CEO of Everything

Balancing Career and Family

By Catherine K. Enders Carlton

When Martha Flory needs to run a quick errand or go to the grocery store, she cashes in some half-hour tokens and drops her 6-month-old daughter off at a friend's house. Flory is part of a co-op babysitting group with five church friends in Arlington, Va. Each mom gets 30 tokens to start. They earn back tokens by babysitting the others' kids. The co-op helps her balance work and family life.

Career moms work the equivalent of a six-day workweek. And they don't get overtime or weekends off. "Salaried women spend about 46 hours on the job and 25 hours a week on household responsibilities," says Monica Roper, a work life consultant for WFD Consulting in Boston, Mass.

Balancing a career and a family can be a never-ending process. Childcare, flexible work hours and work-family benefits help, but most moms depend on some creative mechanism for organizing and planning their families' time that works for them. Flory's tokens, like her pact with her husband to not watch TV shows, allow her to allot time with her daughter, her husband, her girlfriends, her book club and her church friends each month – and help her strike a balance.

Flory also job-shares a senior performance consultant position with US Airways. She works two days a week and her job-share partner works three days. This way she can spend the rest of the week with her daughter, Isabella. "It's a perfect balance," she says. "With little ones, it's nice to not be a full-time mom. [Work] is really a 'break' – thinking differently, having adult interaction."

Flory also takes a community theater acting class on Saturday mornings. "That's just time for me to just go do something silly on my own," she says. "It's not my role as wife, employee and mother – it's just for me."

Maria Bailey, CEO and founder of BlueSuitMom.com and mother to four, runs her home like an office. She has an inbox for important family papers.

"In our house, we have a communication center where we post all of our calendars, and the kids post their school work," says Bailey, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "I have an inbox for things that need my attention, then I return it to their backpacks."

Molly Gold of South Riding, Va., created a unique organizer called the Go Mom! Planner that she now sells to help coordinate family schedules and master basic tasks such as the grocery list, emergency contact information and play dates. "You're a mom first. Everything else comes outward from that," says Gold, who has two boys and works from home. "By learning how to schedule and build in extra time along the way, I'm aware of how I'm committing every family member's time."

Fridays are Chris Tate's "kick-back days." She orders pizza and has "family movie night" with her husband, 4-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter. On Sundays she tries to cook at least three days into the week. Tate and her husband, Phil, work for Parker Hannifin Corporation in Andover, Ohio. "Both my husband and I share in our children's lives equally, so we take turns on days that we need to be home with our children," she says. "I don't sweat the small stuff," noting the importance of tucking her kids in at night. "If the dishes don't get done – they will be there tomorrow."

There is, of course, no magic equation to balance everything. But creative methods such as these moms' tokens, planners and inboxes help them cope with the time strain that faces them each day.

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