This month instead of a book, we’re debriefing the Mental Load Collaborative in Washington D.C., a gathering of people who are all, in different ways, working on the mental load problem — sociologists, stress researchers, entrepreneurs, and some of my favorite Substack writers, including , , , , and .

One of the people I had talked to but never previously met in-person was Emily King, CEO and Founder of Faye — a service that connects busy families with local advisors who handle personal admin tasks. I’ve been a Faye customer (and raving fan) for a while, so I was thrilled to spend time with her. Emily spoke on a panel at the event, and she graciously agreed to sit down with me afterward for a debrief.

Here are the highlights:

• The mental load is intensifying. On the closing panel, Allison Daminger pointed to compounding societal stressors — COVID, geopolitical instability, AI anxiety — as the backdrop against which the mental load has become impossible to ignore. The argument: so many destabilizing things have happened in quick succession, felt most acutely by parents who are simultaneously raising new humans through all of it. (My take: it’s less due to macro conditions, and more because the overall volume of per-person admin has skyrocketed, and moms do it for the whole family.)

• How long a task takes to accomplish doesn’t determine how heavy it feels. A five-minute phone call to reschedule a dentist appointment can occupy more mental real estate than an hour of focused work — because of guilt, dread, and emotional weight attached to it. This is why outsourcing isn’t strictly about buying back time – it’s also about buying back bandwidth.

As the CEO of a company that enables delegation, Emily thinks a lot about this. As she put it, “The perceived value of delegation has almost nothing to do with how long the task takes.”

• There’s no standard way to measure the mental load yet. We agreed that this is a place where a cross-disciplinary lens is helpful. The right tool is one people will complete — and it should tell them something actionable on the other side, not just give them a score.

• The mental load is gendered, and one reason is social consequences: across most domains of family life, women have traditionally paid the consequences when the ball is dropped. The person who owns a domain tends to be the one who faces judgment when it goes wrong. Allison Daminger’s research showed that men who claim selective incompetence around household tasks are often in professional roles that demand exactly the same skills — such as project managers and pediatric cardiac surgeons. The only difference is where they choose to apply them.

  Men who claim selective incompetence around household tasks are often in professional roles that demand exactly the same skills — such as project managers and pediatric cardiac surgeons. The only difference is where they choose to apply them.

• Recognizing the mental load as real work is a moral imperative. Women who leave the workforce because of the mental load lose their income, their professional trajectory, and often their ability to re-enter at the same level. That’s not a personal failing. It’s the cost of a major problem that hasn’t been taken seriously. The elements that compose the mental load are not “little things;” these are, collectively, a really big thing with a substantial impact.

I want to say again: the workload of family life is not “little things.” So often women who try to explain their overwhelm find it difficult to convey, even to themselves, because each aspect — a phone call to the dentist, a birthday gift to buy, an event to calendar — feels individually small. And yet, what the conversation about the mental load helps us do is find the words to share why merely anticipating the need to buy a gift (not to mention the research, decision making, execution, and social monitoring that follows) is draining.

We ended the day with a panel of builders who are working on solutions to “make the mental load solvable.” Emily was one of them. If you’re feeling the weight of a thousand feather-light admin tasks collectively weighing you down like a ton of bricks, Faye might be just the thing to lighten your load. (You can try it for 20% off using THIRDSHIFT20). I recommend Faye because it works — I use it myself. Having a real human accountable for your tasks makes all the difference between “help in name only” and true relief.

If you’re not sure what you’d delegate, subscribe. In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing more about what I delegate, how to decide what you should delegate, and how to delegate so that it is actually a mental load relief (and not just another set of tasks to track.)

Warm wishes,

Jennifer

This post is part of the Mental Load Discussion Club, a subsection of The Third Shift where we engage with the books, scholarship, and wider conversation surrounding the mental load. (It’s also where new On the Mental Load podcast episodes are shared with exclusive recaps and analysis, such as this one.)

If you prefer to focus on practical solutions for family operations and opt out of the mental load learning, you can separately unsubscribe from the Discussion Club while remaining subscribed to The Third Shift.

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Show Notes

Episode : The Mental Load Is Getting Worse: A Debrief with Emily King of Faye

Jennifer Mickel sits down with Emily King, founder of Faye, for a candid debrief after the Mental Load Collaborative event at Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business in Washington, D.C. They explore why the mental load has intensified in recent years — driven by digital overwhelm, AI adoption, and post-COVID stress — and what it would take to actually measure it. Plus: the gender dynamics behind who carries the cognitive and emotional load at home, and why recognizing invisible labor as real work matters for women’s participation in the workforce.

Guest

• Emily King, CEO & Co-Founder, Faye — findfaye.com

Resources Mentioned

• Drained by — bookshop.org

• Fair Share by David G. Smith & W. Brad Johnson (June 2026) — amazon.com

• What’s On Her Mind by — bookshop.org

• “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by , The Atlantic — theatlantic.com

• , The Maternal Stress Project — maternalstressproject.substack.com

About the Show

The Third Shift: On the Mental Load is a podcast about the invisible cognitive and emotional work of running a family — why it’s so hard to see, so hard to share, and what it would actually take to change it. Hosted by Jennifer Mickel, JD-MBA, founder of The Third Shift and former BCG Principal.

Work with Jennifer

The Third Shift helps families get out from under the mental load. Learn more at www.thethirdshift.co.

The book makes a data-based case that a variety of factors — including, persistently, the structure of modern work — are the cause of gender inequality — and that until they change, thoughtful individual optimization is a woman’s best available tool (but not the solution).

As I noted when making this selection, the dedication of Having It All is “for the women who just can’t do it anymore.” If you follow The Third Shift, you know that dedication landed for me.

Having the data also helps counteract the girl-power optimism tendency of high-achieving women to gaslight ourselves into thinking, “Sure, that might be true for some people, but it won’t be true for me.” I work with high-achieving women coming up against the same structural barriers they expected to run right over, and it’s far better to have planned your life with the facts in mind.

I invited Dana Weinstein to discuss this book because when we met, we were both ex-nonprofit, Princeton alumnae, single MBA students, and in the years since, our paths have diverged: I’m a married entrepreneur with two kids, and Dana is a single Fintech product leader (who flew up the ranks at Visa first.) I thought our perspectives would test Dr. Low’s thesis that the book is for all women.

Here are the ideas from this conversation that have stayed with me:

We’re failing a standard that was never real

The image of the stay-at-home mother as the natural order of things was specific to a narrow slice of mid-20th century white upper-middle-class America. Women in agricultural societies worked an estimated 60 hours a week. Women of color and lower-income women have always worked. The myth persists and creates shame by comparing against a standard that never actually existed for most people.

After women entered the workforce, the shortcuts that made it possible disappeared

The system didn’t just fail to adapt — society also rejected many of the adaptations that had made dual-income households more feasible. Formula gave way to breastfeeding norms. TV dinners gave way to slow food. Latchkey kids gave way to intensive supervision. Screens created an entirely new category of parental vigilance. Taken together, these shifts reintroduce time demands that had, at one point, been partially offloaded — and that land disproportionately on women.

The “glass ceiling” is a household term — but what we should really be talking about is the Squeeze

Peak childcare demands and peak career demands hit at exactly the same moment in a woman’s life. Women aren’t opting out — they are reacting rationally to impossible demands and rarely being given the chance to make a different choice later. Women in “The Squeeze” are being pushed off career tracks that won’t accommodate a temporary season of life (which is most careers) — with very few opportunities to course-correct.

Outsourcing is useful — but not a universal solution.

Buying back time at home requires affordable labor — and the women who historically provided that labor were themselves workers who deserved (and rarely received) fair wages. Plus, in high-cost labor markets, outsourcing doesn’t scale.

The only solution that scales is restructuring work itself. It sounds dramatic, but it has happened, and it works.

• The 40-hour work week was created in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act because we needed to distribute work across more people. We’ve restructured work before when forced to.

• Similar collective or legislative shifts are needed today to address “greedy work” and the uneven domestic burden on women.

• OB-GYNs moved from an individual model requiring nights and weekends to a care team model with predictable shifts — and the field went from 7% female to roughly 90% female. They effectively normalized job-sharing and patients weren’t any worse off.

A few things I’m still sitting with after our conversation:

AI may be the forcing mechanism that makes structural change inevitable. If the relationship between hours worked and outcomes produced breaks down, some justification for the greedy job model breaks down with it. If true efficiencies are produced, they could eliminate hours from jobs rather than jobs from companies. Humanity needs an advocate at the table to counter the demand to manifest efficiencies in the form of job cuts.

The reason women don’t take the rational optimization view of their own lives — even when the data is right in front of them — is guilt. Mom guilt is why the outsourcing solution doesn’t scale even when it’s economically rational. It’s why women make choices that don’t serve them. It’s the invisible drag on every decision in this conversation.

Low argues that women’s happiness is an inherent right. She goes further: if you can’t justify prioritizing your own happiness as a human being, consider that you’re a better caregiver when you do. She is addressing the guilt without naming it by appealing to women’s need to serve others — which we are socialized to find far more justifiable than serving ourselves. Throughout Low’s data, men who clearly prioritize their own time appear — and for most of them, mom guilt simply doesn’t exist as a concept.

Low clearly argues: the structure is broken, here’s the proof, here’s what to do about it. But even when women know all this, mom guilt is an internal force working against mothers (and to some extent, all women).

Even though the framing of the book is getting yourself a good deal, the truth is that the more realistic take is probably something like: exerting intentionality over which bad deal you end up with. Either way, it’s far better than chancing into something that’s suboptimal for you.

This post is part of the Mental Load Discussion Club, a subsection of The Third Shift where we engage with the books, scholarship, and wider conversation surrounding the mental load. (It’s also where new On the Mental Load podcast episodes are shared with exclusive recaps and analysis, such as this one.)

If you prefer to focus on practical solutions for family operations and opt out of the mental load learning, you can separately unsubscribe from the Discussion Club while remaining subscribed to The Third Shift.

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Show Notes

Episode 2: Can Women Really Have It All? Reading Corinne Low’s Having It All

Jennifer Mickel and Dana Weinstein dig into Having It All by Corinne Low, PhD— a data-driven examination of women’s lives and the structural forces shaping their choices. They discuss the “utility function” framework for balancing work, family, and personal fulfillment, the persistent gender gap in household labor despite equal workforce participation, and the brutal “squeeze” period when career and childcare demands peak simultaneously.

Plus: what workplace structures could actually look like if they were designed to support women — and why the myth of the ideal household is still doing so much damage.

Guest

• Dana Weinstein, Head of Product & Operations, Tesser Payments — LinkedIn

Resources Mentioned

• Having It All by Corinne Low — bookshop.org

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” The Atlantic — theatlantic.com

• HBS study: Rethink What You Know About High-Achieving Women — Reprinted here

About the Show

The Third Shift: On the Mental Load is a podcast about the invisible cognitive and emotional work of running a family — why it’s so hard to see, so hard to share, and what it would actually take to change it. Hosted by Jennifer Mickel, JD-MBA, founder of The Third Shift, and former BCG Principal.

Work with Jennifer

The Third Shift helps families get out from under the mental load. Learn more at thethirdshift.co.

Yes, these exact tendencies might be part of why we're drowning... but I'm hooked anyway.

Having It All is technically our February discussion topic (this is your notice to get reading before our call at the end of month) but I can already tell it’s going to be fodder for the rest of the year:

If you had the ability to delegate some key responsibilities or tasks to others, what possibilities would open up for you? There are also strategies for freeing up your time even if paying for things truly isn’t an option…

This line is from the introduction, but it could have been lifted verbatim from any of the zoom calls I’ve had in the past 12 months. We touch on this in all of my workshops and 1:1 work.

The answer is usually practical — more time, etc. But there’s something less concrete yet equally tangible: the emotional benefits of rediscovering joy. As in any aspect of life, offloading a part that feels especially heavy can have outsized impact on your emotional experience.

A data-based discussion around this is going to be fascinating.

If I’m honest, I was initially a little afraid to read Having it All.

I read The Defining Decade by in my late 20s and gave a copy to all 4 of my younger siblings.

I pride myself on making deliberate and intentional decisions. I try hard to live without regrets.

So, in my 20s, I was eager for an instruction manual for life. But now? I’ve already made some pretty committal choices. I have a husband, two kids, and three degrees. What if the data shows I’ve chosen sub-optimally?

Reassuringly, Dr. Low promises us that Having it All isn’t just for twentysomethings:

It’s for women who are considering relationships or children in the context of planning careers, and it’s for women who already have kids and are looking to make the impossible puzzle pieces fit, and for those whose kids have moved out of the house and are wondering what’s next.

And it’s for women who are looking for a partner, trying to make a marriage work, and those who are newly divorced. Because in all these stages, women face unique constraints from an economic system that devalues their contributions and their well-being.

And don’t we know it?!

There’s a Michelle Obama quote that’s circulating right now about how having it all ≠ having it all at once. She says “You can have it all over a period of time,” adding that life has “chapters; you don’t lose out because you didn’t read the whole book in one sitting.”

@allbright

AllBright on Instagram: "Reminder from @michelleobama that it’s…

I’ve been taking particular comfort in this quote, along with stories like Vera Wang not having designed her first wedding dress until she was 40, as I find myself in a season of life that requires moving a little more slowly.

I’m excited to see what the data says about how I should be managing this phase. As further proof that there’s something here for all of us, recently hosted Corinne Low on “My So-Called Midlife.” (← I’m linking to the podcast in case books are simply not at all feasible for you in this season, so you can still get some context before joining our live discussion later this month.)

If you’re on the fence about the book, I’ve got three facts that may sway your decision:

• The dedication is “For the women who just can’t do it anymore”

• The title of the first chapter is “Winning the Bread and Baking It Too” (it’s like an economics textbook, only filled with wry wit!)

• The author promises the book will “arm you with the tools to get more of what you need: from your partner, from your boss, and from the system itself.”

Cheers!

Jennifer

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P.S. Our January Discussion of What’s On Her Mind by featuring and is now available. You can watch the full recording here. I'll be sharing key insights from that conversation in upcoming posts—but I wanted to get February's book in your hands now so you have time to read before our discussion at month's end.

P.P.S. Looking for accountability to make sure you finish Having it All this month? Raise your hand to be a featured voice in our February live discussion — just reply to this message and let me know you’re in.

This post is part of the Mental Load Discussion Club, a subsection of The Third Shift where we engage with the books, scholarship, and wider conversation surrounding the mental load.

If you prefer to focus on practical solutions for family operations and opt out of the books/learning, you can separately unsubscribe from the Discussion Club while remaining subscribed to The Third Shift.

The mental load is invisible by nature — which is exactly what makes it so hard to address. We tend to dismiss the tasks that compose it because each one seems small. Then, we struggle to redistribute it because we can’t point to what we’re carrying. And we can’t ask for help with something we don’t have words for. Allison Daminger’s What’s On Her Mind gives us those words — and this conversation features two ambitious mothers talking about what it feels like when you finally have them.

Here are the ideas from this conversation that have stayed with me:

• The hardest to describe parts of the mental load are the ones nobody can see. Daminger maps the mental load into four phases: anticipation, research, deciding, and monitoring. The middle two — the doing — are abstract but still somewhat visible. The first and last are not. And they never stop. Sunshine said it clicked for her when she realized why she felt so scattered working from home: every room was a trigger for something she was anticipating or monitoring.

• Invisible tasks are easy to dismiss — even by the person doing them. When the women I work with describe what’s making things feel heavy, they say “it’s not that big of a deal, it’s just this, it’s just that.” That’s the trap. The nature of these tasks — brief, intangible, seemingly minor — makes them hard to defend as real work (even to ourselves). But the cognitive weight of carrying something has nothing to do with how long it takes to do it.

• You can have an egalitarian household and still be carrying more. Both Becky and Sunshine described partnerships where the visible execution was fairly split. And yet when they went through Daminger’s cognitive domains chart, the women were still leading on the majority. Equality in what people can see doesn’t fix inequality in what they can’t. As Sunshine put it: “I had a hard time articulating it, but I feel like I’m still doing more. It’s that I was thinking more.”

• Whoever cares more tends to own it — and caring more is itself a form of labor. The person who cares more about a domain absorbs it, because the stakes of it going wrong fall on them. And, whoever bears the consequences of sloppy execution also tends to care more. Sunshine tracked every step of her daughter’s allergy protocol. Becky organizes the grocery list in the order she routes through the store. In both cases, their high standard exists because the fallout of sloppy execution lands on them.

• The tasks men disproportionately own tend to have more elasticity. Daminger found that men are more likely to take cognitive leadership for things like car maintenance, yard work, and macro finances. Something those domains have in common: they’re more episodic. The diaper pail can wait a day. Dinner cannot. The cognitive burden of a task is heavier when the consequences of failing to anticipate or monitor are more immediate and severe. And women tend to hold those high-consequence, low-elasticity domains.

• Systems can help a partnership keep logistics from dominating the relationship. Becky and her husband hold a Monday night one-on-one with a shared Google doc to move the negotiation out of dinner, out of walks, out of text messages. Her husband now redirects logistics talks to the meeting rather than letting them bleed into everything else. Sunshine and her husband explicitly banned texting about household logistics - they use a Google doc or e-mail to coordinate.

• Sometimes the move is learning to care less — and proving to yourself that it’s okay. Sunshine described handing packing over to her husband for a sleepover at a friend’s house. He forgot the diapers. They ordered more. Nothing bad happened. That moment — playing out the worst case and surviving it — gave her permission to let go of more. Caring less isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice.

• This isn’t a women’s issue. But it’s been hard to activate a cross-gender movement around it. Becky said she wanted to pass the book to three men in her life who aren’t her husband — because if the mental load conversation stays feminized, like paid family leave, it will stay stalled. The opportunity cost isn’t just to women. It’s to families, to workplaces, and to what people might otherwise contribute to the world.

• Read it with someone — because holding all the education is also a form of cognitive labor. Both Becky and Sunshine planned to have their partners go through Daminger’s cognitive domains chart with them. The list makes the invisible visible in a way that’s hard to argue with — and is a soft way to kick off a conversation when you aren’t otherwise sure how.

The mental load isn't invisible because it's small. It's invisible because it happens before and after anything anyone can see. And having the vocabulary for it is validating, empowering, and essential to managing and redistributing it.

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The Third Shift: Simplifying the Mental Load

JANUARY | What's On Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life

Why does it feel like I’m constantly juggling a thousand invisible tasks…

Read more

3 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · The Third Shift

This post is part of the Mental Load Discussion Club, a subsection of The Third Shift where we engage with the books, scholarship, and wider conversation surrounding the mental load. (It’s also where new On the Mental Load podcast episodes are shared with exclusive recaps and analysis, such as this one.)

If you prefer to focus on practical solutions for family operations and opt out of the mental load learning, you can separately unsubscribe from the Discussion Club while remaining subscribed to The Third Shift.

Share

Show Notes

Episode 1: Who Does the Thinking? Reading Allison Daminger’s What’s On Her Mind

Jennifer Mickel is joined by Becky Murray and Sunshine Yin to discuss Allison Daminger’s What’s On Her Mind — a deep dive into the cognitive labor that keeps households running.

They explore Daminger’s four-phase framework for invisible work, why even egalitarian households leave women carrying the anticipation and monitoring, and what it would actually take to rebalance it.

Plus: practical systems Becky and Sunshine use to share the load — and why getting your partner to read the book might be the most important first step.

Guests

• Becky Murray, Chief of Staff, TheSkimm — [LinkedIn]

• Sunshine Yin, Executive Coach — [LinkedIn]

Resources mentioned

• What’s On Her Mind by Allison Daminger

• Daminger’s cognitive labor domains chart (in the book)

About the show The Third Shift: On the Mental Load is a podcast about the invisible cognitive and emotional work of running a family — why it’s so hard to see and so hard to share, and what it would take to change it. Hosted by Jennifer Mickel, JD-MBA, founder of The Third Shift and former BCG Principal.

Work with Jennifer The Third Shift helps families get out from under the mental load. Learn more at thethirdshift.co.

Why am I so exhausted when I ‘didn’t even do anything today’?

Why do we primarily have women “superhumans” and male “bumblers” when it comes to household operations?

’s new book What’s On Her Mind finally puts research behind these questions. And it’s brilliant.

One of my goals with The Third Shift is to make the invisible labor mothers carry visible.

This is practical: you can’t manage what you can’t name or see. We have to document the work in order to juggle it differently. If we can’t explain what we need to reshuffle, we can’t implement tactical change. Relief remains elusive. Moms stay stuck in burnout.

It is also aspirational: I can only help so many women 1:1. But if we change the way society talks about the family operations work that disproportionately falls on moms, we can help so many more.

I chose What’s on Her Mind for January because it’s new and focuses explicitly on cognitive labor—the mental load that’s hardest to document yet silently drains us.

I thought starting with a new book would be efficient: it would recap the scholarship, the latest terminology, and a synthesis of how we got to where we are.

Since choosing it, I’ve realized Allison and I are connected in a few ways: (1) She is a fellow Princeton alumna; (2) Her husband is , a friend and fellow Kellogg MBA who taught me to drive on the left side of the road while we were both working in Swaziland; (3) One of Allison’s close friends is Chloe Hart, the widow of my late law-school sectionmate, Wyatt Honse.

Allison is now a UW–Madison Professor of Sociology, but she used to apply behavioral economics to social change. I did too! I love behavioral economics. My passion for understanding why humans do what we do led me to rotate in as a product manager/venture architect for BCG Digital Ventures. And it’s part of what makes me helpful when decoding and strategizing with my current clients.

So I’m thrilled to be engaging with her work. And let me tell you, it delivers.

There will be multiple posts forthcoming inspired by Allison’s research. But first, come join our discussion January 23rd at noon ET, which will use this book as its jumping-off point. Sign up here. (Edit: Watch the recording here. )

A little taste of what has me excited:

• Getting granular about how we talk about the mental load. (FOUR types of cognitive labor! Monitoring is why you’re so darn tired…)

• Understanding why it’s invisible — why even those of us most burdened by cognitive labor have a hard time recognizing it.

• Talking about what it costs women to carry the majority of the cognitive load in ~80% of households

• A provocative explanation for why this breakdown falls so predictably along gender lines— even when couples insist gender isn’t the reason

(You don’t have to read the book to join the conversation.)

This post is part of the Mental Load Discussion Club, a subsection of The Third Shift where we engage with the books, scholarship, and wider conversation surrounding the mental load.

If you prefer to focus on practical solutions for family operations and opt out of the learning, you can separately unsubscribe from the Discussion Club while remaining subscribed to The Third Shift.

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