Welcome to Time Out. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor add In the Rukar, a physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're here to peel back to layers around why it's so easy for society to guard men's time as if it's diamonds and to treat women's time as if it's infinite like sands. And whether you are partnered with or without children, or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you for all family structures. We're here to take a time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim our time. Good afternoon in adity, So good to see you, So great to be with you, Eve, as always, so today we're really digging into ten years of fair Play research, coupled with your lends around care care is really imported in this country, but why does it fallen women? So why was I the statistic the two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family. Why was it falling on me? What I never told you that I do write about was how I start to think about this beyond myself, How I start to look at this. As my favorite sociologisty Right Mills would say private lives or public issues. So I definitely wasn't a gender studies major in college. I had really never heard of these terms mental load, second shift, emotional labor, invisible work. But after that Blueberries breakdown, I went on a breast cancer march with nine of my closest friends and adity, most of them are married to men, They're in heterosist gender partnerships. They are powerhouse women. One woman with me was the CEO of a major nonprofit. We had the head of stroking trauma at a major hospital, oscar winning producer, and on and on, and we were honoring a friend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. So we got up that morning made signs together that said courage, strength, and power. Not just a women's problem. It was this true girlfriend's collective experience of power. And then noon came and like the fairy tale Cinderella, we all turned into pumpkins. And it was not from a spell. It was from our partners and the text and phone calls that were inundating us starting at noon. The first one that came in was when are you coming home from the parade? Another one was where did you leave Hudson soccer bag? Where's the birthday party? What's the address? And and did you leave me a gift? My favorite adity was my friend Kate's husband who texted her as we looked over her shoulder, do the kids need to eat lunch? And you know what was so hard for me? It wasn't like we all decided to reverse the spell and turned back into our version of a fairy tale by turning off our phones. Every single woman looked at me and said, I'm so happy you made us downtown lunch reservation. But we left our partners with too much to do, and they left me there. But before they started to disperse, I asked for an act of resistance, and that was asking these women to help me count up how many phone calls and text we had received. We had thirty phone calls and forty six texts for ten women over thirty minutes. And that was the day where I said I'm going to understand this issue and that's really where I stumbled upon Arlene Kaplan Daniels article think about Same Ship, different decade about invisible work. And invisible work was such an interesting term to me because duh, you could just make it visible. And so I opened up Excel and I spent nine months with women like you and the women at the Breast Cancer March. And then this was a time when we didn't have social media the way we do today, so I just called up women in different communities and it was the first time a d D again because I didn't have a you to follow. I didn't have these beautiful social media accounts. I had myself and an isolation and loneliness problem. And then over nine months, I met a community of women who helped me populate what I ultimately called my Excel spreadsheet, the should I do spreadsheet, and it became tabs and two thousand idem of invisible work with women I didn't even know, saying, oh my god, thank you for putting in taking the kids to the dentists and making school lunches. That's ten minutes. But I don't see sunscreen. Where is the application of sunscreen? And I would say, well, I just got a scroll to tab seventy two you will see sunscreen is there. And then they would respond, well, yeah, there's it says two minutes for the application, but what about the thirty minutes for the chase. I was like, oh my god, yeah, the thirty minutes for the chase. And it just kept on growing and growing, until finally I thought my solution was sending this giant list to Seth with all of my communication skills that we're going to talk about in a later episode, and that's extremely facetious. It was just the nineteen million megabyte spreadsheet with the subject line can't wait to discuss m HM. And what I got from Seth was predictable. It wasn't even words. It was the earliest version of a monkey emoji that's covering its eyes and in my home. And what I realized about that list when I said it to Seth and it landed sort of like a dud, was that list alone don't work. And we've been making lists for literally a century since we've been trying to enter the male dominated workforce. And the other thing I realized about that day was that this woman had called me from the Jewish Federation of Arizona and left me a message that said, Hey, Eve, I don't know you, but I got your text message from a friend. I want to let you know that after receiving your spreadsheet, thank you so much for making it, I'm not going to stay in my marriage anymore. WHOA. And that got me thinking about they do no harm of exposing a problem without a solution. And so that was the time in my life where I could resign myself to continue to do it all and continue to lose myself in the process, or I could get my ass in gear and become my own clients. And so I asked a question that I want us to explore today, which became the basis of the fair play system, and that is, what if we started to treat our homes as our most important organizations. And one man said to me when I asked him that question, because it was a light bulb moment for me, said, Oh, you mean like the opposite of my home where we wait to decide who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take a piss on the rug. And I said, exactly that that thing, but the opposite. And from that day on I started to understand that even my aunt Marian's ma Gen group has more clearly defined expectations. In the home, you don't bring snack twice to that group, you're out. Whereas the home, we are literally every single day doing the most efficient thing we could do, which is make the same decisions over and over again, which is the opposite of what we're going to talk about today, which is a system. And the last thing I want to say was that the second most important question I we're asked in ten years is the basis of what we're going to talk about today, and that is how did mustard get in your refrigerator? That question ended up being the basis of the fair play system because what I got to see as somebody who does organizational management for a living, as you know, I work for families that look like the HBO show Succession, And so what that question, how does mustard get in your refrigerator? Do? For me? Was a broken answer that I kept hearing with the should I do spreadsheet? When I asked people in partnerships who gets the groceries we both do, who watches the kids we both do? Who packs and unpacks the backpack we both do? And I kept thinking, this is not accurate because if we both did it, then why is there so much resentment? Why is this issue so triggering? So I had to ask, how did mustar get in the refrigerator? To get away from this? Both track up to understand what was really happening in people's homes. And we'll center the heterocyst gender partnership here because that's where a lot of these norms come from. I would hear in seventeen countries, including the Nordic countries. Oh yes, I'm the mom, I'm the woman, and I notice my second son, Johnny needs yellow mustard on his protein otherwise he chokes. And that is conception. That is something we know well from organizational management. We get paid big bucks for conception, for coming up with new ideas and noticing in the workplace. And then that mom would say to me, I'm responsible for monitoring the mustard for when it it's running low. And I'm also getting stakeholder by in from my family for what they need on that list. And that's also something we get paid the big bucks for, and that's planning. And then I would hear I send my partners to the store to pick up the yellow mustard, and you know he brings home spicy dijon eve every fucking time, and you want me to trust him with my living will. We can't even bring home the right type of mustard. And that's when I realized that as a mediator, we often say the presenting problem is not the real problem. Similar to medicine, the real problem wasn't about mustard. It was about accountability and trust, and the only way to bring back accountability and trust in the workplace and the home. From fifty years of organizational scholarship that I know from ten years of working with families, as you come to the table with an ownership mindset, you hold together the conception, planning, and execution of a task that is life changing. That is the life changing magic of mustard. You have demystified something that has plagued us for generations and generations. It's universal, like you have that spreadsheet. Because we're all going through this, and we've talked about it in other episodes. We're having this communal isolating experience. We're doing so much work, we feel this burden and we feel all alone. And yet if you were to knock on your neighbor's door, everyone is going through the same experience. There is a way to take agency in your own life while living in polluted air. Right, we know our air is polluted. We know there's a lot of systemic reasons, especially in America, that things are are harder for women, and especially for mothers without a social safety net, and especially for single mothers like my mother or the millions of others you know out there that are in different types of family structures. But the beauty about understanding that the air is polluted is recognizing that we still have to breathe. Right, we can't stop breathing. We don't want to suffocate and die. That is a radical act to say we can do things differently. You know, when I first came up with the idea of a system, it was confusing to people. They didn't understand what a system is. And when I said, who cares what the system is as long as you know what the outcome is of that system, which is accountability and trust. Explicitly define expectation ends where you know your role in your home, where there's fairness and transparency, that's a thriving organization. And in that type of organization, you know how you're making that decision. Before you make that decision so that you're not like that man who's deciding who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take a piss on the rug. That, to me is the reason why we are burning out. And the other great thing about a system is that it's the opposite of assumptions. So what was happening even in gay families that I would talk to, was this same type of assumptions, not gendered assumptions, right, because it's you say, it's two men raising kids. But what happened is that other assumptions would sneak in. Many gay families would tell me that the school would say, well, who's the mom is sort of in a joking way, trying to put these heterocis gender norms onto other family structures, or even in the own family saying well, we decided the person who makes more automatically did less, and so we end up in these dentful assumptions, which is the opposite of where fair play can take you. System sounds very high tech, and the reason, as you've mentioned in the many stories you've told about how people feel that like factor when they hear the word system for their home is because the home is supposed to feel like a respite, like a high touch environment, right, there's no room for that high tech language in a high touch environment. What I love about fair play and about systems in general, it distills down the home into very concrete, manageable parts. The other thing that systems do is that it removes human error. And that's why we have all of these checks and balances in the medical world with systems is because then we don't rely on the individual So when the individuals feeling tired. You know when I think about doctors, right, like, we're tired, we're on call, we haven't slept. There's all of these other human factors. But when we have systems in place, we can override a lot of those as you call it, low cognition, high emotion states and make good decisions. It's a way to automate something that is very complicated, can get really messy. It removes the human error. Yes, So as we talk about fair play, there's kind of three main concepts, right, So we have the CPE ownership mindset, the minimum standard of care, and the daily grind. So Eve, can you walk us through all of those concepts. So CPE the ownership mindset, as we set up was the opposite of the mustard story. If you actually want to see what we call the CPE checklist, you can go to fair play life dot com. We actually have free resources there for you, but I'll explain it briefly. C p E as an ownership mindset is the opposite of a both trap. It's the opposite of understanding who's doing water, who will make a decision because you both are stuck and thinking you both do it. Let's talk about extracurricular sports, because that was the first one that Seth and I started with. Seth honestly thought he was owning he was in charge of extracricular sports a d d. Because he would show up to the Little League field with my kids when they were young, with a water bottle that I packed for him and in sunscreen that I put on for my kids. When Seth finally understood that the conception was serving my kids friends to see what sports they wanted to play. Even in the first place, that's all involved in a conception. The planning is person car pool text chain, plus the ordering of the equipment or borrowing the equipment, to signing up to the portal that never seems to work and crashes all the time to zero saying five copies of your kids birth certificate, and on and on. And when Seth understood that that that whole thing, from the serving to the planning two the actually showing up on the field, the execution was the ownership mindset that changed our lives. You got me six hours of my week back, So that's CPE. The other two concepts that we really need to understand are the minimum standard of care and the daily grinds. As you said, daily grinds are there's thirty of them in the deck of a hundred fair play cards and what they signify our tasks that are normally done by women. Professor Darby Sacks Be, a friend of mine, forced me to double weight the cards to say not all cards are created equal dishes. Is not the same as lawn and plants. And once I understood that, her research shows that men often take tasks that could be done at their own leisure time, whether that's mowing the lawn or paying bills. Women often do the tasks that are the repetitive tasks that interrupt their time, that chop it up like time confetti. Once you realize that the daily grind cards are the ones we should focus on, the ones we should go to first, the ones we should understand that they're not a gendered responsibility. The closer we get to that, the better. Those are the cards like dishes and card transportation and what I like to call daily disruptions where if a kid is sick, who is the one picking up that kid from school and interrupting their day. Now, finally, let's go to the meat of the resistance. The meat of the resistance to fair play is the minimum standard of care, This idea that my partner and I will never agree on what's important, or as one man said to me, my wife does all these unnecessary things. But the beauty of fair play is it's not a list, even though you can use it that way, and I hope nobody will. The beauty of fair plays when you onboard into a system, you build your deck together, you decide it's a collective unit what matters to you, which is often missing in this discussion. And we're going to do an exercise to really unpack the minimum standard of care when we do our time out today. So it's really cool today, Eve, is that we're meeting someone who's putting all of these larger concepts into practice in their daily lives. Can you tell us a little bit more about Fergil King. I met Fergil while I was giving a key note, and he actually wrote to me. He wrote me a letter about how the fair play systems were changing his life, and we're getting to meet him after the break m I'm so excited to have Furgal here with us today. He sent me a letter after going through a really difficult time with his partner Laren and their two kids. Hi, furgo so, Furgal. I loved the letter you shared with Eve about your experience, and I would love for you to share how you came to this pivotal point and what ultimately led you to talk to us today. So I'm in a common law relationship. We're not actually married. We're engaged or have been for a long time. We have two toddlers, two girls, age one and three. They're twenty months apart, and I typically work in a office environment Monday to Friday nine while my wife Laren is at home with the kids most of the time, and so last summer out of probably sheer frustration on her part with me or how the household is managed or not, and how a lot of the burden typically falls on her because she's at home most of the time. And learn started googling some ideas for a system that would work for the home, and it's a system that's more more fair and more equitable. And that's when she really came across the fair Play and the book. So we decided to take a look at it. We bought the audiobook, we bought the cards, and we fully intended and did put a new system into place. And so up until this point, I considered myself and still do to be this kind of modern day dad, pretty progressive views. I carried my own weight around, help out a lot. I was doing the jobs that were asked of me, and often doing a good job of it too. I think it was complimented on how good of a job I did sometimes and sometimes I would even do these things without being asked, so I felt I was like doing a great job with these things. But despite these values or beliefs that I have, I still would have probably carried a number of cultural norms with me that don't always necessarily a line up with the values that I have. So at the time when Learned first broke out these cards, and so this is the thing we're going to do now. So I took a look at it. I'd say there was probably a lot of resistance for me to begin with. I felt like I needed to defend myself and quite worried about the increased workload that was probably going to be upon me, but you know, I agreed to go along with it to keep her happy. There were at least two game changer things that I reflected upon nearly straightaway upon adopting the new system, like, first of all, immediately allowed to learn to switch off from certain tasks as she knew that I was now responsible for them, and not just responsible for doing the tasks, but as Eve has in her book, like the responsible for the conception and the planning and the execution of them. So this idea of CPE was very new to me, and it became like a household name in our place for a while, like we should often say, like you need to CEP it, just go and c p e it. And of course at the start I didn't know what this was, but I very quickly learned that it's doing a job is not just the execution but also the conception and the planning of it. And so the second thing is that gave me much greater insight into the work that typically goes on behind the scenes, the invisible work as Eves called it. And it's really about the mental load and who's carrying that and what does a fair system look like. So, for example, it's not just about getting a gold star to take the kids to the dentist, but it's about recognizing that, hey, our kids aret of age now that we need to think about getting them to a dentists, so doing the research, whereas a dentist, who's going to book an appointment, who's going to bring them? So it's all of those things. So it's quite a bit of an eye opener in that regard. So overall, I'd say there was a pretty extensive rebalance of the household chores and responsibilities in our home in a way that was definitely more fair and more equitable. So but then learn stuffered a concussion and so this was another game changer. So she was moving some things around in our storage room that day she somehow managed to knock acount of paint on her head. And I still refer to this incident as paint gate joke that it's a conspiracy for her to keep her go on. But like joking aside, it was a really big moment and it's a really incapacitated her for quite some time. So the first few days she lay in the dark room by herself. She couldn't handle any stimuli. She was very sensitive to screens including phones and laptops and lights and movement and noise and couldn't read it. It hurt her brain. She was dizzy, she was nauseous, she had headaches forgetfulness. So I mentioned I have two toddlers at home as well, so trying to explain to them what was going on was a challenge in upon itself as well. And our eldest daughter, Olivia, who's three, had also just started preschool, so just lots of big changes, one on top of the other. Compounding it kind of forced me to have to take a leave of absence from work for up to two months. And it was really during that period that I like stepped in fully into the role of a primary caregiver. And so we adopted this new system and things were better, and they definitely were i'd say in the past preconcussion. I was sympathetic to her situation, but It wasn't until I really stepped into this role of primary caregiver that I had a really true understanding of what she had been up against for over three years, and I was able to get a sense of like what it really means by carrying the mental burden on a daily basis, and also the loneliness that comes with it too, Like there's a less adult conversation and stimulation, a loss of who you are as a person, and much less meaning and purpose to life. I was off work doing this for a couple of months, she was doing for three years, and it really wasn't until then that I got a true sense of what she'd been up against. This is where that I'm crying again. How is it still triggering to me for ago after all these years, when I've done this for ten years, I still feel like really emotional hearing what you're saying. Well, there's PC and a C. It sounds like we have our preconcuccussion and after concussion. Do you think Lauren felt the difference after this period? Did your conversations in your communication did it feel different to you after you went through this leave of absence? Yeah, So I've been back at work for about a month and a half now, and I'd say there's still a couple of things going on. She's still not fully recovered, but she's getting back to it, and I think the silver lining of the concussion has been that she's recognized that, actually, I need to value my own space a lot more, of my own time a lot more, in a way that she hadn't done before, and in a way that I probably did. So there's still some concern from her that returning to her state of preconcussion was a state of really deep burnout. And she did reflect a few times that when she was getting better, she was saying she's taking all more things, and by virtue, I was taking on less of them as a result of that. So she did not want to go back to this state of preconcussion. So we've been trying to reframe it a bit more. This is an opportunity to talk about what the new normal wants to look like, what we want the new normal to look like for her and for us. So we're still getting there. I think it was we only broke out the cards again about a week ago, so we've been redivvying them up basically, and we preconcussion again, we did this thing. That how we managed it was we would have a weekly meeting just half hour along in the evening, just talking about what's what kind of went well the past week, what's on our plate over the next week. Are we going to manage these things? So we just started that again. And you know, there's a bigger picture and doing these things makes us a better couple. It's not just about the impact on me. If you can do something to enable a happier relationship, better family dynamic, than that's the bigger benefit from it all. I suppose here here for a go for president. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing your story with us today. I don't know, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciated. Hi, it's me Eve. Are you a therapist, counselor coach or nutritionists that has thought about introducing the fair Play System directly to your clients? Well, now you can come and roll in the fair Play Method, a new online program that provides you with hands on training, a ton of valuable resource, and a community of certified professionals. We are all part of a greater cultural movement for systemic change. Learn more about how you can help your clients shift the domestic workload in their own homes towards more equity, more fairness, and greater connectivity. Visit fair play method dot com. So eve this week's time out. Since we've heard from Fergal all of the practical implications and how to really bring this into our lives, I'd love for us to pick a card, talk about it, and really bring this into our lives and bring it home. So the card I picked for you was Garbage. Oh my god, I love this so much. This is my favorite card. Carbage was an interesting card because it was a minimum standard of care that Seth and I were really budding heads on. So to make that distinction the concept planning and execution the ownership mindset, Seth understood. He understood the cpe of garbage. He understood that to own garbage, and in California it's more complicated. We have to get these bins out onto the road. He understood that a garbage liner goes back in, goes back in the garbage can. So he understood the steps of the conception thinking about garbage. Planning of when those bins will go out, execution of putting the liner back in and getting those bins out and back. What we were struggling with was I was still his garbage shadow, a D D. And so what would happened was, even though Seth took the card, and this was very early in the practice, I still didn't trust he was going to do it. Back to the accountability and trust why CP is not enough because we had not had a conversation other than that you got the CP of this have fun. But because of all of our old patterns, I was not trusting him. So I was doing as I was his garbage shadow. Seth is very tall, so I'd go into the kitchen, I'd see, you know, the garbage can almost getting full. So I'd say to myself, I'll just open the door into the sink, because if Seth walks over there, he'll hit his knee on the open door and he'll fall. When he's on the ground scrambling as his knee hurts, he'll see the garbage liners in there and then replace it, you know. Or in kinder days, I just pull out a liner and just like throw it on there, or un kinder days, I would put a milk carton on the floor next to the garbage so that he would see that it was overflowing. CPE alone was not working. It was feeling like a list. So then what I realized is that actually having deeper conversations about the decisions we make the things we value is actually really important. And so I sat set down when emotion was low and cognition was high. We probably had alcohol or more likely some ice cream, and I said to him, look, I'm gonna tell you a story that I realized you probably don't know about me. You know my mother, you know my my disabled brother. You know in concept, I grew up as a latch key kid. But what I don't often talk to you about, Seth, is what it felt like to get my brother water, to put my brother to bed when I was still a kid, and have to turn on the lights and watch cockroaches and water bugs scatter. I closed my eyes for ten seconds, let them scatter before I go get the water and bring it to the other room. Because we didn't have a garbage can growing up. We had a garbage bag on a knob and that was it, and it would spill out over the floor and the floor was always sticky, and that was how I grew up. And so when I see a banana peal sticking out of the garbage. I'm transported to being a latch key kid. It brings up abandonment, and it brings up so many issues that are bigger than the garbage. This took me a while to understand about myself a deity. That's why this is a time out to practice understanding our story. So we could tell them, which we're to discuss next week to others. But Seth was able to say to me, well, I don't give a shit about garbage. I had a housekeeper growing up. In fact, in my fraternity, I actually think I probably slept on Domino's pizza boxes and not pillows, So garbage was my friend. So what happens is that it do I give up? Do you give up on the fair play system? Or just say like we did an episode one and the time it takes me to tell him her they what to do or remind them, I should just do it myself. Should I have taken garbage back and say, well, I value it more so I'll just do it. No, because then it would lead exactly back to the place where I was crying on the side of the road. So what I said to Seth firmly was I appreciate you valuing garbage because I value garbage even though you don't value garbage. But you know that this is something that has to be taken out, and you've already said you would do it. So what can we agree on so that I am not your garbage shadow and that also I'm not being triggered from my childhood trauma. And what he said was garbage can go out once a day. I will take the garbage out once a day. I put it in my calendar like a freaking work appointment, as long as you never mentioned garbage ever again. And that was the first time in my life where like the Red Sea, it was a freaking miracle. It parted. It was the first time in my life where there was a light bulb, the system was working. We really, very rarely had to talk about garbage over again. It was happening because I had the expectation and Seth had the trust. And that is the beauty of a minimum standard of care investing in these conversations. So for this week's time out, we are going to use Eve's example of garbage, and there are twelve what Eve calls that dirty, doesn't These are like the twelve heated hot button cards, tidying up groceries, dishes, meals, cleaning, garbage, discipline and screen time, kids, friendships, homeschool projects and supplies watching your kids or your pets, laundry and home supplies. Check out the list on fairplay life dot com. We're gonna pick one of those twelve and use the minimum standard of care that Eve has described to talk through how we're going to tackle one of these twelve. And what I love about this is it's really about you. Before we talked to any partners, anybody. It could be a roommate, it could be your parents. It's about understanding you're a minimum standard of care and starting to think about yourself. Talk how you would articulate it, what you remember about this task growing up. And next week we're actually going to start prepping for the invitation for how to invite someone to stay down to actually discuss these issues. We're moving from the internal work to more external facing work and it's going to be really impactful. The next episode is one of my favorite because communication will always be the hardest and the most important practice at least of my life. Thank you for listening to Time out A production of I Heard Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social media at ev Rodsky and learn more about our work at fair Play Life. And I'm doctor at dd NERUCAR, a Harvard position with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout, and mental health. Follow me on social media at dr A d D The rootcar and find out more about my work at doctor d D dot com. That's d R A d I t I dot com. Our Hello Sunshine team is Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker. Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett, and Jessica Krinschitch. We hope you all love taking a much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Welcome to Time Out. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor add In the Rukar, a physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're here to peel back to layers around why it's so easy for society to guard men's time as if it's diamonds and to treat women's time as if it's infinite like sands. And whether you are partnered with or without children, or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you for all family structures. We're here to take a time out to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim our time. Good afternoon in adity, So good to see you, So great to be with you, Eve, as always, so today we're really digging into ten years of fair Play research, coupled with your lends around care care is really imported in this country, but why does it fallen women? So why was I the statistic the two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family. Why was it falling on me? What I never told you that I do write about was how I start to think about this beyond myself, How I start to look at this. As my favorite sociologisty Right Mills would say private lives or public issues. So I definitely wasn't a gender studies major in college. I had really never heard of these terms mental load, second shift, emotional labor, invisible work. But after that Blueberries breakdown, I went on a breast cancer march with nine of my closest friends and adity, most of them are married to men, They're in heterosist gender partnerships. They are powerhouse women. One woman with me was the CEO of a major nonprofit. We had the head of stroking trauma at a major hospital, oscar winning producer, and on and on, and we were honoring a friend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. So we got up that morning made signs together that said courage, strength, and power. Not just a women's problem. It was this true girlfriend's collective experience of power. And then noon came and like the fairy tale Cinderella, we all turned into pumpkins. And it was not from a spell. It was from our partners and the text and phone calls that were inundating us starting at noon. The first one that came in was when are you coming home from the parade? Another one was where did you leave Hudson soccer bag? Where's the birthday party? What's the address? And and did you leave me a gift? My favorite adity was my friend Kate's husband who texted her as we looked over her shoulder, do the kids need to eat lunch? And you know what was so hard for me? It wasn't like we all decided to reverse the spell and turned back into our version of a fairy tale by turning off our phones. Every single woman looked at me and said, I'm so happy you made us downtown lunch reservation. But we left our partners with too much to do, and they left me there. But before they started to disperse, I asked for an act of resistance, and that was asking these women to help me count up how many phone calls and text we had received. We had thirty phone calls and forty six texts for ten women over thirty minutes. And that was the day where I said I'm going to understand this issue and that's really where I stumbled upon Arlene Kaplan Daniels article think about Same Ship, different decade about invisible work. And invisible work was such an interesting term to me because duh, you could just make it visible. And so I opened up Excel and I spent nine months with women like you and the women at the Breast Cancer March. And then this was a time when we didn't have social media the way we do today, so I just called up women in different communities and it was the first time a d D again because I didn't have a you to follow. I didn't have these beautiful social media accounts. I had myself and an isolation and loneliness problem. And then over nine months, I met a community of women who helped me populate what I ultimately called my Excel spreadsheet, the should I do spreadsheet, and it became tabs and two thousand idem of invisible work with women I didn't even know, saying, oh my god, thank you for putting in taking the kids to the dentists and making school lunches. That's ten minutes. But I don't see sunscreen. Where is the application of sunscreen? And I would say, well, I just got a scroll to tab seventy two you will see sunscreen is there. And then they would respond, well, yeah, there's it says two minutes for the application, but what about the thirty minutes for the chase. I was like, oh my god, yeah, the thirty minutes for the chase. And it just kept on growing and growing, until finally I thought my solution was sending this giant list to Seth with all of my communication skills that we're going to talk about in a later episode, and that's extremely facetious. It was just the nineteen million megabyte spreadsheet with the subject line can't wait to discuss m HM. And what I got from Seth was predictable. It wasn't even words. It was the earliest version of a monkey emoji that's covering its eyes and in my home. And what I realized about that list when I said it to Seth and it landed sort of like a dud, was that list alone don't work. And we've been making lists for literally a century since we've been trying to enter the male dominated workforce. And the other thing I realized about that day was that this woman had called me from the Jewish Federation of Arizona and left me a message that said, Hey, Eve, I don't know you, but I got your text message from a friend. I want to let you know that after receiving your spreadsheet, thank you so much for making it, I'm not going to stay in my marriage anymore. WHOA. And that got me thinking about they do no harm of exposing a problem without a solution. And so that was the time in my life where I could resign myself to continue to do it all and continue to lose myself in the process, or I could get my ass in gear and become my own clients. And so I asked a question that I want us to explore today, which became the basis of the fair play system, and that is, what if we started to treat our homes as our most important organizations. And one man said to me when I asked him that question, because it was a light bulb moment for me, said, Oh, you mean like the opposite of my home where we wait to decide who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take a piss on the rug. And I said, exactly that that thing, but the opposite. And from that day on I started to understand that even my aunt Marian's ma Gen group has more clearly defined expectations. In the home, you don't bring snack twice to that group, you're out. Whereas the home, we are literally every single day doing the most efficient thing we could do, which is make the same decisions over and over again, which is the opposite of what we're going to talk about today, which is a system. And the last thing I want to say was that the second most important question I we're asked in ten years is the basis of what we're going to talk about today, and that is how did mustard get in your refrigerator? That question ended up being the basis of the fair play system because what I got to see as somebody who does organizational management for a living, as you know, I work for families that look like the HBO show Succession, And so what that question, how does mustard get in your refrigerator? Do? For me? Was a broken answer that I kept hearing with the should I do spreadsheet? When I asked people in partnerships who gets the groceries we both do, who watches the kids we both do? Who packs and unpacks the backpack we both do? And I kept thinking, this is not accurate because if we both did it, then why is there so much resentment? Why is this issue so triggering? So I had to ask, how did mustar get in the refrigerator? To get away from this? Both track up to understand what was really happening in people's homes. And we'll center the heterocyst gender partnership here because that's where a lot of these norms come from. I would hear in seventeen countries, including the Nordic countries. Oh yes, I'm the mom, I'm the woman, and I notice my second son, Johnny needs yellow mustard on his protein otherwise he chokes. And that is conception. That is something we know well from organizational management. We get paid big bucks for conception, for coming up with new ideas and noticing in the workplace. And then that mom would say to me, I'm responsible for monitoring the mustard for when it it's running low. And I'm also getting stakeholder by in from my family for what they need on that list. And that's also something we get paid the big bucks for, and that's planning. And then I would hear I send my partners to the store to pick up the yellow mustard, and you know he brings home spicy dijon eve every fucking time, and you want me to trust him with my living will. We can't even bring home the right type of mustard. And that's when I realized that as a mediator, we often say the presenting problem is not the real problem. Similar to medicine, the real problem wasn't about mustard. It was about accountability and trust, and the only way to bring back accountability and trust in the workplace and the home. From fifty years of organizational scholarship that I know from ten years of working with families, as you come to the table with an ownership mindset, you hold together the conception, planning, and execution of a task that is life changing. That is the life changing magic of mustard. You have demystified something that has plagued us for generations and generations. It's universal, like you have that spreadsheet. Because we're all going through this, and we've talked about it in other episodes. We're having this communal isolating experience. We're doing so much work, we feel this burden and we feel all alone. And yet if you were to knock on your neighbor's door, everyone is going through the same experience. There is a way to take agency in your own life while living in polluted air. Right, we know our air is polluted. We know there's a lot of systemic reasons, especially in America, that things are are harder for women, and especially for mothers without a social safety net, and especially for single mothers like my mother or the millions of others you know out there that are in different types of family structures. But the beauty about understanding that the air is polluted is recognizing that we still have to breathe. Right, we can't stop breathing. We don't want to suffocate and die. That is a radical act to say we can do things differently. You know, when I first came up with the idea of a system, it was confusing to people. They didn't understand what a system is. And when I said, who cares what the system is as long as you know what the outcome is of that system, which is accountability and trust. Explicitly define expectation ends where you know your role in your home, where there's fairness and transparency, that's a thriving organization. And in that type of organization, you know how you're making that decision. Before you make that decision so that you're not like that man who's deciding who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take a piss on the rug. That, to me is the reason why we are burning out. And the other great thing about a system is that it's the opposite of assumptions. So what was happening even in gay families that I would talk to, was this same type of assumptions, not gendered assumptions, right, because it's you say, it's two men raising kids. But what happened is that other assumptions would sneak in. Many gay families would tell me that the school would say, well, who's the mom is sort of in a joking way, trying to put these heterocis gender norms onto other family structures, or even in the own family saying well, we decided the person who makes more automatically did less, and so we end up in these dentful assumptions, which is the opposite of where fair play can take you. System sounds very high tech, and the reason, as you've mentioned in the many stories you've told about how people feel that like factor when they hear the word system for their home is because the home is supposed to feel like a respite, like a high touch environment, right, there's no room for that high tech language in a high touch environment. What I love about fair play and about systems in general, it distills down the home into very concrete, manageable parts. The other thing that systems do is that it removes human error. And that's why we have all of these checks and balances in the medical world with systems is because then we don't rely on the individual So when the individuals feeling tired. You know when I think about doctors, right, like, we're tired, we're on call, we haven't slept. There's all of these other human factors. But when we have systems in place, we can override a lot of those as you call it, low cognition, high emotion states and make good decisions. It's a way to automate something that is very complicated, can get really messy. It removes the human error. Yes, So as we talk about fair play, there's kind of three main concepts, right, So we have the CPE ownership mindset, the minimum standard of care, and the daily grind. So Eve, can you walk us through all of those concepts. So CPE the ownership mindset, as we set up was the opposite of the mustard story. If you actually want to see what we call the CPE checklist, you can go to fair play life dot com. We actually have free resources there for you, but I'll explain it briefly. C p E as an ownership mindset is the opposite of a both trap. It's the opposite of understanding who's doing water, who will make a decision because you both are stuck and thinking you both do it. Let's talk about extracurricular sports, because that was the first one that Seth and I started with. Seth honestly thought he was owning he was in charge of extracricular sports a d d. Because he would show up to the Little League field with my kids when they were young, with a water bottle that I packed for him and in sunscreen that I put on for my kids. When Seth finally understood that the conception was serving my kids friends to see what sports they wanted to play. Even in the first place, that's all involved in a conception. The planning is person car pool text chain, plus the ordering of the equipment or borrowing the equipment, to signing up to the portal that never seems to work and crashes all the time to zero saying five copies of your kids birth certificate, and on and on. And when Seth understood that that that whole thing, from the serving to the planning two the actually showing up on the field, the execution was the ownership mindset that changed our lives. You got me six hours of my week back, So that's CPE. The other two concepts that we really need to understand are the minimum standard of care and the daily grinds. As you said, daily grinds are there's thirty of them in the deck of a hundred fair play cards and what they signify our tasks that are normally done by women. Professor Darby Sacks Be, a friend of mine, forced me to double weight the cards to say not all cards are created equal dishes. Is not the same as lawn and plants. And once I understood that, her research shows that men often take tasks that could be done at their own leisure time, whether that's mowing the lawn or paying bills. Women often do the tasks that are the repetitive tasks that interrupt their time, that chop it up like time confetti. Once you realize that the daily grind cards are the ones we should focus on, the ones we should go to first, the ones we should understand that they're not a gendered responsibility. The closer we get to that, the better. Those are the cards like dishes and card transportation and what I like to call daily disruptions where if a kid is sick, who is the one picking up that kid from school and interrupting their day. Now, finally, let's go to the meat of the resistance. The meat of the resistance to fair play is the minimum standard of care, This idea that my partner and I will never agree on what's important, or as one man said to me, my wife does all these unnecessary things. But the beauty of fair play is it's not a list, even though you can use it that way, and I hope nobody will. The beauty of fair plays when you onboard into a system, you build your deck together, you decide it's a collective unit what matters to you, which is often missing in this discussion. And we're going to do an exercise to really unpack the minimum standard of care when we do our time out today. So it's really cool today, Eve, is that we're meeting someone who's putting all of these larger concepts into practice in their daily lives. Can you tell us a little bit more about Fergil King. I met Fergil while I was giving a key note, and he actually wrote to me. He wrote me a letter about how the fair play systems were changing his life, and we're getting to meet him after the break m I'm so excited to have Furgal here with us today. He sent me a letter after going through a really difficult time with his partner Laren and their two kids. Hi, furgo so, Furgal. I loved the letter you shared with Eve about your experience, and I would love for you to share how you came to this pivotal point and what ultimately led you to talk to us today. So I'm in a common law relationship. We're not actually married. We're engaged or have been for a long time. We have two toddlers, two girls, age one and three. They're twenty months apart, and I typically work in a office environment Monday to Friday nine while my wife Laren is at home with the kids most of the time, and so last summer out of probably sheer frustration on her part with me or how the household is managed or not, and how a lot of the burden typically falls on her because she's at home most of the time. And learn started googling some ideas for a system that would work for the home, and it's a system that's more more fair and more equitable. And that's when she really came across the fair Play and the book. So we decided to take a look at it. We bought the audiobook, we bought the cards, and we fully intended and did put a new system into place. And so up until this point, I considered myself and still do to be this kind of modern day dad, pretty progressive views. I carried my own weight around, help out a lot. I was doing the jobs that were asked of me, and often doing a good job of it too. I think it was complimented on how good of a job I did sometimes and sometimes I would even do these things without being asked, so I felt I was like doing a great job with these things. But despite these values or beliefs that I have, I still would have probably carried a number of cultural norms with me that don't always necessarily a line up with the values that I have. So at the time when Learned first broke out these cards, and so this is the thing we're going to do now. So I took a look at it. I'd say there was probably a lot of resistance for me to begin with. I felt like I needed to defend myself and quite worried about the increased workload that was probably going to be upon me, but you know, I agreed to go along with it to keep her happy. There were at least two game changer things that I reflected upon nearly straightaway upon adopting the new system, like, first of all, immediately allowed to learn to switch off from certain tasks as she knew that I was now responsible for them, and not just responsible for doing the tasks, but as Eve has in her book, like the responsible for the conception and the planning and the execution of them. So this idea of CPE was very new to me, and it became like a household name in our place for a while, like we should often say, like you need to CEP it, just go and c p e it. And of course at the start I didn't know what this was, but I very quickly learned that it's doing a job is not just the execution but also the conception and the planning of it. And so the second thing is that gave me much greater insight into the work that typically goes on behind the scenes, the invisible work as Eves called it. And it's really about the mental load and who's carrying that and what does a fair system look like. So, for example, it's not just about getting a gold star to take the kids to the dentist, but it's about recognizing that, hey, our kids aret of age now that we need to think about getting them to a dentists, so doing the research, whereas a dentist, who's going to book an appointment, who's going to bring them? So it's all of those things. So it's quite a bit of an eye opener in that regard. So overall, I'd say there was a pretty extensive rebalance of the household chores and responsibilities in our home in a way that was definitely more fair and more equitable. So but then learn stuffered a concussion and so this was another game changer. So she was moving some things around in our storage room that day she somehow managed to knock acount of paint on her head. And I still refer to this incident as paint gate joke that it's a conspiracy for her to keep her go on. But like joking aside, it was a really big moment and it's a really incapacitated her for quite some time. So the first few days she lay in the dark room by herself. She couldn't handle any stimuli. She was very sensitive to screens including phones and laptops and lights and movement and noise and couldn't read it. It hurt her brain. She was dizzy, she was nauseous, she had headaches forgetfulness. So I mentioned I have two toddlers at home as well, so trying to explain to them what was going on was a challenge in upon itself as well. And our eldest daughter, Olivia, who's three, had also just started preschool, so just lots of big changes, one on top of the other. Compounding it kind of forced me to have to take a leave of absence from work for up to two months. And it was really during that period that I like stepped in fully into the role of a primary caregiver. And so we adopted this new system and things were better, and they definitely were i'd say in the past preconcussion. I was sympathetic to her situation, but It wasn't until I really stepped into this role of primary caregiver that I had a really true understanding of what she had been up against for over three years, and I was able to get a sense of like what it really means by carrying the mental burden on a daily basis, and also the loneliness that comes with it too, Like there's a less adult conversation and stimulation, a loss of who you are as a person, and much less meaning and purpose to life. I was off work doing this for a couple of months, she was doing for three years, and it really wasn't until then that I got a true sense of what she'd been up against. This is where that I'm crying again. How is it still triggering to me for ago after all these years, when I've done this for ten years, I still feel like really emotional hearing what you're saying. Well, there's PC and a C. It sounds like we have our preconcuccussion and after concussion. Do you think Lauren felt the difference after this period? Did your conversations in your communication did it feel different to you after you went through this leave of absence? Yeah, So I've been back at work for about a month and a half now, and I'd say there's still a couple of things going on. She's still not fully recovered, but she's getting back to it, and I think the silver lining of the concussion has been that she's recognized that, actually, I need to value my own space a lot more, of my own time a lot more, in a way that she hadn't done before, and in a way that I probably did. So there's still some concern from her that returning to her state of preconcussion was a state of really deep burnout. And she did reflect a few times that when she was getting better, she was saying she's taking all more things, and by virtue, I was taking on less of them as a result of that. So she did not want to go back to this state of preconcussion. So we've been trying to reframe it a bit more. This is an opportunity to talk about what the new normal wants to look like, what we want the new normal to look like for her and for us. So we're still getting there. I think it was we only broke out the cards again about a week ago, so we've been redivvying them up basically, and we preconcussion again, we did this thing. That how we managed it was we would have a weekly meeting just half hour along in the evening, just talking about what's what kind of went well the past week, what's on our plate over the next week. Are we going to manage these things? So we just started that again. And you know, there's a bigger picture and doing these things makes us a better couple. It's not just about the impact on me. If you can do something to enable a happier relationship, better family dynamic, than that's the bigger benefit from it all. I suppose here here for a go for president. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing your story with us today. I don't know, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciated. Hi, it's me Eve. Are you a therapist, counselor coach or nutritionists that has thought about introducing the fair Play System directly to your clients? Well, now you can come and roll in the fair Play Method, a new online program that provides you with hands on training, a ton of valuable resource, and a community of certified professionals. We are all part of a greater cultural movement for systemic change. Learn more about how you can help your clients shift the domestic workload in their own homes towards more equity, more fairness, and greater connectivity. Visit fair play method dot com. So eve this week's time out. Since we've heard from Fergal all of the practical implications and how to really bring this into our lives, I'd love for us to pick a card, talk about it, and really bring this into our lives and bring it home. So the card I picked for you was Garbage. Oh my god, I love this so much. This is my favorite card. Carbage was an interesting card because it was a minimum standard of care that Seth and I were really budding heads on. So to make that distinction the concept planning and execution the ownership mindset, Seth understood. He understood the cpe of garbage. He understood that to own garbage, and in California it's more complicated. We have to get these bins out onto the road. He understood that a garbage liner goes back in, goes back in the garbage can. So he understood the steps of the conception thinking about garbage. Planning of when those bins will go out, execution of putting the liner back in and getting those bins out and back. What we were struggling with was I was still his garbage shadow, a D D. And so what would happened was, even though Seth took the card, and this was very early in the practice, I still didn't trust he was going to do it. Back to the accountability and trust why CP is not enough because we had not had a conversation other than that you got the CP of this have fun. But because of all of our old patterns, I was not trusting him. So I was doing as I was his garbage shadow. Seth is very tall, so I'd go into the kitchen, I'd see, you know, the garbage can almost getting full. So I'd say to myself, I'll just open the door into the sink, because if Seth walks over there, he'll hit his knee on the open door and he'll fall. When he's on the ground scrambling as his knee hurts, he'll see the garbage liners in there and then replace it, you know. Or in kinder days, I just pull out a liner and just like throw it on there, or un kinder days, I would put a milk carton on the floor next to the garbage so that he would see that it was overflowing. CPE alone was not working. It was feeling like a list. So then what I realized is that actually having deeper conversations about the decisions we make the things we value is actually really important. And so I sat set down when emotion was low and cognition was high. We probably had alcohol or more likely some ice cream, and I said to him, look, I'm gonna tell you a story that I realized you probably don't know about me. You know my mother, you know my my disabled brother. You know in concept, I grew up as a latch key kid. But what I don't often talk to you about, Seth, is what it felt like to get my brother water, to put my brother to bed when I was still a kid, and have to turn on the lights and watch cockroaches and water bugs scatter. I closed my eyes for ten seconds, let them scatter before I go get the water and bring it to the other room. Because we didn't have a garbage can growing up. We had a garbage bag on a knob and that was it, and it would spill out over the floor and the floor was always sticky, and that was how I grew up. And so when I see a banana peal sticking out of the garbage. I'm transported to being a latch key kid. It brings up abandonment, and it brings up so many issues that are bigger than the garbage. This took me a while to understand about myself a deity. That's why this is a time out to practice understanding our story. So we could tell them, which we're to discuss next week to others. But Seth was able to say to me, well, I don't give a shit about garbage. I had a housekeeper growing up. In fact, in my fraternity, I actually think I probably slept on Domino's pizza boxes and not pillows, So garbage was my friend. So what happens is that it do I give up? Do you give up on the fair play system? Or just say like we did an episode one and the time it takes me to tell him her they what to do or remind them, I should just do it myself. Should I have taken garbage back and say, well, I value it more so I'll just do it. No, because then it would lead exactly back to the place where I was crying on the side of the road. So what I said to Seth firmly was I appreciate you valuing garbage because I value garbage even though you don't value garbage. But you know that this is something that has to be taken out, and you've already said you would do it. So what can we agree on so that I am not your garbage shadow and that also I'm not being triggered from my childhood trauma. And what he said was garbage can go out once a day. I will take the garbage out once a day. I put it in my calendar like a freaking work appointment, as long as you never mentioned garbage ever again. And that was the first time in my life where like the Red Sea, it was a freaking miracle. It parted. It was the first time in my life where there was a light bulb, the system was working. We really, very rarely had to talk about garbage over again. It was happening because I had the expectation and Seth had the trust. And that is the beauty of a minimum standard of care investing in these conversations. So for this week's time out, we are going to use Eve's example of garbage, and there are twelve what Eve calls that dirty, doesn't These are like the twelve heated hot button cards, tidying up groceries, dishes, meals, cleaning, garbage, discipline and screen time, kids, friendships, homeschool projects and supplies watching your kids or your pets, laundry and home supplies. Check out the list on fairplay life dot com. We're gonna pick one of those twelve and use the minimum standard of care that Eve has described to talk through how we're going to tackle one of these twelve. And what I love about this is it's really about you. Before we talked to any partners, anybody. It could be a roommate, it could be your parents. It's about understanding you're a minimum standard of care and starting to think about yourself. Talk how you would articulate it, what you remember about this task growing up. And next week we're actually going to start prepping for the invitation for how to invite someone to stay down to actually discuss these issues. We're moving from the internal work to more external facing work and it's going to be really impactful. The next episode is one of my favorite because communication will always be the hardest and the most important practice at least of my life. Thank you for listening to Time out A production of I Heard Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and find your Unicorn Space. Follow me on social media at ev Rodsky and learn more about our work at fair Play Life. And I'm doctor at dd NERUCAR, a Harvard position with a specialty and stress resilience, burnout, and mental health. Follow me on social media at dr A d D The rootcar and find out more about my work at doctor d D dot com. That's d R A d I t I dot com. Our Hello Sunshine team is Amanda farrand Aaron Stover and Jennifer Yonker. Our I Heart Media team is Ali Perry, Jennifer Bassett, and Jessica Krinschitch. We hope you all love taking a much needed time out with us today. Listen and subscribe to Time Out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.