A review by cdubiel
I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam

3.0

I have mixed feelings about this book. Vanderkam uses data she collected as part of The Mosaic Project, a time-log study, to find insights on how successful women organize their lives. While I recognize and use many of these tips already, I was deeply disappointed in the study itself. The main reason is because she only collected time logs from people who made $100,000 and over per year. Vanderkam gives the reasons for this in the first chapter, but I don't think this helps many of us. Librarians, teachers, writers, people in the education and nonprofit sectors will never see that kind of salary. She says that most "successful" women don't work more than 50 or 60 hours a week, but what about women who are successful but don't, and never will make that much money? I freelance on top of my regular full-time workload, and I have to struggle to make my life work. Wait till you see my time logs. I use a lot of her strategies already, so maybe I should have written this book. I got really mad during the part where she talks about child care. She makes a blanket judgment that in-home care is inferior to center care. For one, some of us can't afford center care - and even if I could, I might not choose it, because my in-home sitters have been amazing. Vanderkam recommends nannies, which of course would be ideal, but I could never afford that in a million years. I realize I am extremely lucky to have the life I do, and I am so grateful for my in-home care, my husband, my parents, and friends who help me raise my child, do my work, and keep up with my house. But money makes things so much easier, and if Vanderkam had recognized this, this book would have been a lot more useful. The other thing that bugged me, as in other time management books, is that a few assumptions are made: most of these women have flex-time or some other work from home arrangement, and their jobs are white-collar (lawyers, accountants etc.) Duh, because those are the people who make the most money! What about retail and public-facing jobs, where we have to show up in the office, and often nights and weekends? Some of us also have management responsibilities on top of all of the public-facing stuff. Maybe I should write a time management book. Clearly, I am not learning anything anymore.