Crafting the right work life balance.

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Hunger. I'm a mother of two and soon to be three and a practicing physician. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to episode three, where we'll be talking about crafting the right work life balance and does it make sense to take your career part time. A lot of strong feelings about that one way or the other, so we're looking forward to that discussion. Before we get into that, though, I'm heading out for vacation next week, and so I've been thinking a lot about planning vacations and vacations with kids. Sarah, you're not taking a vacation this August the right because you did it earlier this summer. Yeah, we had a two week journey in June, so we kind of used up a lot of our days at that time. Where are you guys going We're going to the Jersey Shore woo where not if everyone around here goes to the Jersey Shores and the East coast thing, but we really like it. We're renting a big house in a town on the Jersey Shore, and my extended family will be joining us. We did another version of this out in Indiana in the beginning of July, where my husband's extended family rented a lake house and we all were on Lake Michigan together for a week. So that's kind of how we've been doing a lot of vacations with little kids. Having a house is definitely good. You don't have to take people out to eat every single meal if you're doing that kind of thing. But you you were moving around a lot though for your two weeks. Yeah, we did. That was kind of like our little big journey that I figured would be easier with our kids at their current ages. We headed to my college reunion in Williamstown and then from there went to New York, some different areas in New York, visited family, and then finally landed in Philadelphia. And it was about twelve days I think that we spent on the road in total, and I think ten might have been the right length for us. That was just a little bit too long. But I do think there is something to taking more than a week, which is not something we had really done before, and you just decided to save up your vacation days and do it. Yeah. One thing that I've found with kids is that to me, luxury I really do enjoy nice hotels, but when it comes to traveling with kids, luxury is overrated because if you've got a three year old running around a fancy hotel, that actually adds to the stress. So I'd rather save my money on accommodations and have more childcare, whether that be in the form of family members or bringing our nanny with us. Yeah, which is something you can do. We've done that occasional. We're not on this because we have so much extended family with us. The other thing we've done, when we took a trip over spring break, we actually left the two year old with others and just took the big three kids because we knew it was going to be hard to have a long plane flight with a little guy. It was going to be not relaxing at all. We can do other special stuff with him, you know, It's not like his life is no fun. But I think he also benefited from having more adults focus just on him during that time, whereas it would have been more stressful for us to have all four kids with us. So I mean, you just kind of have to think about what's going to work for you in different vacas. I love that outside of the box approach. I will admit I was like, oh, I've not heard of people doing that, but it actually makes total sense. Because your other three kids can get more attention, He's not gonna have any memories made or broken in that you know, week period at that age, and you probably all had a great time and a nice break. Yeah. Yeah, although I think what one has to remember with trips with kids. I read this article the other day. They're saying, you know the difference between a vacation and a trip, and the vacation in many of our minds involves like sitting on the beach with a novel and a frozen drink and nobody wanting anything from you. Ever, and that's just not what your vacations with little kids are going to look like. And so if you go in knowing that, then you can sometimes have some fun times and build in moments of relaxation. But if you think your whole trip is going to be like that, you're just going to be deeply disappointed. And then that can be this whole existential angst thing that people go through, like, oh, I hate my life as well. And you know, maybe your expectations were a bit out of whack for your two year old and this particular trip. Yeah, and you know what one thing you can do and you sort of mentioned this is in the midst of a fan on vacation building in some couples times because you may need to recover from all about twenty four to seven childcare. So we actually had my kids stay with my parents for two nights while we stayed at a hotel just thirty minutes away. We went to a concert, we saw cigarettes. They were awesome. We went to a movie, we went to dinner with you guys, Yes exactly, and it was not that exactly. So, you know, even though it was twelve days mostly spent with the kids, that little mini break in the middle definitely added to the relaxation factors. Yeah, I love that. And even if it's just trying to like maintain your own personal enjoyable habits during vacation, I mean I made sure when we went to Indiana with my husband's extended family, I kept running every day. Sometimes it was runs with a sister in law of mine, which was fun, and other times runs solo. But just even having that little bit of alone time really went a long way to making me feel like I was doing something fun on that trip. And then, of course there's always work travel, which is the way a parenting vacation and totally a parenting vacation. Trips with kids are a vacation from work, and trips for work are vacation from parenting. But there you go. All travel can be vacation if you think about it that way. But moving the conversation to our main segment today, we want to talk about work and how we think about our work hours and structure our work. Sarah and I have different sorts of jobs. I run my own business, I do a lot of speaking, I write books on time management and productivity, and I do work a reasonable number of hours. However, they are relatively flexible. If I need to travel for work, then they're not exactly flexible. I mean, I have to be on stage somewhere at a certain time, so that's not something that can be moved around, but the rest of it is And so for me, it's always about making sure I get in the work I need to do, but I can make it fit around other things in my life. But Sarah has a different situation, which is the reality of medicine, which is that you are seeing patience and they tend to be seen at a certain time physically present. Absolutely. Although you know there is more telemedicine happening and more interesting opportunities that do allow work from home, most of it is still in person work. So prior to doing any really dialing back to my schedule, I was just sort of full days Monday through Friday, and adding a commute on there meant that I was on from the house from around seven thirty to six every day. And I'm also on call every fifth week, so that means I have to work both weekend days during those weeks, and I also have to answer any phone calls that come at any time in the evening or overnight. So you know, it's a decent number of hours. It's not a hideous number of hours. There are certainly professions where it's it's more and that's you know, in part by design, but there really was not a lot of flexibility there. Yeah, and so at some point in the last year, you decided that you wanted to change it up a little bit. I did so right around the time that I was thinking about expanding our family. It came to me that perhaps I could just ask for one day off per week and see if they would let me do an eighty percent arrangement where I'd get paid for, you know, eighty percent of the time I was spending at work, but would have one day blocked off for myself. My husband was completely supportive of this. We just felt like between the two of us, there were not enough parent available hours. And we'll talk a little bit more about you know why that ended up coming out of mind and not out of his. You know, I was really the one who was happy to do this, and so I went to our administration. I was really nervous. I didn't know how they would approach it, and they were actually very accepting, and they said, oh, yeah, we've had people do that before, no problem. When would you like to start doing that? So I was thrilled and I made that official in April, going down to eighty percent time. The other thing I did which has enhanced the flexibility and also I feel like has helped me grow some new skills and actually have some more leadership in My job is to take a role in our emerging residency program. I'm going to be the associate program director of our pediatrics residency, which we're interviewing candidates starting now. So instead of only being clinical and seeing patients, I have some other responsibilities which aren't quite as time sensitive, I guess. I mean, I still have to spend at least as many hours doing things, but I can do some of those things from home. I have to craft a presentation that I'm giving on Thursday, it's a little bit more fluid. So that combination has really been really rewarding to me, and I feel like I love the balance that I have right now. And one of the reasons we're able to do this podcast I should stress here is that, oh the only reason a way that Sarah now has a day off a week where we can record stuff, and so we look at the day that she has off and try and set our calls and do our podcasts during that time. So it certainly allows her to do her own twenty percent project, as it were. I think Google is famous for many years for allowing their engineers to spend twenty percent of their time on a project of their choosing, and this is this is kind of your twenty percent time project, right, It totally is. And you know, if medicine would get to that enlightened point where they would give us a day to do whatever we want, that would be pretty amazing. But I don't see it happening anytime. So this was my solution. Now, obviously there's there's trade offs. I mean, what what was going through? You know, there's financial there's also absolutely so talk about that. Yeah, so from a financial standpoint, obviously there was the number crunching to figure out, oh, is this even going to be doable. We definitely have our eyes very open with respect to you know, what's coming in, what comes out. We've been using and again non sponsored, but the budgeting app wine app. You need a budget for the past three years now and literally every transaction and every paycheck goes in there. So we kind of knew exactly what we were dealing with and whether we can handle it. You know, we talked about it and figured out what might have to be given up or compromised on and it seemed like it could work, so that was a big part of our decision making. I did fear a little bit at work that I might not be taken as seriously, but thus far those fears have not been realized at all. I've been asked to give grand rounds this month. I've been asked to take part in the beginning of this new clinic that we're setting up, so I feel like the administration has actually sort of paid no attention, which I think is great. They're treating me just as much as a full team member. I've even been participating in like a leadership development program this year, which admittedly I was asked to do before going part time, but nobody said, oh, well, now that you're eighty percent, you don't need to do this anymore. I'm still doing it, so it hasn't impacted me negatively. I guess the hardest part has been fitting in all my patients that are already my existing patients and needing to be seen. But we're currently training a nurse practitioner to do some of the overflows, so I think that's actually going to work out really well. Yeah, and of course there's also the question on the personal side. Like, are you using your time off? Well, I mean I think you are with this podcast, but it might be easy to just like clean the house the whole time or something. Yes, And I will say I haven't really been able to enjoy the time until I would say July, because it was just so sick from the pregnancy that I was just like, I have to lie down, and I don't know. At that point, I was also catching up with so many of the loose ends that I couldn't deal with normally, so it was like I had every appointment accumulated, like when was I going to the dentist? And when was I taking the kids to the doctor, and et cetera. But now that I've caught up with those things and I feel like a human, it's been like a renaissance for me. I mean that's what made me realize, hey, I want to do this, and it even makes me. I feel like I'm more active and happier parent when I'm with the kids by myself, because I feel like, well, I got all this time, so now I'm happy to spend you know, this time with my kids while my husband isn't there. So it's kind of bled over in ways that I didn't even expect yeah, so that I would say that this is like a good, you know, win schedule for SA. We probably have a lot of people. Yeah, we have a lot of people listening to this or are like, oh, that sounds great, maybe I should go to eighty percent. I think that there are a lot of things to think about. Partly that's I've spent a lot of time studying women's time logs. I did huge time diary project where I looked at one thousand and one days in the lives of women who had six figure jobs, so really big jobs, and also had kids at home. And I saw a couple things that struck me as very interesting. One is I had colleagues keep logs sometimes, so I had people from the same company, and I would notice that in many industries there is no set number of hours that people work like. It's kind of all over the map, and so two people who could have full time schedules might be working, you know, one works forty hours, one works fifty five, or sometimes it was even like thirty five and fifty five. I mean, that is a big difference, right, and it's huge. It's part time in full time, that's part time. In full time, but they're both technically full time or you know, And some of the women I studied had come up, you know, ask for official part time schedules, And in some cases I saw women who had part time schedules working like fifty hours a week. And in at least one case, I saw a woman who had a part time schedule working more hours than a colleague who had a full time schedule. So clearly something is going wrong in that particular company. I will not name it, but it is What happens in a lot of industries is that there is no accountability for hours whatsoever. So Sarah's job you have to do in a certain time, certain place, if she goes to eighty percent, it's because she sees twenty percent fewer patients. So we know that there are other you know, stuff that's like that too, Like if you get paid by the hour, okay, then you know how many hours you work. If you are a lawyer who has to build time, if you get a twenty percent reduction in your schedule, like you have to build twenty percent fewer hours, yeah, you'll probably work roughly twenty percent fewer hours. So in case, this is where there's accountability for it. It can buy you more time. What happens than a lot of industries is that nobody knows how many hours anyone is working, and people throw out numbers like, oh, we all work eighty hours a week around here. They don't like, let's just put that out here right here. They generally do not It just sounds like a good number. And so you want to make sure you really know what the denominator is on the number of hours per week before you change the numerator and take a pay cut to change the numerator. So I'm going eighty percent, Well, what is it eighty percent of right? And so if you don't know what that is, like if everyone's talking about their eighty hour workweeks but in fact they only work fifty five hours, then going to a forty five hour week and taking a fifty percent pay cut to get that, well, that wasn't a good financial move because you're only working ten fewer hours than other people and you just lost half your money. So that's something to think about. I think. The other thing to keep in mind is that in many cases what people want want is time, and time can be gained either through working flexibly or through just working less, and to back up to explain that, you know, there are ways of working different hours in different places that might make life more doable. So certainly getting to work from home a day or two a week can buy you back your commuting time, and even if you're working some of that time more more hours, you might still feel like life is more doable. It could be getting to work flexibly, doing that what we call the split shift, of leaving work at a reasonable hour, spending the evening with your family, doing more work at night after the kids go to bed. Sometimes people even might be willing to do a little bit of work on weekends and that way they can have a more reasonable life during the week. So sometimes it's just about getting flexibility rather than going part time, and then other times we can do it. Sarah and I were joking about calling this the informal eighty percent schedule, which is that if you are a productive professional woman and you look around your office, you will probably notice that there are people who are twenty percent less productive than you already, and so maybe you can just try working like they work and see what happens, and you know, maybe just not call attention to it. Sometimes it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission. So if you want to bring your kids to school two days a week, just show up later. See what people do. I don't know. Maybe maybe they'll fire you, but maybe they won't, right, Yeah, And I know that there are some industries that are just very production driven. So if you're getting your stuff done just as well or even better than those that have more FaceTime, then I feel like that's a positive thing. I mean, I definitely think that's something that varies from company to company, but I think there are more that are making some efforts to discourage the button seat FaceTime culture, although I know there's still some. Yeah, there's plenty. But there's been some research finding that some men just do this right, that they work the way they want to work and just don't talk about it. So if they want to do something with their family and in the evening, they leave and then they're maybe on a call later or answering emails later, and people just assumed that they were working the whole time, but they weren't. They weren't at all. They just don't talk about it. And I think in some industries it might behoove women to try that approach, just to work how you want to work, see how it goes down. Maybe there will be consequences, in which case you can deal with it. But if you were already thinking like, oh, I can't make this work, I should quit, like, well, then you may as well work how you want to work and see and see what happens. See what happens, I mean, maybe it'll work just fine, and then you can go with that. So the informal eighty percent goes. But of course then we run into this issue of guilt. Talk about the guilt factor. Sarah and I are both what have people read Gretchen Ruben's books we call upholders, which people meet outer expectations and our inner expectations. But you liked having it official. I definitely liked having it official. Again, that's partly the industry that I'm in. If I was in a more results driven environment, I wonder if I could have taken a more casual approach. But the fact is I'm in one where I am expected to be there, So for me to break the rules, to break those outer expectations is so uncomfortable. I mean, I'm the kind of person like if I'm running seven minutes late, I'm texting our manager, oh my gosh, I'm almost there, and you know I've done that. And then like my medical assistant will note that, like, you know, this doctor comes in forty minutes every day late and never says anything. So it really suits my personality a lot more to have since there are expectations to not quietly try to be subversive like I just that was not going to work for me. But I think you know, again, in some other industries where it isn't so straightforward, you know that you need to be in certain places, certain times, there always is this, you know, temptation. I guess I call it that we want to be the good girls, right like we want to show that we are team players, we're playing by the rules. Like some it's about showing like, oh, I'm a good mom because I'm working part time, and we're going to go there. We're going to talk about this in certain circles like look at me, Oh I work a part time schedule. I work, yeah, but it's a part time schedule. And so that's how you can show to the world that no, work is not my top priority. My family is my top priority. And I'm going to show it by taking the official career hit. So there's some of that going on. And when Sarah has talked about going to her eighty percent schedule, she she has gotten a little bit of pushback on her blog. I've been people, We've got some very you know, fierce powerful women here reading these, and I like that. It was actually a very thoughtful, polite and powerful pushback that I got. But someone commented that they were, you know, they were supportive of my decision and they get why it works for me, but they're a little disappointed that it always has to be the woman that's making this choice and not the man. And I in some ways I agree with her, like I wish, you know, that were if I could be the man and make this choice, I would feel even you know, more empowered doing what I'm doing. Versus this way, it sort of feels like I'm succumbing to gender roles, whereas in reality it is truly what I want and works best with a family. And you know, interestingly, in some ways, I think it's not the women and this is going to be controversial too, but that are the most oppressed by this concept, But it's the men, because I actually think there's a lot of professional men that probably could still support their families and you know, have career success but still formally dialing back their hours or their time to make more time for family. But this is just really not something that's done very often in our society. Yeah, and that's why there's some research finding that men may experience more work life stress than women do because men also want to spend time with their families, but they don't have the same options for dialing it back that women do. I mean, a guy who says he wants to work part time, people be well, why, Like, I don't get it, that doesn't make any sense. Whereas if a woman suggests she wants to work part time, a lot of times people assume, well, that's just what mommies do. And so the guys are feeling the stress of having to continue full throttle on their careers while raising their families, and they don't have the same social acceptance of other options. Yeah. I just finished reading a really interesting book called My Year of Living Danishly and talked about a woman who was a writer actually for magazine, and she moved from the UK to Denmark for a year so that her husband could take a job with Lego, and both my husband and I have been fascinating, but fascinated by reading what it's like to work in another country like Denmark, where actually both genders are expected to work what would be considered part time for most of us in the United States. Thirty five hours is typical. To leave the office at four pm to pick up your kids is normal, and then on Fridays off in the end even earlier. And that's true whether you're a man or a woman. And in reading this, you know, both of my husband and I are like, you know, this is awesome. Maybe someday our culture could well I'm not really that hopeful to you ask, but maybe we could partake in such a culture where both of us would have time for balance. I think that would be the ideal. Yeah, And it certainly is totally possible for couples for both parties to work full time, to have full schedules and travel for work or and anything like that. So there's certainly no requirement that one party and a couple dialed things down at all. But you know, if people want to, I think the key thing is you want to make sure you're getting the right things out of it, and that you don't automatically become the person who has to do all the laundry just because you work one fewer day per week or something like that. And I know you guys have had conversations about making sure that it doesn't all fall to you. No, it's definitely doesn't. And trust me, if that's what I was doing on my day off, then I'd probably rather be at work. Yeah, well, because then you'd just be substituting no paid labor for higher paid labor. So that's I mean, I don't mind folding, but you know, not into folding at all. Yeah, So some things to think about with going to the part time schedule that it can work. You just have to be very careful that you're not working full time hours for less pay if you do decide to go to a part time schedule, and Sarah's good about this. You want to set your boundaries, so don't be that person who's working fifty hours a week and only getting paid for part time because people are like, well, but I just need to schedule this call even though it's your day off. Some of it's the kind of work again, but how would you suggest setting those boundaries? It really. I mean, for me, it does help to have the kind of work where I either have a template with patients on it or I do not. But I have been pretty careful not to say yes to too many meetings on my days off, or if I do, then sort of remember that. Well then on my on Friday, if I have to run to my OBI appointment during a day where I'm at the office, that hour is sort of accounted for, because I don't want to end up working the same number of hours as before for a lower paycheck. That's not fair to anyone, especially you exactly. So this brings us to the segment where we do our love of the week started loving her eighty percent schedule, but there's other things she loves too, So what do you have for us this week? There are other things I love this week. I'm loving birthday parties. We actually last weekend spend I don't know, a good chunk of our overall weekend at a birthday party for someone. We had one on Saturday for a five year old, and then another five year old on Sunday, and then my sister in law that night. I know birthday parties get a really bad rap, but I don't know. For younger kids, it's usually a bunch of kids running around having fun. You get to socialize with the parents. A lot of times, you don't have to supervisor kids as closely because they're engaged in whatever activities are being provided by the party, and then they go home tired out. So I personally think it's a win all around. One thing that has made my party experience, I guess a little bit smoother or more fun, is that I do the second IRSVPDI a party. I order the gift at that moment so that it's been in the closet and I don't have to scramble to deal with that, and I have a whole like wrapping drawer that's always stocked, and then that becomes actually part of the event. The kids help me wrap the gift, they make the present, and then that you know, takes up part of the morning, and then we go to the party and it's it's a nice way to spend the day. So yeah, I'm into them. Kids' birthday parties. I don't think they're as bad as I think people like to complain about them. But I honestly, unless it's at like Chuck E cheeses, which I hate. Oh yeah, that's not the best, but a lot of them will be fun. And that's how we've gotten to be good friends with a lot of parents, is that you just keep seeing them at the birthday parties over and over again, and the next thing you know, you're like, eh, I actually like these people exactly. What is your love of the week. My love of the week is my Kindle app. I like to read, and I think, like a lot of people, I was sort of saying, oh, I don't have enough time to read, and the time I was reading it turned out I was either looking at headlines online or I was reading magazine stories. And there's only so many times you can read the story about how air popped popcorn is a good low calorie snack. I think I've read that about fifty times. So this January, I think it was I put the kindle app on my phone finally, and I thought that was silly, because I have a kindle somewhere that I should be reading, but i'd never take that with me every whereas I take the phone with me everywhere. Right, So I have my phone and now I can read ebooks on it during time that I would have been scrolling through headlines or social media or whatever. And it's nice because I can even read like really big books with only having to have this small thing in my pocket, and so that was really helpful. Recently I read through the personal memoirs of Ulysseses Grant. There's a long story of how I wound up reading that. Anyway, it's kind of epic. Book'd be two volumes set if I was looking at it in actual book form, but it's just on my Kindle, and I was scrolling through and reading it and getting through it, and these little bits of time that are otherwise very easy to waste. You know, you're sitting there waiting for a kid to be done at practice, or waiting for a phone call to start or something like that. So Kindle app is free. Obviously, if you're buying books from Amazon, that costs money. But the truth is there's a lot of free books on Kendle. Like a lot of the stuff that's in the public domain is either free or it's ninety nine cents, So as long as you just have an account, it's almost nothing to purchase some of these older books that are in the public domain, and they're just basically compensating people for formatting it. That's it. And libraries also a lot of them have the ability to borrow free ebooks as well, so that's definitely something to look into. If you think you're not reading enough and or you want to read more, just see if you can turn some of that random phone scrolling time into actual reading time. That's what I did too. It's kind of embarrassing how many more books I am making it through these days than we should do a reading episode. We will do reading you read a time. My Kindle app is what I am loving this week. We also, of course love listener questions, so as we're recording these first episodes, we have not obviously had listener questions, although we encourage you now that you aren't listening to these episodes to write to us through our very social media our blogs. You can email me el vanderkamat yahoo dot com send in your questions. But we have some from Sarah's blog that people have been posting. So what do we have this week? I like this one from Jordan how do you make time for friends? I'm a full time working mom and both my husband and I are really social, but sometimes it's hard to find time to see our friends, especially those without kids. She also asked about meal planning, but we'll get that. We'll get to that in another episode. That's also another episode. Yeah, I love this question about friends. It you know, we moved here four years ago, and it's honestly in three to four years before, I feel like we have a good suite of friends and enough to do, and we've gotten to a point where, you know, I do feel like I have enough of a social circle to satisfy me. And I am an extrovert, so that's you know, a decent amount of people. My husband says he doesn't need people, and sometimes I think he wishes we had fewer friends, and I hope that doesn't sound bad because he's a really wonderful person, but not an extrovert. Anyway, we tend to make time for friends a lot of times. With our kids. We often do a Sunday pla ate dinner, so our kids are releasing their excess energy. We're either cooking or taking out, and we're getting that adult interaction all in one. And then if you host them, you'll find that you get invited to some so then you don't even have to worry about cleaning your house half the time. So that's been one of the biggest ways that we've stayed connected with the friends that we've made. That's really cool. I think that you know, obviously, if they have kids your age, that's that's good. Get together for joint friends without kids a little bit more complicated. But what we did when we were, you know, the first of sort of the group to have kids, certain least I was my husband's a little bit older. We would have people come over after kid bedtime and like bring takeout and so then we'd supply the wine. The other couple could bring something that they had picked up on the way over there. And you know, people feel like hosting is the hard thing to do. It is so not, especially if you have kids. You want people to come to your house because then you don't have to leave. You know, we're about childcare. I don't have to worry about childcare. So they would come over after the kid bedtime and we would hang out and then they could leave and go party all night or whatever it is people without children do, and then we could you know, pass out and wake up at six am in the morning. The other I found that a time that I often get together with friends is through exercise. Like I have a couple of friends that I run with occasionally, and they're all different paces, so it sort of depends what kind of run I am looking for. But that can be a fun morning thing to do on the weekend that I meet somebody for a run at a trail that's somewhere near my house and we do a long run and can chat and catch up. I'm totally jealous because I feel like running conversations are the best, and that's one thing I haven't really found down here. So if you're in the Miami area and you want to run with me, let me know all those Sarah, it's deceptively slow at the moment, and her yes, but I'll come back. I'll come back, and then she will be fast. So you might want to build that into your mindset as you're you're thinking, if you want to run with Sarah, but yeah, no, that's so. That's been good for that. But I think it's also just about deciding that it is going to be a priority in your life. And I think it's very easy when we are in these kind of busy years of building a career, raising a family, to say that friends are just the thing that's going to fall by the wayside, and there will be I think a lot of winnowing out because some relationships, it turns out, were not worth keeping, like it's only that they were convenient or you didn't have anything else going on, or whatever it is. But you could also you want to have people who support you through this time, and it doesn't have to be a huge number of people, So it could just be about saying, I'm going to put this on my to do list for the week, to reach out to a friend and to get coffee on the calendar, or a lunch on the calendar, or you know, a weekend get together on the calendar. And if you put this on your calendar to do every month or so, then you'll be getting together with friends at least once a month. And maybe you decide you want to do more frequently, and you can do that as well. But making space where it can make life feel so much more fun and even just catching up on the phone time you would have been scrolling through Instagram, just actually pick up your phone and call somebody and that can be much more meaningful. It's also amazing to me how and This speaks to keeping my friendships with my friends who don't have children. How even just a once a year gathering, you can reconnect with these friends instantly and feel like no time has gone by. So it may be difficult in the next year, but in prior years, there's been at least one trip each year, either because someone got married or for my college reunion, or one year we just all decided to meet up in Chicago, where all of my college girlfriends get together. I'm the only one thus far with kids, which is kind of amazing in and of itself since I'm thirty seven. But yeah, that's been so nice, and it doesn't have to be often for me to still feel like I'm very connected to these women. Yeah, even just a little bit can go a long way. And if you have local friends having a standing date for getting together, whether it's like the first Thursday of every month or something that you meet for dinner, that that's great because then nobody has to plan it. It's already on there. Because when you're planning one off events it's just a pain. But when everyone knows when it's gonna happen, it always happens at that time. It can be easier to get together. Yeah. Or book club are great for that purpose too, just like for instant book exactly, it's a ruge for getting together. Yeah. Well, that has been this episode. Thanks for tuning in. You can reach out to us and we look forward to talking with everyone next time. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.