Gail Griffin

17Sep08

“How does she do it?” It’s a question a lot of working mothers ask themselves when they watch those supermoms who seem to be able to seamlessly balance the demands of work, home and other commitments. I know “the juggle,” as some call it, firsthand. I recently had my second child, while balancing a full-time job as general manager of a web site, other family obligations and volunteer work.

On Oct. 7, New York Women in Communications will hold a panel discussion on “Disconnecting in a Hyper-Connected World,” where a variety of women media professionals will share advice and tales on how they balance career and family. (Click here to learn more about the event or to register.) Thanks to the Crackberry, I’ve been staying semi-connected to the office while out on maternity leave for the past few months and I’ve picked up a few tips of my own. And while I wouldn’t remotely claim to be an expert in managing the juggle, I have found a few web resources to share with other working moms.

Get all your news in one place. Many women in communications need to stay on top of multiple media sources, both for personal and professional reading. But with limited time to visit multiple sites each day, it helps to gather them all in one place. These days, most sites offer RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) feeds of the top headlines that provide easy access to the latest news or topical headlines.

With one or two simple clicks, those headlines can be easily plugged into an RSS reader, which aggregates content from many different sources. Google Reader and My Yahoo are two widely used RSS readers, but there are many others.

Join or start an online networking group. Joining or forming a group of other working mothers – either based on geography or other interest group – can be a great way to keep tabs on what’s going on in your neighborhood, as well as to network with other moms. My neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens, has a social networking group, Sunnymoms, that’s grown from a few members several years ago to more than 250 today.

With everything from extensive mom-to-mom advice to tips about neighborhood meetups and swaps of no-longer-needed kid gear, the list is a central resource for the neighborhood. It’s also a godsend for working moms, who can ask questions to the group and get quick, great advice that can be read via email every morning. Collectively, the moms also act as trendspotters to news you won’t find in mainstream parenting magazines, posting links on everything from the latest research on breastfeeding to links to neighborhood food blogs.

Many neighborhoods have similar groups on Yahoo, Google or Facebook, so check to see if there’s one in your area. If not, consider starting one – it’s quick and easy, and like the one in Sunnyside, is likely to grow quickly via word of mouth.

Unite your work and home calendars online. I like to joke that Google Calendar saved my marriage. Before we set up our family calendar on this easy-to-use web application, my husband and I had separate calendars and would trade emails to let the other know about events or time commitments – leading to the “it must have gotten caught in my spam filter” excuse when one of us invariably forgot. Now, we each manage our work calendars on Outlook, but use Google Calendar to keep all our family events. The application allows you to sync either two ways with Outlook, just from Outlook to Google, or vice versa, making it easy to control the flow of information.

While there are plenty of other calendar applications on the web, it’s hard to beat the simplicity of Google. In my household, it’s even spawned a new verb – to “googlecal” events so each of us knows what the others are up to.

I’d love to hear tips on other ways the web has made your own juggle easier. Post your comments below, or share them at the Oct. 7 NYWICI event. It’s on my Google Cal, so I’ll see you there.

Gail Griffin is NYWICI’s co-VP of Integrated Marketing and Communications, overseeing the organization’s editorial content.

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