It has been suggested recently that perhaps women have hit a wall in the amount of work they can stuff into a week. The combination of paid work and personal and family time has brought with it a moving target of third party support. Fathers have stepped in to help with the children and household help has been hired to do the housework. One of my personal contributions has been reducing the number of hours I sleep each night. I figure that adds a couple of hours to my day and I try to catch up by sleeping in on weekends when there isn't a soccer game on Saturday morning. This, of course, isn't exactly as I had planned it. My earlier view of the schedule included lots of household help, some childcare help and me firmly grasping the corporate ladder. I studied, worked and married later to provide for this vision. My participation in the labor force was restrained only when I published my view of how my work would be configured. The proposal was a sound one. For a period of five years, I would reduce my hours and pay between 35 and 50%. Even the benefits could be prorated. Only slightly daunted by corporate reluctance to read my proposal, I shopped it around until I finally found a buyer. I changed departments gladly and got to work. And it did work. There were many naysayers both in management and among my peers. But the plan succeeded for two reasons. The first is that I exhibited a Pollyana attitude when objections to my "deal" arose. As my mother would have suggested, I just kept a positive attitude and my nose to the grindstone. The second critical success factor was that I worked in a job where measurements and metrics reigned. I had numbers to achieve and if I hit them my performance review was good. Each fiscal year, I prepared a substantial plan and negotiated my numbers. It paid off. I worked in my chosen profession continuously for 20 years and half of it on a flexible schedule.