Shifting the Second Shift
Shifting the Second Shift
By: Megan Trask CEO + Co-Founder of TULA.
Household chores like laundry, cleaning, meal planning and prep, organizing, planning, scheduling, child care… all the things that take an incredible amount of time and plague so many TO-DO lists!
Women spend on average 243 minutes a day on these types of tasks while men spend on average 150 minutes. The disproportionate burden on women is something that contributes to many women being faced with choosing between their career and care. Women shouldn’t have to choose and on the tailwinds of COVID we hear incredible numbers of women leaving the workforce in the last couple of years and about those trying to balance care and career at a cost to their own mental health.
The struggle to do it all is real and leads to mental load and burnout. BUT, we don’t have to do it all. We can shift the weight of household chores significantly just by asking for help. Changing the narrative around asking for help is so important, rather than feeling guilt or shame for not doing it all, instead feeling empowered to delegate so that prioritizing with purpose is a reality.
Another reality, second shift efforts are uncompensated. If the time spent on these tasks in the US alone was totaled, and compensated for, the tab would be 1.5 trillion dollars. Yes, trillion with a T! There is truly an incredible opportunity to create an ecosystem where we ask for help, and value our time, but value others’ time as we compensate them for saving us time.
In order to delegate it’s critical to put a value on your time. There are ways to do this that are more scientific, your current hourly rate vs the rate of someone who could take the weight of your TO-DO list. Or, how much you would pay someone to do the things that you can’t get to? Or, what I like to think of is what I would pay to get time back. That really puts things into perspective. So go ahead, ask for help, feel empowered when you do it, and find yourself with more time.
These stats, the struggle we felt as Moms juggling careers and our families, the idea that we could design the lives we want for ourselves and for others... these are a few of the WHYs behind TULA. We are on fire for our mission to shift the second shift and to empower people to ask for help by making it easy to ask for help!