Wide bracketing also lets us pool outcomes on our to-do list, and can shield us against the risk of falling short of the goal despite our best efforts. Say we’re fresh off a lively extended-family reunion with cousins, aunts, and uncles. Our desire to maintain positive connections with these kindred relations has never been urgent. Whatever interest we might have felt may have been stymied by a second cousin who has yet to return an email, or a nephew who screens every call and doesn’t return them. If we were to focus exclusively on these missed connections, our enthusiasm to cultivate companionship within our newfound (or newly rekindled) family could easily wither away. With too many failure experiences, motivation to persevere deteriorates. But a wide bracket can put these failures into context alongside the successes.
A wide bracket can help us find a different and perhaps even better way to achieve what we want. In New York, cab drivers choose their own hours. Some drivers rent cabs from a fleet for twelve-hour shifts. In one study by a group of economists, drivers were paying the fleet owners $76 to take a car for a day shift and $86 to take it overnight. They had to return the cab with a full gas tank at the end of the shift, which cost them about $15. Other drivers leased their cabs from an owner by the week or month. A third type of driver owned his or her own medallion (costing about $130,000), a requirement of the city to drive a cab legally. Drivers could keep all the fares, including tips, and could take on fares as long as they wanted up until the contracted period of time expired. If they returned the cab late, they’d be assessed a fine. Then—like now—in New York, drivers got most of their fares by “cruising” and looking for passengers. Fares were set and regulated by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. So cabbies’ revenue depended both on the demand for rides and the number of hours they kept their car out.
The economists wondered whether drivers made the best decisions about how many hours to work on a given day. They knew that the optimal strategy would be to work more hours on days when demand was high, and fewer hours on days when fewer people were standing around looking to hail a cab. Weather has an impact—pedestrians rethink their idea to walk to their destination when it’s icy cold or raining; rush and lunch hours also see spikes in the need for a ride. This strategy would maximize both the average daily wage and leisure time. Work when demand is high. Take a day off when demand is low.
To test whether drivers in fact chose their hours optimally, the economists analyzed almost two thousand trip sheets from fleet companies. Drivers were required to keep lists of the time a fare was picked up and dropped off, and the dollar amount of the fare (excluding tip). The researchers knew how many hours the drivers worked during each shift, which could be verified against the meter in their cab, and could compute the average daily wage the driver earned.
What they found was that in fact some cabbies did not use the strategy that would maximize profit and leisure time. When they were making a smaller hourly wage, drivers worked more hours. These drivers were reluctant to work shorter days when revenue streams were running shallow. Cabdrivers who paid daily for the use of their car made decisions using a narrow focus. They took it “one day at a time,” setting a loose daily income target and quitting for the day once they had that much cash in hand.
Other drivers, though, made decisions that better balanced work and time off. Drivers who were paid weekly or monthly, and those who owned their own cab, worked fewer hours on days when their average hourly wage dipped, and more on days that held the most potential for fares. Because they chunked their expenses and revenue with a wider frame, they found themselves choosing a more efficient labor schedule.
Assuming a wide bracket, and setting goals for the week or the month, they could minimize labor and maximize profit in addition to leisure. They could make more money, working fewer hours. The wide bracket turned off the ignition when their efforts weren’t paying off.
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In 1982, the first female editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurley Brown, sparked a conversation around the phrase with which she had titled her book: Having It All. The idiom quickly and ferociously established a foothold in common discourse and left most people—especially her female readers—feeling overwhelmed and deflated. The incantation led people to believe not only that it was possible to both balance and excel at meeting the demands of competing roles like parent and professional but also that real success in life required it. We felt pressured to do more, and to do it all well.
As the decades have passed, the definition of “having it all” has evolved, but what has remained constant is the feeling that the maxim places many impossible demands on all of us. In her book Off the Sidelines, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand urged her readers, “Please, let’s stop talking about having it all and start talking about the real challenges of doing it all.” In a similar spirit, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman to serve as director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department, wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” She wrote it, in part, because other women told her she shouldn’t. That is not a message that should be sent to other women, she was admonished. But she wrote it anyway because, despite all of the doors that her life had opened for her, she still felt she couldn’t get where she wanted to be.
The ubiquity of the phrase “having it all” contributes to our assumption that most people aspire to wear many hats (perhaps not as literally as Dr. Seuss did), and to wear them all fabulously. It also leads us to believe that we should want this. Our understanding of these social norms and societal expectations, even if they are wrong, might be one reason that people find it difficult to give up on a goal they’ve been working toward. Even if we want to quit, we might not think it’s okay if we do.
When Mattie was about a year old, I had lots of balls in the air. I was juggling my own research career as a scientist, teaching, moving my just-retired parents halfway across the country, writing this book, and trying to learn one song on the drums well enough to not embarrass myself publicly. I was experiencing my own struggle with having it all, and getting really annoyed that the phrase existed. About that same time, a major brand approached me and asked whether I wanted to serve as a scientific consultant for a study on how women define their ideal life. Do women really hold the multitude of goals that the phrase “having it all” implies, we would ask, and does that lead to happiness? I jumped at the opportunity, which was a surefire way to feel spread even thinner. I knew I had only myself and my tendency to say yes to blame. But this question was one I personally wanted to answer.
We chose to tell the stories of a dozen and a half women whose lives were different from one another’s but not all that uncommon. These were strong and confident women who had already accomplished some pretty amazing things—like receiving graduate and professional degrees, earning salaries that allowed them to live a comfortable life in the city of their choosing, and managing deep and meaningful relationships. But they were all at a choice point in their lives, and were not living exactly the dream they’d hoped they would. Their journey wasn’t over but instead in progress.