UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT Family life is chaotic. Could office software help?
Michelle Penczak and her husband, Maj. Sean Penczak, had planned, pre-coronavirus, to move from Kailua, Hawaii, to Atlanta for Sean Penczak’s new job with SkyWest airlines in May. A crosscountry relocation isn’t easy under normal circumstances, especially with two boys, ages 1 and 4. Then the pandemic arrived.
Sean Penczak was furloughed, and the couple, both 33, scrambled for a new destination. They landed on Virginia Beach, Virginia, close to Penczak’s Marine Corps reserve unit. But this required choosing a new neighborhood, house and schools. It meant rethinking the family’s entire budget: Could they afford full-time day care? Keep their Netflix subscription?
And what about the move itself? What personal protective equipment (PPE) would they need? Which stroller would best contain the boys, so they didn’t touch anything? At what intervals would they all wash their hands?
To impose order on this chaos, the family turned to Airtable, a cloud collaboration platform that companies use to manage big projects. In went every new budget line item, every piece of PPE, every potential day care provider.
It was part of a strategy the family implemented a year ago: Apply office management tools to structure their domestic life. This included weekly meetings called “Sunday huddles,” midweek check-ins called “brain dumps” and organizational platforms like Airtable as well as Trello, a Kanban-style list-making app that resembles a board of Post-it notes.
Michelle Penczak runs Squared Away, a company that trains military spouses to be chief executive assistants. “My job is organizing people for a living,” she said. “And my philosophy is that if you do it more than once, it should have a process.”
But for many years, the couple made their domestic decisions “in passing,” which strained their relationship. Once they gave their marriage an HR-style audit, however, the situation improved. And now with the coronavirus, Michelle Penczak is especially grateful to be running her household like her business.
“Focusing on the things we can control over those we can’t has been huge,” she said. “I thrive on organization, and this has given me peace of mind.”
Of course, for these strategies to work, both people need to be game. Initially, Sean Penczak required some convincing. “He was not quite anticipating the level of tool usage that he would become adjusted to,” Michelle Penczak said. But he got on board. “We don’t have the ‘Oh, I don’t remember you saying that’ conversation. That’s amazing after seven years of marriage.”
Allison Daminger, a sociologist and doctoral candidate studying the impact of societal inequality on family dynamics at Harvard, agrees that these formal systems “can be annoying or cumbersome.” But she said they’re useful in achieving domestic parity.
Last year, she published a study in the American Sociological Review about cognitive labor: the process of anticipating, planning and monitoring that is often required in household tasks. Without an “explicit plan, when couples just fell into the division of labor, they almost always replicated the status quo with women doing more,” she said. “The more formal systems help couples reckon with what they actually want.”
Hitha Palepu, the CEO of a pharmaceutical startup, angel investor and mother of two, said “a lot of women can empathize with constantly giving and giving and giving and waiting for someone to say, ‘Let me jump in.’ Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen often.”
Palepu, 35, had a breaking point in late 2018, while pregnant with her second child. She was suffering from depression, and her work and family responsibilities felt unmanageable. When friends posted a marriage check-in list on their Instagram, Palepu asked her husband to give it a try.
Now each week, “we go through almost all the agenda items: how are you feeling, how am I feeling, how does our marriage feel,” Palepu said. “If one of us is feeling off, underappreciated or not heard, we discuss what we can do to remedy that.” This level of honesty and vulnerability took some getting used to. “The first few meetings were incredibly uncomfortable,” she said. “You have to put your ego aside. It’s a practice.”
A year later, the couple adopted a family management system they’d read about in a 2019 book called “Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live).” Palepu even brought the dogeared, highlighted copy with her when the family left Manhattan to isolate with her parents in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
“I sat my parents down and said we need to talk about what everyone is going to do, so we can all live harmoniously in the same house,” she said.
You should “treat your home like your most important organization” said Eve Rodsky, the author of “Fair Play.” In an efficient, well-functioning office, people know their roles and have clearly defined expectations. “The home,” she said, “has none of these.”
Rodsky, 43, runs a philanthropic and family management consulting firm for high-net-worth individuals. But she wrote “Fair Play” for the average stressed-out parent. According to her, fairness isn’t about a 50-50 breakdown, but rather, each person truly “owning” a set of domestic responsibilities. Whether it’s your job to wash the dishes or balance the household budget, you’re responsible for all the related logistical and cognitive labor: what Rodsky calls conception, planning and execution, or “CPE.”
Before writing “Fair Play,” Rodsky said her husband was in charge of extracurricular sports. To him, this meant showing up for Little League games. But Rodsky was actually doing most of the CPE: submitting medical forms, picking up the uniforms, ordering cleats and then returning them when they didn’t fit, remembering to pack the kids’ sunscreen and water bottles, arranging car pools.
Now, under the “Fair Play” ownership model, “I never think about extracurriculars again,” Rodsky said. “It’s been so freeing. I got six hours of my week back.”