Does it feel like you need more hours in the day? Do you find yourself saying, "Where does the time go?"
"There's a secret, and all you need to do is think about mustard," says Eve Rodsky, author of "Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution For When You Have Too Much To Do And More Life To Live," a Reese Witherspoon Hello Sunshine Book Club pick.
"The mustard" is a concrete way to think about setting up a system for your entire life, according to Rodsky. She says you start by thinking about how the mustard got into your refrigerator.
You might know that one of your kids loves yellow mustard and won't eat his favorite sandwich without it, so you always have it on hand. That, in organizational management, says Rodksy, is called conception.
Then, someone has to monitor when the mustard is running low and put it on the grocery list to replace it. Brodsky says that is the planning stage.
To get to the execution stage, someone has to go to the store (right now with masks and gloves) to pick up the mustard and everything else on the list.
And this is where men, (for example) in some heterosexual relationships, are stepping in, says Rodsky.
But what if they bring home Dijon every time when you ask for yellow mustard?
"Men are saying to me that they can't get anything right, and women are saying to me that, 'I can't give him hard tasks. I can't give up control of the grocery list because he brings home the wrong kind of mustard.' But this is a systems-fail that we would never accept in the workplace," she says.
Rodsky insists the key is not to break up conception and planning from execution. You need to "own the grocery card" and keep all the steps together.
By dividing things up into cards and someone owning the steps from start to finish, Rodsky says you will have a system that will allow you to win massive amounts of time back in your day, not to mention a less stressful household.
For the full Mom2Mom episode with more concrete tips from Eve, watch here:
