Lean in or lie down?

Okay, I've got to weigh in on the debate opened up by Real Simple (one of my favorite magazines!) editor Kristin Van Ogtrop's response to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. In the recent Huffington Post article, Van Ogtrop, author of Just Let Me Lie Down, argues that women ought to "stand up straight" rather than "lean in," which she understands to mean always being more and more ambitious at work, regardless of the impact on your family life. I was really disappointed in the Van Ogtrop's Huffington Post article. I wonder if Van Ogtrop even read Lean In; Sandberg takes pains to talk about how much she's home for dinner. (Also, although I haven't read Van Ogtrop's book, I'm suspicious of a hugely successful magazine editor telling a regular person like me to relax and not be so ambitious.) I thought Lean In had the same good message that Anne Marie Slaughter made in her June 2012 Atlantic article "Why Women Still Can't Have It All": everyone, not just women, benefits when jobs allow people to be flexible with their time so as not to ruin their family life. Slaughter points out how modern technology that allows people to work remotely makes this day and age an ideal time for this shift to happen.

I think the benefits of workplace flexibility would also be ideal for introverts and other sensitive people in general, whether or not they be mothers or fathers concerned about the state of their family life. For instance, I don't have any kids yet, but I know I've been much, much happier with a professor's schedule than a high school teacher's. Typically, I'm in front of a class 2-4 hours a day, not 5, and the rest of the time is for quiet preparation, studying, and grading. I do not conduct class at all on Fridays; I can have the whole day to grade and prepare for the next week. If I need to run errands after my in-class time is over, I can; I just know that I'll be finishing my work later in the evening or on the weekends. Sometimes that's better; after a very full day of teaching, I don't have the brainpower to grade papers, so I do what would traditionally be Saturday errands on, say, a Thursday afternoon, and I'll save that grading for Saturday morning, when I'm fresh again. The flexibility allows me to use my time more efficiently and lets me decide when my brain is fried and I should just wash the dishes and when my brain is ready to do thinking work. I don't have to force myself to slog through papers when I'll only get a few done and waste time in a tired stupor while the laundry piles up.

These articles and my reaction about mixing up my down time and my work time get me thinking of the cliched phrase, the "work-life balance." Sandberg and Van Ogtrop discuss this at length, and I also just read in this month's O Magazine that Martha Beck would scold me for having my book bag in close proximity to the TV set where I relax. So, let me say that I think the separation between work and life is a false dichotomy, and that's why flexible schedules and partially online work schedules are good for everyone, not just people with kids.

Historically, there was no separation between work and life. You and your whole family worked together on the farm, say. My women's history professor in college explained that women were actually more equal to men in the Colonial Era of America than in 19th-century America. Even if Colonial women's work was different than a man's (he does the heavy plowing while she cooks the food and sews the clothes), both genders' jobs were critical for the family's survival. Children helped, too. The "angel in the house" who stays home while the man goes away from the family property to make a living and children are seen as living in their own special bubble did not happen until the 1800s. So, that's fairly recent in the course of human history. This "Honey, I'm home" type of world is new and has lots of problems; it should in no way be considered the ideal situation or some sort of default. When my husband watches Mad Men, I can see why all those guys cheat; they spend most of their time living in a completely separate world than their wives and children are living in. Work and family life need to be more integrated, or work becomes life and you grow apart from your family.

Plus, all of us sensitive people know that creativity doesn't always come between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. If I'm not feeling it on a Tuesday afternoon, I'll take care of some chores or do an extended workout and then maybe that frees up my mind to have a brainstorm as I'm watching Chelsea Lately at 11 p.m. In fact, any creative person will tell you that you often need long periods of doing what seems like nothing before you come up with anything good. Jonah Lehrer has a great discussion of this phenomenon in Imagine. Although sections of Imagine have been discredited due to the fact that Lehrer admitted to making up some of his Bob Dylan quotes, I think what he said about the creative process rings true. We introverts and we creative types need periods of quiet, alone-time, doing-nothing-ish time to get the brainstorm later. We don't want to be surrounded in an office with people all day long, and we don't want our society to measure productivity or career commitment by how long we can stay at the office and be interacting with others. For us, that can be very unproductive.

I'm eternally grateful that I've found community college life to give me just the right balance of structure and flexibility, and I wish that for everyone. I wish the professor's schedule was seen as the norm, not the aberration. In a post-industrial, information economy, why do we keep pushing the nine-to-five factory model of work scheduling as the be-all and end-all? Any teacher who has gotten the "Must be nice to get off at 3:00" comment can surely see why I ask.