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A review by sarahanne8382
Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less by Tiffany Dufu
5.0
This one was a game changer for me.
Tiffany Dufu tackles the seemingly unimportant issue of logistics in managing a home, a problem that seems to especially plague ambitious working women who are part of what they thought was an egalitarian partnership. The book goes back and forth between Dufu's personal story (which is kind of great on audio because she reads it) and those of women she's met who are similarly struggling to "drop the ball" and research studies she's well familiar with as a professional fundraiser for various organizations advancing prospects for women and girls.
The problem, she argues, isn't so much that our husbands don't help out enough around the house, it's more that, despite knowing the importance of our careers outside the home, we still unconsciously feel that our value is tied to the state of our home and we're losing our minds because, as we know all too well, it's impossible to both work full-time at home and full-time outside the home and do both well.
Once you understand that the pressure to be "perfect" at home is mostly in your head or a construct of society, it's easier to hear her further points, that often our standards at home are often unrealistic and our husband's don't help for many reasons, but a big one is because we're constantly criticizing them for not meeting our unrealistic expectations.
The other big one is that just as we're unconsciously sticking to the perfect homemaker role, our husband's weren't raised to believe that the home would be their responsibility one day and so it simply doesn't occur to them the sheer number of things that need to be managed to run a home efficiently.
Until this point I was mostly just enjoying her story because I could identify with the broad points she was making and her personal observations were hilarious (she actually left her husband instructions reminding him to feed their toddler 3 meals/day). What really made me a believer of the relevance and practicability of her book, though, was when she started to talk about their chore chart.
Many couples can identify the problem that wives take on too much work, but when it actually comes to fixing it, that's where things break down. Like Dufu, I'm often confounded that my husband can't simply see the tasks that need to be completed on his own. If I still have to tell him what to do, then I'm still in charge of everything. She explains that our differing communication styles often make this challenging, so what she and her husband did was create a spreadsheet listing all the household responsibilities and assigned them to a person who would be wholly responsible for that task (and sometimes they mutually decided that a task wasn't worth doing and assigned it to "nobody"). Her humorous story about letting the mail pile up for 3 months while her husband was away on business was funny but also illustrated how she trusted her husband to complete the tasks he was responsible for. Once he realized that she wasn't going to swoop in if he did it wrong or got behind, he never let the mail pile up for 3 months again.
Her arguments especially make sense to me when I think of the exceptions in my life. The friends of mine who don't struggle with this generally grew up in homes either where Mom wasn't the obvious de facto head of the household, Dad was much more involved in household management than usual, or the children, regardless of gender, were required to help around the house.
While I took a lot of practical specifics away from this book, she also frames things in a more general way, talking about the importance of diverse viewpoints everywhere (more women in C-suites and more men at home) and how progress of women into the highest levels of management has really stalled and how more progressive work policies for women are only part of the problem. We need to make it easier for men to be involved at home, both by changing societal perceptions that taking time off for family obligations is proof you don't care about your career and changing the ways we divvy up work at home, so that men and women equally share the burden.
There were just so many good things in this book I'm afraid I'm going to leave something out. It's just so so so so good!
Tiffany Dufu tackles the seemingly unimportant issue of logistics in managing a home, a problem that seems to especially plague ambitious working women who are part of what they thought was an egalitarian partnership. The book goes back and forth between Dufu's personal story (which is kind of great on audio because she reads it) and those of women she's met who are similarly struggling to "drop the ball" and research studies she's well familiar with as a professional fundraiser for various organizations advancing prospects for women and girls.
The problem, she argues, isn't so much that our husbands don't help out enough around the house, it's more that, despite knowing the importance of our careers outside the home, we still unconsciously feel that our value is tied to the state of our home and we're losing our minds because, as we know all too well, it's impossible to both work full-time at home and full-time outside the home and do both well.
Once you understand that the pressure to be "perfect" at home is mostly in your head or a construct of society, it's easier to hear her further points, that often our standards at home are often unrealistic and our husband's don't help for many reasons, but a big one is because we're constantly criticizing them for not meeting our unrealistic expectations.
The other big one is that just as we're unconsciously sticking to the perfect homemaker role, our husband's weren't raised to believe that the home would be their responsibility one day and so it simply doesn't occur to them the sheer number of things that need to be managed to run a home efficiently.
Until this point I was mostly just enjoying her story because I could identify with the broad points she was making and her personal observations were hilarious (she actually left her husband instructions reminding him to feed their toddler 3 meals/day). What really made me a believer of the relevance and practicability of her book, though, was when she started to talk about their chore chart.
Many couples can identify the problem that wives take on too much work, but when it actually comes to fixing it, that's where things break down. Like Dufu, I'm often confounded that my husband can't simply see the tasks that need to be completed on his own. If I still have to tell him what to do, then I'm still in charge of everything. She explains that our differing communication styles often make this challenging, so what she and her husband did was create a spreadsheet listing all the household responsibilities and assigned them to a person who would be wholly responsible for that task (and sometimes they mutually decided that a task wasn't worth doing and assigned it to "nobody"). Her humorous story about letting the mail pile up for 3 months while her husband was away on business was funny but also illustrated how she trusted her husband to complete the tasks he was responsible for. Once he realized that she wasn't going to swoop in if he did it wrong or got behind, he never let the mail pile up for 3 months again.
Her arguments especially make sense to me when I think of the exceptions in my life. The friends of mine who don't struggle with this generally grew up in homes either where Mom wasn't the obvious de facto head of the household, Dad was much more involved in household management than usual, or the children, regardless of gender, were required to help around the house.
While I took a lot of practical specifics away from this book, she also frames things in a more general way, talking about the importance of diverse viewpoints everywhere (more women in C-suites and more men at home) and how progress of women into the highest levels of management has really stalled and how more progressive work policies for women are only part of the problem. We need to make it easier for men to be involved at home, both by changing societal perceptions that taking time off for family obligations is proof you don't care about your career and changing the ways we divvy up work at home, so that men and women equally share the burden.
There were just so many good things in this book I'm afraid I'm going to leave something out. It's just so so so so good!