Overwhelmed

ideal worker doesn’t get interrupted by repeated calls from the school because a child is acting out, like Rivelli’s, or daily 3 p.m. calls from kids begging for playdates instead of the scheduled after-school program, like mine. The ideal worker never has to think about researching good assisted care facilities for Mom or Dad as they get older, whether they’re getting the best treatment in ICU, or how to get his sister to her next chemotherapy appointment. It’s simply not his job.

Though Gallina put in the grueling 2,200 or more “billable hours” a year required of most lawyers at big law firms,40 she deviated from the norm by working some of those hours at home to make time for her family.

While other associates stayed at their desks, eating the take-out meals ordered by the firm, Gallina tried to leave the office at 6:30 most nights to make it home for dinner and bedtime. Then she went back to work on her laptop, often taking client calls from the West Coast long after 11 p.m. She was always available; her BlackBerry was always on.

Her problems started, she said, when she put a photo of her two-year-old daughter on her desk. The partner she worked for had a wife at home and never saw his kids, she told me. “His perspective was, if I can’t see my kids, why should you see yours?”

Unlike Sandberg, Keefer discovered that it was virtually impossible to walk out the door at 5:30. With a workaholic boss and often pointless meetings called at the last minute in the late afternoon, or projects dumped on her desk just as she was trying to get out the door, and being married to another techie who regularly worked until 2 a.m. for a start-up, life in the high-tech world was simply incompatible with having a family.

Marianne Cooper, a sociologist who has studied extreme work hours in Silicon Valley, said that working to the point of collapse to meet impossible deadlines has become a way to prove manliness and status in the high-tech world. “There’s a lot of … He’s a real man; he works 90-hour weeks. He’s a slacker, he works 50 hours a week,” engineers told Cooper.64 It’s the kind of culture that applauded when pregnant Marissa Mayer announced she wouldn’t take maternity leave after being appointed CEO and president of Yahoo!

The ideal worker doesn’t take parental leave when a child is born. He doesn’t need a place or time to pump breast milk. He has no need of family-friendly policies like flexible scheduling, part-time work, or telecommuting. The ideal worker doesn’t have to find babysitters, deal with school closures on snow days, or otherwise worry about child-care responsibilities. The ideal worker doesn’t mop up after the child who barfs up her breakfast Cheerios or the green Saint Patrick’s Day cookie of the night before. He wrinkles his nose, says, “Good luck with that,” and waltzes out the door.

Being superbusy has become so normal that it’s now a joke. The actor Casey Wilson explained in an interview that her character, Penny, on the TV Show Happy Endings, abbreviates her words, like “hilar” for hilarious and “appresh” for appreciate, because she’s just

high levels of “role overload”—meaning they were trying to do too many things at once to meet the demands of both work and life. Never mind play.

Once, he kept his own time diary. He was in the middle of a huge project, working at the office until 11 p.m. every night. “I figured I was working one hundred hours that week. But when I measured it, it was only seventy-two. That’s when I got skeptical about people’s perceptions about time

more education a parent has, the more time he or she spends with the children.

modern drive toward fast-paced busyness is a pathology. He dubbed it “time sickness.”20 Others said it was more a psychological mania. They called it “chronophilia