Maternity 33

week 2: take smart time off work

If you count the few weeks I took around Christmas, before my maternity leave officially started, and the few weeks I will take to ease back into a full time work schedule, I’ll come pretty close to 33 weeks - the inspiration for this blog’s title. Since I’m 33 years old, it’s a nice coincidence: 33 weeks in the life of a 33 year old.

Seven months of maternity leave … “that’s great”, “you’re so lucky”, “!!??!!”, “I’m so happy for you”. These are some of the comments I received when I turned on the auto-reply message on my email, a few weeks before my due date. But luck had nothing to do with it. I planned this maternity leave carefully, learning from my last. Here are three principles that worked for me and that should help you plan your leave. 1. Empathize with your employer: in other words, look at things from your boss and team’s perspective. The key to getting enough time to properly welcome your child into this world is to leave your team-mates with a functional replacement while you are away. This means finding a suitable person, training her yourself and equipping her with perfectly organized files. This also means being available to guide this person should they have any questions while you are away: just set realistic expectations about your response time. I hired a graduate student in a Sociology PhD program to replace me for 6 months. I was looking for someone with self discipline and good analytic skills and for whom a 6 month gig would be attractive: this student was happy to take a break from his PhD research to work on a related topic in a “real-world” environment. He was also glad to make a little money!

Also, maternity leave is good practice for the day you leave your job. You should be so good at what you do - namely building and documenting the systems that support the job - that the work should get done regardless of whether or not you are there. As a child I learned that Japanese men don’t take holiday because if they do it’s proof that the company can go on without them. That’s crazy: as an employer I’d want my company to get along fine even if someone leaves or is absent for a long time. So think of maternity leave as a golden opportunity to practice your planning and succession skills, the proverbial “being run over by a bus”.
 
2. Don’t over-estimate your physical and mental abilities in the first 6 months post-partum.  During my first maternity leave, I managed to work one day a week. I didn’t actually do 8 consecutive hours, rather I’d space it out, 2 hours at a time over a seven day week, but I was pretty consistent. By regularly checking email and meeting occasionally with the young lady who replaced me I was able to guide her in her projects and save her lots of wasted time. Exactly one month after his birth I attended an all day conference by Edward Tufte the data visualisation guru and loved the thrill of being back in an intellectual environment after weeks of baby time.

This time around (second maternity leave), I gave myself 6 weeks to stay away from email and my colleagues, and figured that I would then be ready for approximately one day of work per week. However, I’m now three months into my leave and I’m having trouble meeting a simple hour long weekly call to check in with the fellow who is running my projects. I haven’t done more than 5 hours of work in a given week. When I do finally sit at the computer my brain is so accustomed to skipping from one thought to the next, and so worn down by interrupted sleep that I’m not very effective. Thankfully, this doesn’t really matter:  the engine runs without me because I hired a smart, resourceful guy and because I trained him adequately.

3. Stay in the game. It’s tempting to think of the female condition as an either/or: career or family. Everyone dabbles a bit in both, but there’s a prevailing sense that a woman will have to chose to do one better than the other. You can’t have it all. Yet, this doesn’t mean that you have to become lousy at home or career. Instead I practice Carol Bartz’ philosophy - she’s the CEO of Yahoo!.

When asked how she combines being a mother (of three), a CEO and a good partner to her husband she says it’s a juggling act: she just makes sure not to drop the ball. In other words, lots of things come dangerously close to failure or chaos, but they never implode, as she catches them in time to get them moving again.

What might this mean for a maternity leave? It means that you have to take enough time to ensure your infant’s safety and comfort in this world, enough time to ensure that you and your spouse are still having a fun loving time together, but not so much that you don’t know how to step back into the professional world.