pm two days per week and then make up those 2 hours in the evening after her baby goes to sleep. As it is, I have such night owls at my house that I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I had 5 hours in the evening after my kids went to bed!

But that, of course, brings us to the third assumption. There are definitely some schools of thought that advocate putting children down to bed very early, and some children do need more sleep than others. But 13 hours straight seems like quite a bit to me (or maybe I’m just jealous… my children have NEVER slept that much. Ever). Several people in the comments section suggested that Hoque have her nanny put the baby down for an additional nap in the afternoon, so she’d stay up until 8pm (or even 9pm). This would clearly solve the problem of them not seeing each other. As it is, over the next few months, her daughter will naturally stay up a bit later as she needs less sleep, and so they’ll get their evenings together.

But even if none of this changes — Dr. Hoque’s work hours, or her baby’s sleep schedule — the last assumption is still worth addressing. Ninety minutes of full-on time with your children each day during the work week would actually not be horrible. If Hoque was up and ready (though probably not dressed for work, as babies can destroy your clothes…) at 7am, and fed her daughter and then played with her for an hour straight through until 8:30, with no newspaper reading, no puttering around the house, no checking email, no TV, this would be better than some parents who have much more available kid time manage to accomplish.

The average stay-at-home mom of pre-school aged children, according to the American Time Use Survey, only spends about 50 minutes per day playing with them, and about 8 or so reading with them (and a few more minutes on educational activities). They obviously spend much more time around them (and I’m guessing the interactive figure is higher for very little children), but often doing other things — housework, watching TV, running errands, reading a magazine in the bathroom while the kid is taking a bath, or else the child is napping and not available for interactive time anyway. An hour each week day would actually be a pretty good show, considering that they will spend almost all their time together on weekends.

Michael Pollan has been making the talk show rounds discussing his new book, Food Rules. I’ve been meaning to write about him for a while. I read the brilliant Omnivore’s Dilemma last summer, and then downloaded In Defense of Food to my Kindle while I was in the hospital waiting to be induced (then the Pitocin kicked in and let’s just say I stopped reading for three excruciating hours until Sam was born. But since it was impossible to sleep in the hospital I did wind up reading much of it before my discharge).

Pollan’s books raise the very good point that we, as omnivores, can choose what to eat. But many of us don’t think about this question very much. In the past, we simply ate what our culture (“which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother” writes Pollan) and the seasons and location dictated we eat. But now, with factory farming and a global economy producing more food than we know what to do with, our choices should probably be more judicious. Judging by our growing national girth and the environmental destruction mass-produced food can cause, perhaps we should be a lot more judicious.

Pollan has several guidelines, a key one being to “eat food.” That is, food that your grandmother would recognize as food. There are no bonus points gained for nutrition claims on food-like substances produced by the “Nutritional Industrial Complex”; the fact that Go-Gurt has calcium does not make it healthy. We would probably all benefit from eating more fruits and vegetables. With this, I agree.

But Pollan’s messages go beyond that – and here is where I start to worry. He suggests that the grocery store is not a good place to buy groceries, though he recognizes that you need to buy some things there. He just thinks that you should also start visiting farmers’ markets frequently. He waxes eloquent that a great thing about buying CSA produce or from farmers’ markets is it forces you to hunt for new recipes and experiment with them.

All these things take time. Whose time? Historically, food purchasing and preparation have largely been women’s work, which is why “culture” means “mom.” Married moms in dual-income couples who work full time spend about 6.5 hours per week on grocery shopping and food prep and clean-up (their husbands spend 2.73 hours). While this is only about an hour a day, the problem is that it is often a very valuable hour for a working mom – in the morning as you’re packing lunches, or in the evening when the kids are home but you’re trying to get a meal on the table. While there is plenty of time in 168 hours to work full-time and spend massive amounts of time with your family, making the pieces fit means that these valuable hours when you are all home and awake are not a great time to be doing housework.

But Pollan advocates that women should spend more time on these chores, since these choices “have real consequences, for our health and the health of the land and the health of our food culture.”

He is cunningly persuasive in an era in which middle-class motherhood is prone to fundamentalism—to suggestions that if you’ve ever given your baby formula you’ve failed. And so, on some of the email lists I’m on, people fret about how to afford CSA produce and organic food on a budget, or the time they spend hunting for recipes that incorporate ingredients they have, or about how they spend an extra 3 hours each week processing the CSA produce so it won’t go bad. They spend time every morning packing lunches rather than send the kids to school with lunch money, even if brown bag lunches tend to get soggy while the school lunch will be fresh and hot.

The trouble is that these choices have other consequences. While I truly believe that we have more time than we think, time is in the larger sense a non-renewable resource. Time spent doing one thing is time not spent doing another. I could spend two hours going to the farmers’ market every weekend and an hour cooking every night. Indeed, I sometimes enjoy cooking elaborate dinners. But I usually don’t do it, for a simple reason: I believe it’s more important to spend that time interacting with my family or doing the professional work I love. I fail to see what would be gained by having women scale back their paid work (thus depriving the larger economy of their talents and insights, which often create opportunities for other people, including men who are supporting their families) in order to spend hours cooking. I fail to see what is gained when women try to do everything and thus feel guilty and stressed for time, or else do their paid work and the cooking but ignore their families. As it is, one reason I believe that fathers in 2-income families wind up playing with the kids more than moms do is that moms spend so much time doing cooking, cleaning and errands that these chores, rather than play, characterize big chunks of their family time. I think this is a mistake—much like in the Gospels, when Martha is obsessed with cooking for Jesus, while Mary actually sits and listens to him.

Jesus noted that Mary had chosen the better option. And so, my husband and I cook very simple preparations of veggies and meats and side dishes like couscous or instant rice from the supermarket. I’m sure the 5-minute couscous has nefarious ingredients, and so do the pre-marinated meats. Since my toddler is in a phase where the only fruit he’ll eat is pineapple, I buy pineapple—in season or not. It beats huge fights over dinner, especially since he’ll move on to a new fruit soon enough. This morning we all sat together eating cereal and talking. I definitely think this was a better use of my time than standing over a pot of steel cut oatmeal stirring, while family life went on without me. It is good to eat together whenever you can. If this means eating good enough food rather than good food, so be it.

Over the past few years, Marc and Amy Vachon have found themselves in the public eye for what, judging by some of the comments on blog posts about them, seems like a pretty controversial and non-traditional lifestyle. Nope — nothing you need to cover the kids’ ears for. What’s gotten the Vachons a cover story in the New York Times magazine, plenty of TV interviews (and being profiled by me in the Huffington Post in 2008), is a commitment to being equal parents to their two kids.

Now in a new and very compelling book, Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents (which I blurbed), Marc and Amy discuss this philosophy. At first blush, it sounds like what women have been clamoring for all along. Who wouldn’t want dads to do more of the endless bathing and laundry and making school lunches that moms do? Many women who first hear about ESP wonder “where they can sign up… their husbands,” as the Vachons put it.

But true ESP requires just as much change from traditional motherhood as fatherhood–sometimes in ways that many moms would find difficult. For starters, as the Vachons write, moms “have to believe, just as strongly as any man, that breadwinning is your responsibility.”  Many mothers assume that having children gives them a license to either opt out of the workforce or not treat their careers very seriously. We get excited about a career’s flexibility, rather than its income potential, and we fail to negotiate raises because we do not see earning a family-supporting income as a critical part of motherhood. But if we aren’t willing to take on this responsibility, why should men take on more at home?

Now, obviously many women do put a lot of energy into their careers. But even in these cases, many mothers undermine the notion of equally shared parenting by assuming they know best on the homefront, and that their way is the right way. They then want men to do half of the work as they dictate it be done, and get upset when fathers don’t exactly embrace this subservient role.

To take one example, how often do small kids need to be bathed? What happens in some families is that mom thinks the answer is “every night” and dad thinks the answer is “twice a week.” Now, dad may be entirely willing to do half of what he thinks is the right answer. That is, he’ll give the kids one bath a week. But if mom doesn’t compromise on her number, that means she’ll bathe them six times and he’ll do once, and she’ll be bitter that he isn’t pulling his weight. But “every night” is not necessarily more right than “twice a week.” ESP couples have to hammer out a right answer for their family, not giving more weight to mom’s preference in situations where it’s not a matter of safety or medical necessity. Then they execute against the family answer, splitting this definition of the task.

It’s the same thing with housework. The usual stereotype is that women have higher housework expectations than men, and probably in many families, this stereotype has some grain of truth. But again, ESP requires mom to give up the idea that she’s right. Dad may have a point that there’s no reason to pick up a playroom nightly because the kids are just going to get it dirty again the next day. He may completely get behind the idea of cleaning it up once a week with the kids helping out, and turning it into a game of basketball (points scored for drilling the toy box with that Duplo car from across the room). ESP requires mom to acknowledge that if she wants it done more often, she either needs to give dad a compelling reason, or do it herself and admit that this added housework is simply leisure time — because doing it is a preference, not a necessity.

Marc and Amy make it clear that ESP requires shifts from fathers, too (my profile of the Vachons was written in a bit of a wistful tone during a somewhat rocky period as my husband and I were transitioning toward a better split of work and kid time). They have to develop childcare competence, sometimes learning the hard way to check that the diaper bag has diapers before heading out. Dads can’t just assume that whatever they deem necessary for their jobs is a family priority, though I disagree with the Vachons that choosing part-time work is a great option for both partners. There still aren’t that many great part-time jobs out there. Going from, say, 45 hours per week to 35 hours often involves severely limiting one’s career options, and earning much less than one would proportionally assume. As long as you have a reasonable amount of flexibility in choosing your hours, having both partners work 45 or so hours per week is perfectly compatible with having lots of family time. There are 168 hours in a week. If you sleep 8 hours a night (56 per week) and work 45 or even 50, this still leaves 67 or 62 for other things.

Still, the Vachons do a great service in pointing out how modern parents can be fully involved in raising their children, building their careers, and maintaining their personal passions. As I note on the jacket (quoting from my HuffPo piece), “the Vachons are the leading edge of true social change.”

Over at The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington and Cindi Leive (Glamour’s editor-in-chief) have taken up a new cause for the new year: getting American women to sleep more.

“Americans are increasingly sleep-deprived,” they write, “and the sleepiest people are, you guessed it, women. Single working women and working moms with young kids are especially drowsy: They tend to clock in an hour and a half shy of the roughly 7.5-hour minimum the human body needs to function happily and healthfully.” (That is, they clock about 6 hours of sleep per night).

The reason? According to sleep expert Michael Breus, whom Huffington and Leive quote at length, “They have so many commitments, and sleep starts to get low on the totem pole. They may know that sleep should be a priority, but then, you know, they’ve just got to get that last thing done. And that’s when it starts to get bad.”

It sounds like a good story. Unfortunately, it’s completely untrue. The figure that working moms of school-aged kids get only 6 hours of sleep per night came from the National Sleep Foundation’s 2007 Sleep in America poll, whose results are written about here.

There are two problems with this stat. One is that the NSF commonly partners with drug companies such as sanofi-aventis, maker of Ambien, one of the country’s most popular sleep drugs. They definitely have an interest in more people thinking they are sleep deprived than actually are. But the other problem is that the NSF’s annual poll is a “quick response” survey. The pollster simply asks you how many hours you sleep and you tell him. But people are notoriously unreliable at remembering these things, or averaging out exceptions (if you slept 6 hours 3 nights this week and 8 hours the other 4, you sleep over 7 hours a night — but you’ll probably remember the 3 lousy ones and say 6). In a culture in which sleep deprivation is a sign of how important you are– or how dedicated you are as a mom– it’s very easy to underestimate.

A more accurate way to figure out how many hours people sleep is to have them keep a time diary. This is exactly what the annual American Time Use Survey, done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, attempts to do. Averaged over thousands of Americans, it paints a very different picture of our sleep habits. The average American sleeps 8.3 hours on weekdays and 9.3 hours on weekends.  That doesn’t sound like a nation that’s “increasingly sleep-deprived” to me.

Of course, one could assume that that figure is tipped to the high side by students and retirees — surely working moms sleep a lot less, right? Not really. Married moms who work full time and have kids ages 6-17, according to this chart, sleep 8.09 hours per night. As for women being more sleep deprived than men? Married fathers who work full-time and have school-aged children actually sleep slightly less than their female counter-parts, though they, too, clock a full 8.0 hours per night.

This does not mean that individual women aren’t sleep deprived. It’s entirely possible that Cindi Leive only sleeps 5 hours per night. Though is that because of her work and her young kids, or is it because of her “wicked TV addiction” (which she fesses up to in the post)? For most women, I’d wager it’s more likely to be the latter. Despite Leive and Huffington’s assertion that women often feel that “they still don’t ‘belong’ in the boys-club atmosphere that still dominates many workplaces” and so “they often attempt to compensate by working harder and longer than the next guy,” married moms who work full-time clock about 6.5 fewer hours of work per week than married dads who work full-time. In other words, they are not working longer and harder, on average, than the next guy. In fact, they’re working a lot less.

So why do these stats get repeated by very smart women? There is the danger of thinking one’s own personal experience is universal, of course, and a woman who runs a major magazine and a woman who runs a major website have very different careers than the average woman. They, personally, may not sleep that much. But also, these stats allow women to paint themselves as victims, and to complain, rather than owning up to their own choices. As a culture, we’ve developed a narrative that moms put everyone else first and hence have no time for sleep because it makes us feel holier-than-thou and makes us feel better about not doing things by allowing us to claim that we don’t have time to do them. The truth is that we just don’t want to make them a priority. Moms who work full-time spend more time watching television than they do caring for their kids. Even for moms who aren’t in the workforce, the TV and childcare figures are close. That doesn’t sound like a matter of having so many commitments that sleep goes to the bottom of the totem pole–which is why, in fact, women on average are getting enough sleep.

While weekdays often pass in a blur of rushing from one thing to the next, weekends require a different mindset. It’s easy to lose track of time and watch these precious hours disappear into things you didn’t mean to do — watching a lot of TV, running errands, doing housework, etc.

In 168 Hours, I recommend instituting a family meeting at some point during the week to figure out at least one activity that everyone would enjoy doing over the weekend. Then chores and other things can fit in around that.

But how do you figure out what you’d like to do? I recently came across an intriguing site called Goby.com, which lets you type in what kind of activity you’re looking for (e.g. family fun), where you want to do it (e.g. NYC), and when (e.g. next weekend). Then it spits out a list of ideas.

Test-driving it for my family for this coming week, I found some obvious ones (take the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building) but also some lesser known sites, such as the Lower East Side Ecology Center, and ideas I wouldn’t have come up with (a tea ceremony in China town). There are some dud entries (Sydney’s Playground turns out to now be closed) but a big part of the problem of figuring out weekend activities is brainstorming a list. Goby at least takes care of that part for you, so you can weed down from there.