Carol Fishman Cohen: Welcome to 3,2,1 iRelaunch, a podcast where we discuss strategies, advice, and success stories about returning to work after a career break. I'm Carol Fishman Cohen, the chair and co-founder of iRelaunch and your host. Today, we welcome Laura Vanderkam, time management expert and author of six books on the topic including one we think is so relevant for relaunchers, 168 Hours. She has a new book out, which is fiction of firsts called Juliet's School of Possibilities. We're going to talk about both books and focus on the most relevant topics for relaunchers. Hi Laura, welcome to 3,2,1 iRelaunch!

Laura Vanderkam: Thank you so much for having me.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Well, I'm so excited to have you...I've been a big fan of yours for years now. And just for our audience, before we get into the books themselves, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you got to be a time management expert?

Laura Vanderkam: Well, I didn't grow up saying I want to be a time management expert. It's not one of those things like firemen or something that sounds like something a kid wants to do. I've always been interested in the topic of productivity though, and I was certainly a self-help book junkie over the years. But, I became more interested in this topic about twelve years ago when I became a parent for the first time. And obviously many of your listeners have been through that transition.

I was trying to figure out how to make the various pieces of my life fit together in a situation where I was suddenly way more accountable for my time and aware of my time than I had been before. So I started looking around to see how other people were making the pieces of their life fit together, and studied the schedules of successful people. Most of my books have come out of that. It's been a learning journey for me as well. One of the upsides of interviewing so many people is I get to learn how to put all these tips into practice in my own life. I do a lot of speaking, write books, I have two podcasts now, and I'm raising my four children with my husband, we live outside Philadelphia.

Carol Fishman Cohen: That actually brings me to the next question, which is, do you feel pressure to be the perfect model of time management and high productivity in your own life? Because you're the expert and you have all the books out and the podcasts, and there's a lot of social media. Do you ever admit to the public when things don't go as perfectly as you usually advise?

Laura Vanderkam: I am under no impression that life goes perfectly. And I would actually say that part of real time management mastery is figuring out how you'll deal with things when life goes wrong. So many of my posts have been things like, here is how I managed to not miss a deadline when I spent half a day in the ER with one of my kids. Or here's how we are dealing with snow days, or illnesses or anything like that. I've written about flight delays. This is just life, right? Anyone can plan a perfect schedule. That shows me nothing. It's how you deal with life when it doesn't go as planned, that really shows if you have figured out how to manage time or not.

The one thing I would say about being publicly billed as a time management expert, is people always think it's hilarious when you're late to things. Also, I try not to be, but it happens. And so we had a funny situation the other night, where I was giving a reading at a bookstore up in Doylestown, which is theoretically only 45 minutes from my house, but I got stuck behind a big accident on 611, which is the highway that leads there. And so I was late. And just, oh my goodness. We'll just joke about this because there's nothing else you can do.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Right. I have to say, I felt pressured when we were in the planning stages for this podcast that I needed to be especially prompt with responding to you, and scheduling, and doing everything as I thought you would ideally instruct someone to do. So I think, just by working with you, I have become better about my time management.

Laura Vanderkam: Oh, well that's exciting! I didn't even have to do anything. That's really exciting.

Carol Fishman Cohen: So thank you. But actually, I just want to dive into a little bit about how you researched and what some of your books have been based on. I understand that you asked large groups of people to track their time, and I can't remember, it was in small increments. How many people did this, and for how long, and in what kind of increments? And then did you look at all of these trackings and then derive your conclusions? How did that work?

Laura Vanderkam: I've done a couple of time diary projects over the years, and some of my books have been based on this. I wrote a book called I Know How She Does It a few years ago. That was based on time diaries from 1,001 days in the lives of women who had demanding, professional careers, and were also raising children.

And most of the time it was half hour blocks that they tracked. A few people were really gung ho and did fifteen minute blocks. But, then I could analyze the data that came out of that and see how many hours people were working, and when they worked those hours. I could see how many hours people were sleeping and how they slept those hours.

Things like housework or television or reading, time with family, all of that could be analyzed and come to my conclusions as a result.

I also did a time diary project for a book called Off the Clock where I had 900 people who also had full-time jobs and families, but it was both men and women this time. I had them track their time for a day. And I looked at how they were spending their time. And then also how they felt about their time. I asked them many questions that got at their perception of time. Whether time was abundant and that they felt they did have enough time for the things they wanted to do, or people who felt most stressed and starved for time.

And so I could compare the schedules of people who felt like time was abundant with equivalently busy people who did not have that feeling, and see what's different about how they are spending their time.

Carol Fishman Cohen: And there is a related exercise to all this in the back of Juliet's School of Possibilities, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But did anyone come away from that exercise feeling, "Oh my gosh, I had no idea I was spending so much time on X and now I'm going to eliminate that or reduce that time."

Laura Vanderkam: I can tell you that I have had that experience. I think everybody has that experience of there being some blind spot in our time. Unless somebody is already incredibly aware of their time, most people will discover something that they were spending more or less time on than they thought. And actually it's usually not the thing they think. Many people assume that they're working around the clock for instance, and it seldom is the case that people are actually working around the clock. People have seen some things where they assume they never see their families again. They turn out to see their families quite a bit, which is also good to know.

And in my case, I had a couple of surprises, one was the amount of time I spend in the car, because I run my business out of a home office, so I don't have a daily commute. So in my mind, I was never in the car. But anyone who has a family can understand that was not actually the case. And most of it was very short trips. It's eight minutes to swim practice and eight minutes home. It's things like that.

But those do add up, and these short trips were enough that I was spending more than an hour a day in the car on average. And once I realized that I need something to do with this time, and my interest in podcasts, they came out of realizing I had these small chunks of time in the car and wondering if other people had small chunks of time in the car that they might also wish to listen to something entertaining or enlightening during that time.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Having raised kids myself, but now being an empty nester, I have had this experience of comparing long periods of unbroken amounts of time, to times where you might have to get in the car here and there. But even though it's only an eight minute drive, the break in concentration, when you have to break away from something that you're immersed in and then have to get reengaged in that, is often way more than just those eight minutes.

Laura Vanderkam: Yeah. And that's true for any sort of activity like this. One of the reasons that meetings extract such an attention cost, and I caution people to be careful about how many meetings or phone calls you schedule yourself into, is you stop any other work about ten minutes before your meeting or your call because you're waiting for it to start. And then afterwards you kind of cycle through your various things you check after you come back, whether your email or headlines or whatever. An hour-long meeting can easily take an hour and a half of concentration, and it's broken up into maybe a longer period of time that you might've had. So these are the things you have to be very careful about in terms of scheduling.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yes. So let's talk about the impact of all of your thinking on relaunchers. We look at the relauncher community very broadly. Initially we were hyper-focused on women who took career breaks for childcare reasons. But now we see men who take career breaks for childcare reasons, and women and men who take career breaks for reasons that have nothing to do with childcare. It could be elder care or pursuing a personal interest or a personal health issue. And we're even looking more broadly at the population to include non-traditional candidates like retirees unretiring, or expats repatriating, or military spouses or veterans transitioning back to work. So we're looking at this very broad category of people transitioning after doing something else. And we think about this concept of relaunchers making this dual transition. So you're transitioning to work on the personal side and on the professional side at the same time. And this relaunch differs significantly from the typical job search because of that personal transition piece. And, at the end of the day, our relaunchers are "fitting in a full-time job into an already full life."

And that's a quote from Michelle Friedman, from Advancing Women's Careers who is a frequent co-presenter with me in career reentry programs. So I wanted to know if you can talk about that a little bit. Thinking about a transition where you're doing something else during your career break and now you're transitioning into a full-time job, and you still have the rest of that life going on around you. That's a pretty significant insertion of a major time commitment into a full life.

Laura Vanderkam: Yes, but here's what I always say, "that time stretches to accommodate what we have chosen to put into it." And when you've chosen to fill it with one thing, that's what fills it. Many kinds of work expand to fill the available space.

And so if you are not in a paid job, you find other things to do with your life that will fill the time. Obviously anyone who's been out caring for children or other family members knows that, but it's not just the childcare that's part of it. You become involved in various community organizations, there's probably more housework that's done. We have time diary studies looking at that, because you're in your house more. If you're not at a job outside your house, you naturally do more things in your house. People make messes in your house that you then clean up and then they make more messes you clean them up again. Whereas if nobody was there, none of those messes would have occurred in the first place. So that's what's going on. And sometimes it's almost funny to think about it. And I have written in the past about a question that somebody asked me in a conference, that was focused on people who are looking to get back into paid work, generally caretakers of young children who are looking to get back into paid work. And one woman said, "I'm thinking of going back to work, but I'm trying to figure out," the first thing that was out of her mouth was, "when are the bathrooms going to get cleaned?"

And it wasn't so much when the bathrooms were going to get cleaned. I would suggest maybe every other Saturday morning, I don't know, that's what I would do. But, that wasn't the point. It was more that she had felt very busy already with her home responsibilities, and she was trying to figure out the same thing. How do I fit a job in? And so all that stuff will take less time when you're not there doing it. And that may seem crazy, but time really does expand and contract.

One of the things I've explained to people to get your head around this idea is, a lot of people say I have no free time whatsoever. And then they start a binge worthy TV series or pick up a book where they have to find out what happens next, like maybe one of the John Grisham novels or something. And all of a sudden you find a magical amount of time to read that John Grisham novel.

You've consumed it in one weekend. Where did that time come from? You didn't think you had ten hours to read over a weekend, but what it is, you wanted to find out. And so those other things didn't happen.

But that same thing can happen once you transition into a paid job, other things will shrink a little bit. There may be things that are less of a priority now that were before. Some things naturally, again, if everyone's out of the house, there's no mess being made in the house, so they don't have to be cleaned up. That's something that will take less time. There are maybe errands you don't do but maybe they didn't need to be done. Maybe there are things that would have been fun to do with friends or community, and you'll just be a little bit more judicious about which one of those you take on. Life and time is always a negotiation. And when we decide to spend more time on one thing, we often figure out those trade-offs, just more automatically, I would almost say than others. So I tell people, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Carol Fishman Cohen: We talk about a general lowering of standards that we hear from relaunchers in terms of, "The house is messier now, and I don't care," because their priorities, as you're talking about, your priorities change. And you're prioritizing what you're doing at work and you're prioritizing less, maybe some of the standards of perfection you would hold yourself to in your home life, or whatever you were doing on your career break.

And also this idea of the power of "no," of starting to say "no," when you're making the transition from running that most successful of all time international night that they're asking you to run again. And you have to say, "I just went back to work and will have to pass the baton now to someone else to run that event."

For those of you who just tuned in, you're listening to 3,2,1 iRelaunch. This is your host, Carol Fishman Cohen, and I'm speaking with Laura Vanderkam about her new book, Juliet's School of Possibilities, one of her previous books, 168 Hours, and time management advice for relaunchers.

So Laura, let's talk about Juliet's School of Possibilities, your new book. And this was my synopsis, but please correct me, as I saw in the early chapters, you have a protagonist, Riley, who's a 29 year old workaholic. Her friend, a good friend and boyfriend are distancing themselves, breaking up with her and she's not doing that well at work. She just responds to hundreds of emails and doesn't have this opportunity to really step back and prioritize and be her best self in any way. And as part of a corporate retreat, they send all the women or certain senior women and Riley to Juliet's School of Possibilities. She meets Juliet, who is also doing many things, but seems to do it in a calm and cheerful way and is present, and has these quality relationships and gets so much done. And she notices the change in her life, I don't want to give anything away. But, first of all, is that a fairly accurate description of the book, or would you describe it in a different way?

Laura Vanderkam: Yes, it's a fable. A story, yes, of this young woman whose life is falling apart on all dimensions. And she goes to see Juliet at Juliet's School of Possibilities, and gets different visions of what her life could be based on different ways she would choose how to spend our time.

And we hope by the end, she learns her lesson and learns how to make good choices in order to build the life she wants.

Carol Fishman Cohen: And so I just had this question for you, is Juliet autobiographical in any way? Is she you?

Laura Vanderkam: Oh, no. I admire people like Juliet. She isn't any particular person that I know. But she does have many of the characteristics of successful people I've interviewed about their time over the years. One of the phrases she said to Riley at one point was, "Oh, I have all the time in the world." And that is something that somebody did say to me once in an interview, when I had said, "Oh I won't take much of your time." I had gotten on the schedule with this fabulous woman. I said, "I won't take much of your time." She said, "Oh, I have all the time in the world," which of course isn't true. But what she meant is that she had chosen to spend this time with me.

She would've had the perfect ability to say "no" if she didn't want to spend the time with me. But once she had decided to do it, she was going to fully focus on the matter in front of her because this is what she had decided was the right thing for her to be doing at this given moment. And it was such a gift of full focus for me and for her. And I wanted to convey that sense of calm and abundance in the character of Juliet.

Carol Fishman Cohen: That is the ultimate gift, is complete presence with whomever you're with, and focus I think, both on the personal and professional side.

Can you tell us a little bit more why you wrote this book? You're the queen of nonfiction and you wrote this fiction book all of a sudden. Did this idea come to you all of a sudden that you could convey some of the ideas you're trying to put forth in your nonfiction books in a fictional context? Or how did that come about?

Laura Vanderkam: I've always written fiction on the side and I've participated in National Novel Writing Month a handful of times. This is a challenge where you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November, on the premise that a lot of people say, "Oh, I have a novel I want to write," and then they never get around to writing it. But if you give yourself just the month of November, you just get something down. And it won't be good, it can't be. That's a lot of words in one month.

Carol Fishman Cohen: I'm so impressed that you do that and you fit that into your already busy schedule.

Laura Vanderkam: But then you'd go back and you make it better, and it's easier to turn something into something better than to turn nothing into something. A little time management tip for people listening, that might be something you should try if you ever have a big creative work you want to produce. However, anyway, I had been doing this on the side. So, I tried my hand at fiction. And my publisher came to me in the summer of 2017 and said they were looking to commission some fables. This is a genre of literature that actually has a decent audience. A lot of the most successful business books of all time are in fact stories, things like The One Minute Manager or Who Moved my Cheese. These are stories that teach a lesson. And so they asked if I was interested in trying one. I was, so I had some material for something else I had been working on that had the characters of Juliet and Riley and some other people, but in an entirely different format. But I could repurpose them into this fable construct and turn this into Juliet's School of Possibilities. So it was a lot of fun to write. Different from nonfiction in many ways, in that I'm not interviewing people and looking for studies and statistics to cite. But I'm still making stuff up and then have to go through the process of writing chapters. There's working from an outline, working back and forth with my editor. So that part was pretty similar.

Carol Fishman Cohen: And can you, without giving too much away about the book, can you tell us what you wanted your readers to come away from the book after they've read it?

Laura Vanderkam: I really do want people to understand that time is a choice. And at one point in the fable, Juliet explains to Riley this phrase that she has carved all over the school of possibilities, which is that "Expectations are infinite. Time is finite. You are always choosing. Choose well." And the reason I like this phrase, the expectations are infinite.

There's no limit to the things you could be doing with your time or that other people might expect you to do with your time, or that you might personally think are good or important to do with your time. These things are infinite, but you only have 24 hours in a day. And because of this, we are always choosing how to spend our time.

Even if it doesn't seem like we're making a choice, the sheer fact that you are doing one thing means you're not doing something else. So we are always choosing, which could sound depressing, right? There's always something we're not doing, but I actually think it's liberating. Because once we realize that everything is a choice, that frees us to make these choices consciously and to hopefully make these choices wisely, or as Juliet says, "Choose well." And so Juliet has this bracelet that she's wearing that says, "Choose well." I made myself a bracelet that says, "Choose well," and I think it's a good way to always ask at any given moment, is this the best thing to be doing with my time? Is this what I wish to be doing with my time? And if it is, great. And if it's not, what can I do to change it?

Carol Fishman Cohen: I like the idea of the bracelet, it's just always being there as a reminder to think about that. So at the end of Juliet's School of Possibilities, you have worksheets and maybe they're like time recording sheets, and you're asking readers to do some visioning, long-term and short-term, for their professional and personal lives. I just wanted to know if you can talk about why you put those sections in the back, and talk a little bit about the power of visioning.

Laura Vanderkam: So one of the things that Juliet does with Riley, is show her alternate visions of her future. It's a bit like A Christmas Carol in that way, seeing the different visions of what might come to pass in her life based on different choices that she makes.

One is continuing to just react to whatever is right in front of her, whatever is blinking brightest, seems most urgent at the time. And then the other set of choices is, if she really thinks about what she wants to do and what deserves her time, and makes wise choices based on this, the outcomes are entirely different. So I think it's important for readers to also try to envision your future self.

And Riley goes twenty years in the future because she's so young. Those of us who are not so young don't need to go that far in the future. But a couple of years in the future, you might picture yourself at a dinner that's being given in your honor, and people are giving toasts about the amazing things you are accomplishing and have done and the sort of person you are. And if they were doing that, what would they be talking about? What would be the toast? And what would be the thing they're celebrating? When you have this vision, then you can start breaking it down into, what steps could I take to get me closer to that?

I encourage people to think about steps that they can put into their near-term schedules to start getting toward that picture. And then of course, as always, if you want to spend your time better, I think it helps to figure out where your time is going now. So I encourage readers to track their time, ideally for a week, a couple of days is okay, but ideally for a week. Because the week is the cycle of life as we live it. And once you see where the time is going, then you can make choices based on reality, as opposed to various stories you've been telling yourself. People, again, will tell stories like, "Oh, I can't do anything because I'm working all the time."

That's highly unlikely to be true. Even if you're working sixty hours a week, if you're sleeping eight hours a night, that's fifty-six hours a week. You still have fifty-two hours for other things. There's a lot of time. You're probably doing something else in those fifty-two hours per week. So we want to make sure that people are making choices based on fact, as opposed to larger cultural narratives that might not actually be true.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Got it. And that was one of your breakthroughs, correct? With 168 Hours for people to think about their life in the chunk of a week of 168 hours instead of the 24 hours a day?

Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, because a day is interesting as a unit of time, but it is not the unit of time we actually live our lives in. If you think about it, Tuesday and Saturday both have 24 hours. They both occur just as often. But most people's lives look quite different on Tuesday and Saturday. So if I tell you to tell me about a typical day, which one are you going to tell me about? If you only tell me about Tuesday, that's going to give me a very different picture of your life, than if you tell me about Saturday. But neither is more right than the other. So I want people to think in terms of a whole week. And partly, this is also just the math of what I was saying about this. If you work sixty hours, most people don't work anywhere near sixty hours, but if between work and commute got you to fifty hours, you'd have sixty-two hours for other things, if you were sleeping eight hours a night, which again, many people claim not to do.

We have big chunks of time and nobody spends that much time on housework. Nobody spends that much time on childcare either. Even if you have personal responsibilities, there is space. And I want to encourage people to see that and to start saying, "How can I maybe carve out a little bit of time for these various long-term priorities?" Even if it's just half an hour to an hour a day, over time, that really does add up.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Well, at one point in Juliet's School of Possibilities, Riley thinks up a great idea. I think I remember right, while she's biking on the boardwalk during the retreat. And it reminds me that I've always thought of my best ideas, business or otherwise, when I'm in a spin class. Sometimes it's all I can do to not get off the bike in the dark room and run out and write them down because I'm worried I'm going to forget them by the time that the class ends. But I had this injury and I haven't been able to be spinning for the last five months, and I've definitely felt a shift.

And I wanted to know if you could comment on when you allow yourself to be in these different environments, does it unleash your mind in a certain way? And that's why you tend to come up with better ideas or what is your thought around that?

Laura Vanderkam: We spend so much of our time in reactive mode and when we're taking in various inputs, whether it's reading email or headlines or surfing the web or anything like that. And because our brains are occupied with that, they're generally not occupied with coming up with ideas. Whereas, when we put ourselves in situations where we are not doing that, so for instance, when you're in spin class, or for many people, it could be other forms of exercise, you're out walking or running for instance, or maybe you are driving somewhere and there's a lot of people who say they get their best ideas while they're just driving in the car somewhere because their mind is wandering, or in the shower, another place where you tend not to be checking email.

This is the related thread between all these places, you are not checking email in these places. So you can do this, try to generate some time in your life where these inputs are not coming in like that. Your brain might be just a little bit bored. It doesn't have to be a pleasant thing per se, but that is what triggers your brain to start entertaining itself. And as it is doing that, it will piece things together, it will remember things that used to do, it will put itself into the future.

A lot of what our brains are doing when it's on autopilot is what they call autobiographical scripting. You're thinking of yourself in future situations. So if you try to direct that a little bit like, "Oh, here is how I'm solving this problem in the future in my career." You'd probably come up with some interesting ideas. I guess the problem that we always have is there's no good way to capture it, if you're in this situation where you have controlled the inputs. That's one of the reasons I actually do bring my phone with me while I'm running, partly for safety, but partly to send myself a note if I get a good idea. And it's not that I'm listening to music, I'm not checking stuff while I'm out on the run, but I have it so I can write it down.

Carol Fishman Cohen:That is so interesting. What did you call that autobiographical, what? When your brain thinks about the future?

Laura Vanderkam: Autobiographical scripting, you're writing the story of your life. Because I blog, I always think of it as writing a blog post. Like my brain is writing blog posts while I'm out running. Maybe not ones I'll ever write, but that is what our brains are doing.

Carol Fishman Cohen: I've never heard of that before, and I'm going to check it out. So thank you for telling us about that. Do you know Laura, we're wrapping up now, we're coming to the end of our podcast and I wish we could be talking longer, but we have to finish. So I want to ask you the question that we ask all of our podcast guests, and that is what is your best piece of advice for our relauncher audience, even if it's something that we've already talked about today?

Laura Vanderkam: I think the part we did talk about, how time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it is just so important. And in my speeches, I tell a story that really illustrates this. I've had thousands of people track their time for me over the years. And this one particularly stood out because of how it made this point. She's a very busy lady, worked in finance, and had kids. She goes out on Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find that her water heater has broken and there's water all over her basement. So you know, anyone who ever had that happen, knows somebody who's had that happen to him, it's a pretty big mess. So she has to deal with it. She has to deal with the immediate aftermath that night, the next day, the plumber is the day after that, the professional cleaning crew because their carpets pretty much have to be replaced. All this is being recorded on her time log that she's keeping for me.

And it winds up taking seven hours of her week. And what we're talking about in the workshop where we were looking at this log and just if we talked about this at the start of the week and ask, "Hey, can you find seven hours to set up those coffee dates with the people who keep asking you to mentor them at work?"

Or, "Could you find seven hours to write the first chapter in that novel you keep saying you want to write?" I'm sure she would have said what all of us would have said, which is, "No, I cannot find seven hours to do that because can't you see how busy I am?" Yet, when she had to find seven hours, because there was water all over her basement, she found seven hours.

And so really, the point is that time is elastic and it will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. And so the key to time management is really treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. And so if, for instance, it's important for you to get back in the workforce, why don't you treat the time devoted to working on your resume, to meeting with people, to setting up those coffee dates, treat it as the equivalent of a broken water heater.

You know you're going to get to it, whatever else is going on in your life. Or as you are in the workforce for the first time, starting a new job, to just treat maybe even the career capital building parts of it, and really getting to know your colleagues as the water all over your basement, right? That can be the important thing this week. And you can choose to focus on it, even if there's chaos everywhere else. Cause there's always going to be chaos everywhere else.

There's always going to be a ton of stuff going on. And, I still remember my mother-in-law went back to work before I knew her, when her children were in high school. And on her first day back at work, one of her daughters crashed her car. Of course, she handled it. These things will happen, but she still made it work. And I love that story because, yes, of course stuff is going to go wrong. And naturally it's going to go wrong on the first day that you're not driving her to school or whatever, but you still can make it work. You have chosen to make this a priority in your life right now, and just ignore the rest of the stuff that's going crazy.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Such excellent advice for our relauncher audience, our listeners. Thank you, Laura Vanderkam, so much. Thanks for joining us today.

Laura Vanderkam: Thank you for having me.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Laura, before we close, can you tell us how people can find out more about your work?

Laura Vanderkam: So please come visit my website, which is LauraVanderkam.com, L A U R A V A N D E R K A M. C O M. I usually blog about four times per week. So there's lots of new content there and you can also learn about my various books, 168 Hours as we were talking about, and also the new one Juliet's School of Possibilities, the time management fable. Learn about my podcast as well, I have one called Best of Both Worlds, which is about the intersection of work and life. And then I have another short daily one that's called Before Breakfast. So you might build that into a short drive in the morning, to give you a little shot in the arm for the day.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Excellent, thank you.

And thanks for listening to 3,2,1 iRelaunch! The podcast where we discuss strategies, advice, and success stories about returning to work after a career break. I'm Carol Fishman Cohen, the chair and co-founder of iRelaunch and your host.

For more information on iRelaunch, go to iRelaunch.com. And if you liked this podcast, be sure to rate it on iTunes and your favorite podcast platform, and be sure to share this podcast with a friend on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.

Thanks for joining us.