Working mom Tiffany Dufu has come up with a way to “have it all”: Stop trying to do everything herself and get her spouse to do more.
“I expect less from myself and more from my husband,” the 43-year-old author and leadership consultant tells The Post. In her new book, “Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less” (Flatiron Books, out now), Dufu, who lives in Harlem with her husband and two kids, outlines how busy women can balance career and family by letting go of more of the household tasks they’ve traditionally managed.
“You really can have it all, as long as you don’t do it all,” says Dufu.
Here, she shares three strategies for doing just that.
Have faith in your spouse
Men can actually be pretty great at household or parenting tasks if you let them, Dufu writes. For example, when Dufu’s husband was left to find a baby sitter on his own, he came up with a group-messaging trick that streamlined the task, instead of messaging each baby sitter individually and waiting for a response like Dufu had always done.
“When I didn’t believe in any other way except for my way, my home never benefited from the ingenuity and talent that my husband brought,” she writes.
Figure out what matters
Ask yourself what legacy you want to have, what you’re good at and how you want to spend your time. Then you can “drop” the tasks that aren’t important or outsource them to your husband.
“It’s giving yourself permission not to feel guilty if you drop the ball,” Dufu says.
Divide the labor
Dufu advises that husbands and wives make a management spreadsheet of all the home tasks that need to be done, with some assigned to the husband, some to the wife and — most importantly — some to no one. Declaring certain chores nonessential is surprisingly freeing.
“We mutually agreed that some things just wouldn’t happen, and we’d be OK with that,” Dufu writes.
Via source
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