3 simple tips working parents can use to create more free time

Working while parenting can feel a little like juggling flaming swords. Everything works fine(ish) as long as nothing surprises you. But there will always be “come pick up your feverish kid” calls from daycare and last-minute project deadlines during little league games. So you end up defending your commitment to work while agonizing over having missed your child’s game-winning home run. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, working parents feel like they’re “supposed to work like [they] don’t have kids and parent like [they] don’t have a job.” That’s because our workplaces and other institutions are still set up under the assumption that every employee has a stay-at-home spouse who takes care of the children. In general, parents do want to work. They just don’t want to feel like they’re missing out on their kids’ childhood and their own self-care. While there’s nothing an individual parent or household can do to fix the system that tries to squeeze 28 hours of productivity out of an average day, you can change how you think about your time–which will lead to finding more of it. Here’s how: You’re probably falling for the planning fallacy Although the local middle school is only 7 minutes away by car, my 12-year-old son was just barely on time nearly every day of 6th grade, and tardy the rest of the time. While “hustle” is not a quality anyone associates with this child, his repeated lateness was entirely his parents’ fault. Because we somehow believed, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that it would only take an hour for us to successfully get ourselves, our pets, our middle-schooler, and our high-schooler fed, dressed, caffeinated, packed up, and out the door each morning. We fell victim to a cognitive bias–the planning fallacy. First coined in 1979 by economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the planning fallacy describes the ubiquitous human tendency to underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete a task, even if you have plenty