Equal Opportunity

I know I said I was going to be writing about productivity over the next few weeks... and I am. But something else came across my screen today that I feel compelled to write about first. I want to write about what equal opportunity really means. Not strictly from a standpoint of gender or race- but from a standpoint of what it would mean to have a society that provides equal opportunities to people.

I think a lot of people would say that it means that two candidates- for a job, or for a spot on a college admissions list, for instance- are evaluated strictly on merit. They are given equal opportunity to prove their worth.

I don't think that goes far enough.

I think we should aim to have it mean that any two little babies would have the same chance to live up to their full potential, regardless of their race, gender, eventual sexual orientation, or how much money their parents make.

There is a lot of work to do and a lot of interesting discussion to have around the first three things on my list, but I want to talk about the last thing on the list: the role of money.

I started thinking about this today because I read Sean Reardon's NY Times Essay: "No Rich Child Left Behind." It is about the the gap in educational attainment between rich kids and lower income kids. He presents data that show the gap is widening, and not because poor kids are doing less well, but because rich kids are doing better:

"The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school."

His essay is food for thought, but doesn't provide a lot of answers for what we should do. As he says:

"It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich."

He clearly thinks something should be done, though:

"Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born."

The added emphasis is mine. I am not an expert on early education, or public policy. I know that figuring out how to give all of our kids a better chance to make the most of the educational opportunities they have will not be easy.

But I strongly believe we should try.

I think most readers of this blog will have figured out by now that my husband and I are fairly wealthy.  Pumpkin and Petunia are easily in the group Reardon labels as "rich kids." He is right: we are rich and we have given them many enrichment opportunities, and we continue to do so.

Most of you might not know, however, that I wasn't always this rich. I don't write much about my background, not because I am ashamed of it (far from it), but because it seems so mundane. We weren't rich, but we weren't particularly poor. My family did use food stamps when I was little- I remember going shopping with my Mom and needing to separate our items into things we could buy with food stamps and things we couldn't. When I got a little older, though, my Mom (a teacher) went back to work and my father (a librarian) got a promotion, and money wasn't quite so tight. I don't remember wanting for anything as a grade school kid, but I still have memories of money being an issue some times. When I tell Pumpkin that something is too expensive to buy, I am trying to teach her about the value of money. When my parents told me that, chances were it really was too expensive for them to buy.

My parents certainly wouldn't have been able to take me to a two day visit to Disneyland for my 6th birthday- not even if Disneyland had somehow been transplanted to a location 1.5 hours away from my home. We took family vacations, but not every year, and we stayed in economy motel rooms, not the business class suites my husband and I favor.

This is not to say that trips to Disneyland and business class hotels are essential enrichment opportunities. It is just to give an idea of the difference in my current socioeconomic level and the one from which I came.

You can look at stories like mine and argue that there is no problem- I worked my way up,  after all. From food stamps to top 5% of income in one generation! But I think that overlooks both the extent to which I was the beneficiary of things not generally available to other kids from modest means and the extent to which we have dismantled some of the things that helped me when I was a kid.

I was cared for as a baby and young child by an expert in early education- my mother, who had taken a break from her career as an elementary school teacher both because at that time you had to quit when you got pregnant and because she wanted to stay home with her kids. I had parents who were well aware of the free educational opportunities offered by my local library and had no logistical trouble availing themselves of them- my Dad worked there, after all, and the children's librarians were family friends. I had a loving extended family, who provided a sense of security and well-being. My family had access to food stamps when we needed them, so I never remember going to bed hungry, except when I refused to eat my dinner on grounds of it being "gross." (Yeah, Pumpkin comes by her extremely picky streak naturally.) We had access to affordable housing. Our part of town was not wealthy, but the only time I found it scary was when a guard dog from one of the nearby light industrial businesses got loose. I do not remember gangs being much of a problem, although there was some gang presence in my high school. Both my former elementary school and my former junior high have to take anti-gang measures now.

And I'm white. So no one looked at me as a kid and thought I was genetically destined to be lazy or stupid.

I look at my background and at what I have today, and I mourn the fact that so many factors have to line up for people to have the socioeconomic mobility I have had. And apparently, it is only getting harder.

We should look at our society and ask ourselves how can we help all parents provide the excellent early environment my parents provided. How can we ensure that all kids have the same high quality of day care my children have? How can we make sure no child is held back by hunger?

In essence, we need to look at our society and ask ourselves how we can stop wasting so much human potential, because make no mistake, that is what we are doing now, and that is a tragedy both for the kids whose potential we waste and for our society, which misses out on the benefits of a better educated population.

I am not hopelessly naive. I know that parents matter and that there is only so much the larger society can- or should- do to level the inequalities created by money. I know that wealthy parents like me will continue to give our kids every opportunity we can, and that there we will never truly have equal opportunities for all the little babies born in our country.

But I think we can- and should- do a hell of a lot more than we do now.

Weekend Reading: The Even More Short eBooks Edition

I almost hate to post my weekly set of links, for fear of cutting the conversation short on yesterday's post. Please feel free to keep commenting on it! I'm finding everyone's thoughts about BS work and how that relates to work hours really interesting.

However, I've been wanting to do another short eBooks post for awhile, so I'm going to plow ahead.

The first short eBook is totally on topic with yesterday's post: it is Laura Vanderkam's latest eBook, What the Most Successful People Do at Work. This is the third in a set of eBooks she wrote about the habits of successful people. She said in her post about it that it is her favorite of the three. I think it might be my favorite, too. I was fascinated by the anecdotes and found several of them quite inspiring. I particularly liked the discussion about the children's book illustrator, and I liked the way she organized the book into distinct "practices." I consider myself to be pretty efficient at work, but I still found a few new things to consider. It is definitely worth the time to read.

I'll probably write more about this book in the coming weeks- I've got a bunch of productivity-related posts in mind, in an informal sort of lead up to the release of my own book about productivity (now slated to come out in May). I postponed reading Laura's book until I had finished the introduction I was writing for my book, because I didn't want to unconsciously copy any ideas. But in fact, I think our books are complementary, taking two different angles on the topic. Laura focuses more on the overall arc of a career, while I focus more on the details of tightening up productivity at the job you currently have. There are some points of overlap, of course, because we read a lot of the same research and we "talk" to each other a lot on our blogs.

Anyway, I recommend her book, particularly if you're motivated to have an interesting career as part of a full and happy life. It will give you ideas to think about.

On to my next eBook recommendation, which isn't about work at all- it is a fantasy-mystery story, which I found during one of my periodic stumbles through Amazon's Kindle Singles.  Day Breaks, by Matthew Reuther is a fun, short detective story set in a fantasy world peopled with goblins and other magical creatures. I am a bit of a sucker for the hybrid fantasy or sci-fi detective stories, but I still require them to be well-executed within both genres.This story met those requirements, and had some nice details, too.  I just noticed there are now more stories in the series... I plan to check them out. It looks like the four short stories are also  available in a single volume, called The Partners.

Do you remember the book about a goat I kept telling you to go read? Well, I decided to check out other stories by the same author, and read a story called "Grease is the Word" by George Berger. It was a fun read- not as good as the book about the goat, but still a lot of fun. Strangely, it no longer seems to be available. The author has several other works available, though- here is his Amazon author page, which links to them. Based on what I've read from him so far, you'll probably get something quirky and entertaining if you pick one to try.

Finally, the academics and scientists in my audience will probably enjoy Improving Slay Times in the Common Dragon, by Catherine Shaffer. It is a humorous story about a graduate student trying to finish up some research on dragons.

And that's all I have for you in this edition of "Cloud recommends short eBooks." If you missed the first two editions, click here and here. And as always, if you have short eBook recommendations for me, leave them in the comments!

Work hours, BS work, and The Corporate Ladder

Thank you for all the thoughtful and supportive comments on my last post I was about to start replying to them and then I realized that I had a bunch of related thoughts and- hey! This is my blog! I can just write a new post. So here it is, my reply to all your comments and some further thoughts on the topic at hand. Sorry, it will be a bit rambly.

First of all, yesterday was a better day, except for the part where Petunia peed on Pumpkin's bedroom floor, and Pumpkin melted down before our library trip, and then the library had some jazz-like music performance going on in the children's area so we were limited to picking books from the "new" shelf... and I was so wiped out by the time Petunia finally went to sleep that I went straight to bed.

So maybe I should say that yesterday was a better day at work. I made really good progress on one of my projects, and I killed off TWO meetings. When I kill a meeting, it is a sign that the project is progressing well enough that we don't need a full hour each week to check in, discuss, and keep things on track- it means that my other project management techniques are working. So hooray me.

Plus, I had a bit of an epiphany on the whole "what should I do with my life" question. I realized that I actually know how to make this decision. Clarifying options and identifying the information needed to choose among them is one of the things I do at work- and frankly, it is one of the aspects of my job I am best at. (This is an anonymous blog. If I can't brag here, where can I brag?)

Once I realized this, I quickly enumerated the options I have, and I'm ready to start the process of figuring out what I need to know to make this decision. I know how to do this!

This decision is important to me not because I think I can completely plan out my life, but because I have a little bit of time and energy to start a new project right now, and I'd like to put that time and energy towards something that is likely to fit into my long term goals. Otherwise, I don't know how I'm going to decide what project to tackle. Should I take a class relevant to my current career? Work on refreshing my coding skills? Write another book? I'm not really sure. They all sound fun.

I'd also like to clarify one thing: I absolutely believe that I am capable of doing big and important things using only "regular" work hours. Or at least I can do things that are big enough and important enough for me. I've been doing a lot of time tracking over the past 6 months or so, and I can definitively say that I tend to work ~40 hours/week, of which, 35-38 are productive by a basic measure of "I'm actually trying to do some work, not sitting at my desk surfing the internet or what not." I also put in 1 to 5 hours of work on my non-work projects (e.g., writing and publicizing books) and maybe another 1 to 5 hours on my blog. Even though the book writing has made me take my blog a little more seriously (I know... you'd never notice!) I still consider it a hobby, and do not think I could take all of those hours for work without going a little crazy.

So I have roughly 45 hours per week in which I can be productive- whether that is on my work/career or on one of my side projects. Looking back over my career, I can't think of any time in which I worked many more hours than that and been productive in them, and was able to sustain that for more than a few weeks. 45 hours per week is probably a good estimate of my true work limit.

Maybe the real "superstars" can work insane hours and stay productive- but if that is true, then I have never worked with a superstar. In all of my years managing projects, I have met many people who thought they could work really long hours effectively week after week, but I have never met one who really could. Some people might top out at 50 hours rather than 45, but I've literally never met someone who worked 60 or more hours per week and was actually productive during all of those hours. Of course, I've worked with people who spend 60 hours per week in the office- but not a single one of them has actually been working during all of those hours. There was one guy who really seemed to... but I got curious and checked the network logs (I ran IT there so could legitimately do this). He was streaming TV shows to his desk. We did not work in a media company. There was no conceivable way that was work.

However, just because I know I can do great things in a 40-45 hour work week, that doesn't mean that the world will let me. Basically, our corporate work world is largely set up to expect and reward people who take a macho approach to hours worked, and put in long hours whether or not they are all productive.

As far as I can tell, there are two ways to deal with this: (1) pretend that the corporate world is sane and judges on productivity rather than hours, be productive in sensible hours, and just trust/hope that it will all work out. (2) Opt out and go out on your own as a contractor, or start your own business. Of course, if you go with option #2, you will still have to ignore the false signals around you that tell you that the only way to succeed is to put in super long hours- but your actual success seems to be more tightly coupled to real rather than perceived productivity.  Or maybe that is just my wishful thinking.

So far, I've gone with option #1, and I've done reasonably well. I think this is at least partially because my internal drive towards always feeling like I'm learning new things has pushed me to spend more time on what Cal Newport calls "deep work" than strictly necessary to do my job, but I'm not 100% sure about that, and I know there's been a healthy dose of luck in the mix, too.

Anyway, there is nothing pushing me to change options: my current boss is more than happy with my work, and I feel like my career is reasonably "on track." I'm learning new things and growing my skills, and when I get to focus on the core of my job, I really enjoy the work. There is more non-core corporate BS than I'd like, but that is hard to avoid as you move up the corporate food chain.

Should I try to climb up there?

That last bit is precisely why I'm feeling angsty about my career lately. Jobs are always composed of core things (the things in your job description and/or things that add to your skills and advance your career- in short, the things you feel productive when you do) and non-core BS that needs to get done but that no one really credits you with doing, and that doesn't really advance your career or grow your skills.

When I was first out of graduate school, my work was mostly core things. I've seen several estimates of the amount of core work a knowledge worker can produce, and the consensus seems to be roughly 6 hours per day, tops. In my early years after graduate school, it was no problem at all to get those 30 hours of "good" work in a 40 hour work week. Now, I'm lucky if I get 20 hours of core work in an average work week,  plus another 5 or so hours of non-core things that feel really useful. The rest is BS. Of course, there is still the need to produce the core work, there are just more BS things crowding it out. So far, I've been able to use my productivity tricks to produce sufficient core work in the hours left after I've done the BS work I can't avoid. This, plus my relatively high BS tolerance has kept all well in my career.

But here's the fear that has me considering switching to option #2: as I go up the corporate ladder, the BS work keeps going up, and it gets harder and harder to do a good job on my core work in a normal work week- not because the core work can't get done in the time, but because the corporate BS grows. Some of this is inescapable- but I swear some of it is just because other people don't want to do their core jobs and so invent BS meetings for the rest of us to go to and BS work for the rest of us to do, so we can all be busy without doing anything actually challenging and meaningful.

The growth in corporate BS alone is probably manageable, but it also seems that the macho posturing about work hours goes up and up as I go up the corporate ladder. Maybe managers feel like they need to justify their higher pay and generally cushier jobs by complaining all the time about how overworked they are? Of course, they aren't really working 70 hours per week (check out this excerpt from Laura Vanderkam's new book for a review of the evidence on that)- but if they can fool their underlings into thinking they are working that many hours, maybe the underlings won't feel bad about being underlings. I don't know- that's just a guess.

Again, none of this means that I have to work long hours to succeed, it just adds to the noise that I have to ignore in order to do my job and live my life the way I want to. I could just keep pretending that I will be judged solely on the quality of my work, and keep trusting that I'll be able to keep the BS work to a manageable level, and maybe I would in fact keep advancing up the corporate ladder. I have seen nothing so far to indicate that I won't. It just feels like my chances for continuing advancement aren't what they could be. I don't know if that is actually true.

All of this is bouncing around in my head along with a summary I read this week of some research on "overwork" and the fact that mothers in male-dominated fields are more likely to leave their jobs. (I did a bad job of summarizing that link- sorry. But it is a short read, just go read it.) If this particular mother leaves her particular male-dominated career, despite her equitable split on the home front, it won't be the actual need to overwork that drives her out. It will be a combination of corporate BS and silly macho cultural things that make her decide it is time for a change.

It is worth noting, though, that what I'm thinking of changing to is entrepreneurship. It is not that I don't think I can do the work. It is that I am increasingly less certain that it is worth putting up with the background noise to keep doing the work I do now. But there are lots of things I like about my current career, and a lot of unknowns about other possible careers- so the decision is not an easy one. But at least now I know how to go about making that decision! And I know that I won't be switching to 60 hour work weeks, no matter what I do. I see no real benefit in that, and my BS tolerance doesn't extend that far.

What's the core work to BS work ratio like in your job? Have you noticed a change over the course of your career? I'd be particularly interested to hear from my academic readers- from the outside, it seems that one of the problems in an academic career is that the core work required to advance your career and the things in your job description are only partially overlapping- is that true? And if so, do you have any thoughts on how that plays into the work hours issue?

Of Two Minds

One of the fun little aliens-related details in Constellation Games was the idea of the Farang (all of the alien names are taken from various languages' words for "alien). These aliens literally have two minds in one body- one is male, and one is female. They alternate periods of wakefulness, so that the Farang never actually sleeps. Usually, the two minds are in agreement, but the story includes a description of a Farang video game in which this is not the case, and the two halves of the one character compete with each other to determine what product a factory will make.

I'm feeling a bit like that hapless Farang factory-owner right now, and just like in the game, nothing much is getting built.

Where should I steer the boat?

One half of me is feeling really ambitious, and has big ideas about my career and how to have an impact on the world. In fact, this half of me is itself conflicted and has several competing ideas about my career, but it has actually worked out a few not entirely implausible plans to handle that.

The other half of me just wants to enjoy life, maybe travel more often, definitely read more.

I have two competing guiding principles: that the purpose of life is to enjoy and appreciate it, so I should go out and do that, and that the purpose of life is to enjoy and appreciate it, so I should work to make that possible for more people.

The solution to this conundrum is of course simple to conceive but difficult to execute: find some meaningful work (which for me is work that improves other people's lives) that I enjoy doing. That used to be an accurate description of my day job- but that hasn't been the case for long enough that I suspect I have lost my way. Or that the ankle weights have tired me out.... The ambitious half of me has ideas about how to fix this, and maybe I should just let it be in charge.

Of course, the ambitious half of me isn't content with meaningful. It wants big and important, too.

Luckily, I also strongly believe that a person can do big and important things without working insane hours and while taking reasonable vacations, which should keep the itchy-footed bookworm half of me happy. Unfortunately, the rest of the world isn't so sure about that. The rest of the world seems reasonably sure that achieving big and important things requires a selfless devotion to those things, and not only will I not get to take four week vacations ever, let alone once a year, but I'll have to ditch family dinners, too. As much as I think that the rest of the world is wrong, wrong, wrong on this point, dealing with that dissonance can get tiresome, and the less ambitious half of me points out that I could just stop aiming so high and go read some nice books, already.

But sometimes, when I'm dreaming really big, I think that maybe the important thing I am meant to do is to get out there and show that a person can do big things while also working reasonable hours and taking real vacations. That ambition might be too big for even my ambitious half, though.

So here I am, of two perfectly good minds. No wonder I'm feeling a bit paralyzed on the grand plan for life front these days.

Refuge

Mr. Snarky has taken the kids to the park, with the idea that I use this alone time to do something I want to do. I finished the book I mentioned on Friday (Constellation Games, which I loved as much at the end as I did when I was halfway through on Friday night), and I don't feel like starting another book right away or reading about starting my own company (I'm roughly 3/4 of the way through Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur). So I thought I'd write a blog post.

I was initially going to write about our recent trip to Disneyland, but nothing I was about to write seemed interesting, even to me. I'll skip that post, and just give you a couple of cute pictures:

Pumpkin being a "whale watcher." The ears announce that it was her birthday, and garnered her much attention and joy.

Petunia loved the kitchen in Minnie Mouse's house. She considers meeting Mickey and Minnie highlights of the trip.

Instead, I'll tell you about something I realized during that trip. The low point of the trip was when Petunia got sick. We don't know if we let her overheat, or if her stomach was upset by her unorthodox decision to eat leftover mac-and-cheese for breakfast, or what. But she was clearly not well Friday afternoon, so I took her back to the hotel to rest in some air-conditioning. I thought she was better and went back out that evening to meet up with Mr. Snarky and Pumpkin for dinner. I won't say that doing so was a mistake- I got a couple of great margaritas, Petunia got a stuffed baby Mickey Mouse that she adores and we did see the fireworks. But Petunia threw up between dinner and the fireworks- which is why I know that the adorable stuffed baby Mickey Mouse is 100% washable.

Anyway, when we got back to the hotel that afternoon, Petunia just wanted me to hold her. I was sad and grumpy. I felt like we'd let Petunia down by letting her get sick, and I was sad to be missing out on Pumpkin's afternoon- Pumpkin was LOVING Disneyland, and it was really fun to see that. Too bad, though, this situation was what I had, and no amount of feeling sorry for myself was going to fix that. I figured I should make the best of it, and give Petunia what she wanted. I was at that point reading Zero History, which I have in paper form, so I was not able to read until Petunia calmed down enough to let me put her down on the sofa.

Instead, I just looked at Petunia. I was struck by watching her as she snuggled into me. Her eyes half-closed and I could see all the stress and unhappiness just leave her body. She snuggled in, put one thumb in her mouth, ran the other hand under my shirt- as she likes to do- and smiled.

And I realized, I am her refuge. When she is stressed or hurt or worried, she wants me, because snuggling into me makes it better.

This is both a benefit and a responsibility of motherhood*, I think. I have written before about what was lost and what was gained when I became a mother. To me, this trumps them all. The feeling I get when I can comfort my child just by being there and holding her is literally indescribable. I won't try to describe it, but I will say it is amazing. It is, without a doubt, something I experience as a benefit of motherhood.

It is also a responsibility, though. My children's physical need for me will decrease as they get older- already, Pumpkin wants these comfort hugs less than she used to. But I don't think the effect goes away. I remember reading about a study that found that kids' stress levels go down when they talk to their mother on the phone. I know that talking to my mom on the phone always makes me feel better, and I'm 40 years old. This is an average effect, though- there are some people for whom their mother does nothing but add stress. I think we are hard-wired to want that initial caregiver bond, and to want that bond to be with someone who can be a refuge. What a horrible thing it must be when that person is instead another source of trouble.

I hope I will always be a refuge for my children, in whatever way they need. I will admit that I'm looking forward to the point at which Petunia no longer needs to stick her hand under my shirt for comfort, though!

-------------------------

*Or more precisely, of being the caregiver a child has bonded with as comfort person- it doesn't have to be the mother, and I think even when it is the mother, other caregivers can have a similar, if perhaps a little less powerful, effect. But I don't want to get into all of that in this post. Can we please just take it as a given that I am not trying to denigrate anyone else or their parenting experience, but am writing about a benefit and responsibility I feel from motherhood?