I was going to start this column with“This one is for you, ladies!” as the main audience for the book is certainly women. But honestly, as Tiffany Dufu’s book Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less suggests, everyone could benefit by occasionally dropping that ball — especially during these harried, upsidedown times. It’s particularly good advice for those who live a farmer’s life, where the to-do list never seems to get completed and there aren’t enough hours in a day.
Drop the Ball is a perspective-adjusting, scab-ripping read, with a few moments of “duh, of course — why didn’t I realize that? It’s so obvious!”
Dufu forces us to take a hard look at the well-intentioned habits that women continue to perform, the maxims we repeat to ourselves, and the myths that we inadvertently perpetuate, all of which ultimately work against us.
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For example, “(M)ost modern women scoff at the idea that a woman’s place is in the home,” writes Dufu. “And yet many women still focus obsessively on everything about it — how it’s organized, how it’s managed, and how the cooking, cleaning and caretaking get done, right down to the smallest detail.”
Dufu calls this Home Control Disease and says that it can be difficult for women to abdicate responsibility “in the one place female authority is unquestioned.”
However, it’s nearly impossible to work full steam at home while simultaneously giving it your all to the farm. Adding to the pressure is that “we’re not supposed to openly admit that we feel our success as women is connected to our success at home,” says Dufu. “That would make us weak or at least old-fashioned. And we are not weak or old-fashioned.”
Additionally, the influences of society at large and the cultures in which we grow up make it even more challenging for women to drop the ball at home or at work. Add to that the neuroscientific aspect of humans being wired to choose the path of least resistance, so we think it’s easier to just do it all ourselves rather than take the time to says that this leads to a sense of false efficiency where we think we, and only we, can do everything better and faster. And then we wonder why we burn out or get angry at our partners for not pitching in enough.
Then, as if all that wasn’t enough, let this sink in: “Women spend a disproportionate amount of their energy on activities for which they are neither compensated nor publicly recognized, but which take up a great deal of time,” writes Dufu.
Imagine what you could do if you were more deliberate about how your time and energy are allotted? You might finally be able to implement that cool idea to grow your business or find that ever elusive “me time.”
Dufu suggests several tactics. For example, she recommends defining what caregiving for your family means to you. By “reject(ing) society’s unrealistic expectation that (you) perform breadwinning and caregiving flawlessly” you will necessarily have to drop the ball in some places. Do your floors need to be scrubbed every week or can you get by with every two? Do you need to bake homemade cookies for the school bake sale, or can you outsource this to a small, local bakery?
“Just because you’re better at doing something doesn’t mean you doing it is the most productive use of your time,” Dufu says.
We also need to stop imaginary delegating. “This is when we mentally assign our partners a task but never take the step of telling them,” Dufu explains. “We assume that they will intuit our needs … (but) if we don’t clearly express that we want them to pick up the slack, they proceed with business as usual … and we silently seethe — or angrily lash out – while our husbands wonder, ‘What’s going on?’”
Another hot tip? Wait longer before undertaking a task. This allows someone else to notice and get it done. Irksome? You betcha! Especially for those impatient and perfection-loving Type A’s (which I know a little something about). But Dufu says “Valuing how someone else operates versus just complaining about it helps us to adjust our expectations.”
As Dufu observes, it can be hard to let go of power even if it’s something you never asked for in the first place. But releasing those unrealistic “we can do it all” assumptions — dropping those balls — leads to better relationships with partners and ourselves.
As Dufu sums it up, “We can be happy and imperfect at the same time.”
