Chapter 1

You've seen her in magazines: Superwoman. She's wearing beautiful, expensive clothes and not one hair is out of place. She's smiling as she holds a briefcase in one hand and her three-year-old daughter in the other. You've seen her on television, where you could swear that her clothes had just arrived straight from the cleaners after being worn by a top-notch, well-endowed model. She walks into a clean, two-story, organized home where the children are happy to see Mom and dinner will be prepared within minutes.

A more realistic scenario: Diane Keaton's face fills the screen and we see a woman touched by anguish. Her sensitive features contort with pain, causing a shudder of compassion to ripple through the audience. Is this woman facing political ruin or untimely death? Hardly. In this poignant scene from Baby Boom, Keaton must make the wrenching choice between meeting with her star client or babysitting a newborn. As a seasoned executive but inexperienced full-time mom, her dilemma is excruciating.

For most working mothers, Keaton's situation is business as usual. Like Keaton's character, they are fighting a losing battle to juggle the one thousand and one tasks demanded by job, home, children, husband, friends, and family.

A woman who signed her name "Tired in Texas" summarized the problem in a letter to Ann Landers:

I put in forty hours a week downtown and just as many at home... My job as a supervisor is stressful. The demands on me are awesome. Everyone wants something. When I come home, I must prepare supper, clean the house, wash clothes, pick up the kids from their daily activities, help with homework, and see that they are bathed and put to bed. By then I'm dead tired. And each day is busier than the day before. I'm totally shot and feel as if I'm sinking into quicksand. My body says rest, but my mind says get ready for tomorrow. And the real problem is that there isn't enough time to do it all.

This story is typical of working women all across the globe. Most women work out of necessity. Some work so that the family can enjoy niceties such as a bigger home or an extended family vacation. The problem for most, however, is that the time crunch is killing women physically and emotionally.

What these women want most is the time to handle, without always rushing, all the tasks they deem necessary. The need for time management comes as no surprise to women, who have traditionally been the ones altering their schedules to accommodate daily activities, errands, and special projects. Men, traditionally, have not had this burden. As Gloria Steinem said several years ago in an interview, "I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine the time for marriage and a career." And yet people who teach time management expect working women to allocate their time in the same way a working man does. Stated simply, it doesn't work that way.

Women, at all ages, enter or leave the job market; change careers; have children; marry or remarry; start, complete, or add to their educations; run their own businesses; and more. Many of these varied roles are simultaneous, and the result is a severe time crunch.

Establishing Your Own Personal Motivational Lifestyle
As a working woman, you have surely felt the crunch: meeting the needs of your job and your family threatens to take all your time; with no time for yourself, you may feel as if you are about to disappear altogether. How can you resolve conflicting demands and maintain some sense of personal peace? The first step is to define how you want to allot your energy. Let your own values determine how you balance work, family, and personal time and then develop a lifestyle that reflects your priorities. Only by incorporating your own values can you maintain a lifestyle that will seem fulfilling to you and motivate you to grow as an individual.

A study published in Self magazine defined seven such lifestyles, which the study called Personal Motivational Lifestyles. Each one reflects the values of a certain type of woman. My own experience in working with women's time-management issues led me to simplify the Self model by distinguishing three categories. By choosing the category that best reflects your values and then restructuring your schedule according to the time-allotment percentages that accompany each category, I feel confident that you can improve the quality of your life.