Associated Press

Anyone have any cranberry sauce recipes?

Seven days until Thanksgiving—gulp! But I’ve already gathered up my recipes, made a broad-strokes game plan, and received some fantastic advice from Juggle readers. Today’s my day to draw up a grocery list and act on the tips I got.

Juggle commenters Donna and MPP both questioned my plan to buy a 10-pound bird, noting that size could be hard to find and wouldn’t permit leftovers. So I’m going to look for a 14-16 pounder instead, and leave three days for defrosting. NEGirl suggested I calibrate my instant-read thermometer (great tip! I’ll do that tonight) and make sure I have enough pans for all the cooking I’ll be doing. I may ask my mom to bring an extra saucepan. JHL suggested washing stemware in advance—my wine glasses are dusty, so I’ll be using that suggestion. Thanks everyone for this and other thoughtful advice.

One thing no one mentioned—but which occurred to me after I’d posted—was I didn’t include a cranberry sauce recipe. Anyone got a good one? It should be simple, but more interesting than just sauce from a can.

Also, I remembered to clean my oven last night; you might want to do the same.

Here’s my shopping list. Tonight I’m going to outline my timetable for the remaining week.

1. 14 – 16 pound turkey, Kosher or frozen Butterball (both of these birds appear to have won in multiple taste tests and are not as expensive as heritage birds)

2. 2 butternut squash

3. ½ pound bacon

4. ½ pound breakfast sausage

5. 3 liters chicken stock (The brand is an important consideration—some are terrible, and I don’t have time to make homemade. The Internet abounds with taste tests, like this one.)

6. 2 large onions

7. chives

8. 1 bunch celery

9. fresh sage

10. 1 pound button mushrooms

11. 1 Granny Smith apple

12. 6 sweet potatoes

13. 3 large leeks

14. 2 large carrots

15. 2 pounds Brussels sprouts

16. 2 large loaves white sandwich bread

17. 1 pound unsalted butter

18. sour cream

19. 1 pint heavy cream

20. 1 bag frozen cranberries

21. other cranberry sauce ingredients, depending on which way I go

22. 4 – 5 bottles wine for drinking and cooking

23. I’m still debating Green Bean Casserole. Need to conference with Mom about it and will then post. I was interested to learn I’m not the only one with mixed feelings about this sentimentally important but culinarily suspect dish.

Associated Press

Intrepid travelers braving the holiday crowds.

Like many other Americans, we’re flying out to the East Coast to my mom’s house for Thanksgiving. While I am really looking forward to spending time with family and friends, I am decidedly not looking forward to the journey there and back with an almost-two-year-old during a peak travel period.

What’s worse is that there are some new hassles at the airport these days, according to my WSJ colleague Scott McCartney. New security-screening rules, extra baggage fares and fewer airline staffers could mean bumpier journeys for many travelers, he reports. For instance, the Transportation Security Administration is phasing in a new policy that requires the name on a boarding pass to exactly match the name on your ID. (Mine may not, because of a middle-name snafu on my driver’s license that I’ve never needed to remedy until now.) Fees to check single bags at many airlines are now up to $20. And there’s always the possibility of computer glitches, like yesterday’s major outage, which could cause cancellations and delays across the U.S.

My family has come up with a few ways to help make holiday travel more pleasant. We’re flying on Thanksgiving day, rather than earlier in the week, because it’s a lot cheaper and usually less crowded. (We’ll get to my mom’s house in time for the meal, but we’re, um, so sad that we’ll miss helping to cook and prepare the table.) We’re also returning home the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, a less-traveled day than the weekend after the holiday. We’re flying Southwest, which doesn’t charge for your first two checked bags. We’re landing in a smaller airport which is easier to navigate, rather than the big madhouse we normally fly to, and will try to leave lots of extra time before all of our flights in case we run into lines or security problems. We’re packing light, knowing we can get most kid essentials at our destination; we may even rent a car with a car seat, rather than hauling our own. And we bring along a pack of earplugs to pass out to our nearby seatmates, which creates good will even if our toddler starts acting up.

Among Mr. McCartney’s tips for easier holiday travel: Make sure you know what fees you may face before you go to avoid unpleasant surprises. Sign up for flight alerts, notifying you of delays and other changes. Buy a day pass at an airline lounge or club if you run into trouble; it’s not only a semi-relaxing escape, but club staffers are usually the airline’s most experienced, and most helpful, agents. Don’t wrap gifts, which may be unwrapped during security. And if you’re bringing food for Thanksgiving, such as cranberry sauce, cheese and other soft foods, you’ll most likely need to put it in checked baggage. (More tips can be found in his column.)

Readers, any other tips to help navigate busy holiday travel?

Associated Press

New breast-cancer screening guidelines have caused an uproar.

For many women over 40, part of the regular routine has long involved heading to the doctor once a year for a mammogram and to be told to perform regular breast self-exams to help detect breast cancer. Now, as we all have heard, that advice has been upended by new guidelines released by an influential government-funded panel.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidelines state that routine mammograms aren’t necessary for women of average cancer risk in their 40s, and that women between 50 and 74 years old don’t need to undergo mammograms more often than every other year, according to the WSJ. They also recommend that physicians abstain from teaching women how to examine their breasts for signs of cancer because of a lack of evidence that it is of any benefit.

The task force said the new guidelines strike a better balance between the benefits of early cancer detection and the unnecessary anxiety and extra costs associated with false positives, which sometimes result from the tests, the WSJ reported.

The news has been met with confusion, dismay, and in some cases relief, by many women, physicians and cancer-advocacy groups. Many fear that the new guidelines, if followed, could lead to fewer cases of early detection of the often-deadly cancer and could cause problems with insurance coverage for screenings. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tried to dispel concerns Wednesday that the new guidelines threaten insurance coverage for the procedure, amid a growing debate among patients, medical professionals and legislators. Many doctors also have said that they would stay the course and continue to offer their patients annual screens.

While many people I know are upset about the guidelines—citing examples of loved ones whose lives were saved by early detection—a small minority say they are quietly relieved. Mammograms and even breast-self exams can be stressful, especially when there is a false positive. About one-third of U.S. women in their 40s and older aren’t getting mammograms even every other year, according to CDC data.

I know this topic isn’t a typical Juggle subject, but taking care of our health and that of our loved ones is a crucial part of our routines (as some of our commenters previously noted.) And as anyone knows who has had breast cancer or cared for a loved one with the disease, the experience can be hugely debilitating and time-consuming. Without this turning into a political debate, what has been your reaction to the guidelines? Have any of you or your loved ones faced breast cancer? How was it detected?

Associated Press

Does your juggle ever get in the way of a good performance review?

The onset of this chilly month never fails to remind me of a bleak memory: A bad performance review.

A few years back, I spent a little too much time enjoying my juggle – snowboarding and camping with my kids, and volunteering to help with their sports teams and school classes — and not enough time on my work. While I had some memorable adventures with my family, the previous editors who oversaw my work at the time were not amused, and responded with a dispiriting string of mediocre performance scores.

Performance review season is approaching fast; it can be a tough time for jugglers, and usually not for fun reasons like those I cite. In some cases, employers seem to use them as a weapon to force out pregnant workers, as described in one example in this story. Other times, performance reviews do little more than mislead, delivering praise right before an employee is denied a promotion, as happened to this working mother of four.

Carol Bartz, chief executive of Yahoo, assailed the entire process in a recent interview in The New York Times. Ms. Bartz says she would rather skip annual performance reviews altogether in favor of telling someone right away when they perform poorly. “When the puppy pees on the carpet, you say something right then because you don’t say six months later, ‘Remember that day, January 12th, when you peed on the carpet?; That doesn’t make any sense,” she is quoted as saying. She prefers more instant response: “’This is what’s on my mind. This is quick feedback.’ And then I’m on to the next thing,’” Ms. Bartz says. Many younger workers, in particular, prefer quicker and more frequent feedback than the annual review affords them.

Reviews are notoriously unpopular with managers, too. A supervisor at Apple Computer once got her managers to finish their performance reviews by bribing them with free tickets to San Francisco Giants games, says this Business Week story by Stanford University Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. And at SAS, a North Carolina software company, Dr. Pfeffer writes, a human-resources executive once drew cheers for feeding performance appraisal forms into a bonfire; he later encouraged managers to give employees more frequent feedback instead.

Readers, have you ever gotten a bad performance review because of the way you handled your juggle? What is your biggest fear as performance-review season approaches? Are you worried that your boss will fault your work-and-home priorities, or the way you manage your time? And in general, how well – or poorly — is the process handled at your company? Any suggestions for how it could be improved?

Associated Press

David Allen, who created the bestselling “Getting Things Done” time-management system.

For me, hope springs eternal when it comes to managing my time. No matter how many times I hit the skids, finishing a work week feeling like I left 1,000 important tasks undone, I always think I’ll do better next week.

I got some help from the pros this week, by testing three popular time-management systems for my Work & Family column and reporting on the results. I was surprised how much these methods helped, each in a different way.

First, I tried Getting Things Done or “GTD,” a popular technique. Founded by David Allen, an Ojai, Calif., consultant, coach and author who has 1.2 million followers on Twitter, GTD calls for a weekly “mind sweep” to corral all the projects and tasks floating around in your head into an organizing system you update weekly. No matter what chaos erupts to distract you, the system in theory enables you to quickly identify the next step you need to take on every front to keep all your projects moving forward, while keeping your mind clear to relax, think and be creative. GTD is complicated and demanding, but by the end of the week I see it has really helped me get ahead of my deadlines, clean up my desk and plow through tasks more efficiently.

A quirky method called the Pomodoro Technique was the simplest method. This technique had me working in intense spurts guided by a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato – or pomodoro, in the native Italian of its inventor, Francesco Cirillo, director of XPLabs, an Italian software firm. This method is spreading fast via Twitter and other social networks. It can be learned in a few hours from a free guide at www.pomodorotechnique.com. The user makes a daily log of things to do, then tackles each in 25-minute intervals called Pomodoros, separated by 3-to-5-minute breaks to do something refreshing.

Although I found this method laughable at first, its simplicity is deceptive. Because each Pomodoro must remain unbroken and devoted entirely to work, Mr. Cirillo says, I was forced to stop interrupting myself by jumping up to do something else. Like interval training for the mind, this method helped me work more efficiently, and for longer periods.

Finally, FranklinCovey’s “Focus” method, subtitled, “Achieving Your Highest Priorities,” aims to cut down on time spent on trivia and busywork, in favor of what is truly important and valuable. This method uses a pretest to show users how much time they are wasting; I found I spend fully one-third of my time on stuff that doesn’t matter, like checking e-mail several times an hour. Then, through weekly planning session, it guides users to spend time thinking about what they truly value, set goals that support those values, and schedule time in advance during the week to pursue them.

Like GTD, Focus requires a fairly high investment of mental effort to be useful. But I did become more efficient while using it, cutting down on busywork. I also spent more time on important but non-urgent priorities, including making a family holiday gift and setting a coffee date with friends.

Readers, do you have time-management techniques or tricks that work for you? Have you tried any of these methods? If so, how did they work for you?

Katy McLaughlin

My desk on Day 1 of the Thanksgiving countdown.

I’m hosting Thanksgiving dinner at my house for the first time ever this year. My goal: A delicious dinner that hits all the right culinary and emotional notes, served without the tension that typically sours the atmosphere in our house for hours—or even days– before I entertain.

My original strategy involved taking a few days off of work before Thanksgiving. But that plan was dashed when my boss asked me to deliver a couple of big stories before the end of the year. Then the prospect of putting on this meal while working full time and taking care of my two toddler boys started making me feel that familiar, dreaded entertaining stress.

But now I’m hopeful this approach will work: I’m going to meticulously plan Thanksgiving, blogging about the process as I go (and including lots of tasty recipes in the posts.) My hope is that by planning everything and dividing the work across 10 days of time, it won’t be too overwhelming and I’ll keep my cool.

Any advice from readers more experienced in Thanksgiving than I would be much appreciated. And I suggest that others who are also stressing out about the cooking event of the year follow some of my preparatory steps and write about your game plans. Take it from a newspaper reporter — there’s nothing like publishing your words, or at least putting them down on paper, to force yourself to get the story straight. Then we can compare notes and get some sage advice from those Jugglers who’ve been pulling off this holiday for years.

Today’s Tasks:
1. Make a list of dishes that will be served and line up the recipes.
2. Ask relatives to email key family recipes—subject line “Urgent.”
3. Dog-ear the recipes in cookbooks you’re planning to use for Thanksgiving.
4. If you’re cooking off the top of your head, write down the steps to refresh your mind on what the dish involves and what ingredients or even equipment you might need to buy.
5. Make sure you know how much turkey you need and how much time to defrost it.
6. You might want to call your local market and ask them if they carry a certain brand, and when they typically sell out of it.

Tomorrow, using these notes as a guide, it will be easy to create a shopping list. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Here are my notes, with recipes:

Squash soup: I make this easy soup all the time: Take a butternut squash, cut it in half, and place it flesh-side-down on a parchment-paper lined baking tray. Roast at 400 degrees for about an hour, until it is soft. In a fry pan, cook 4 slices of bacon, chopped, until very crispy. Remove bacon for later use. In the bacon fat, saute a finely chopped onion until soft and browned. Scoop out the butternut squash flesh and put it in a blender; add the onions and bacon fat, and moisten with a bit of chicken stock. Blend until smooth. Place puree in a large saucepan, add about a liter of chicken stock, until a nice, thick consistency is achieved, and salt and pepper to taste. Serve with dollop of sour cream, chopped chives and the bacon bits.

Turkey: I spent the morning going through my cookbook collection and Googling questions like “how much turkey per person?” (The most common recommendation seems to be a pound a head). This Department of Agriculture Web site explains how much time different thawing techniques take.

Our meal will have six adults and four little kids, so I’m going to go with an 8 – 10 pound bird and thus, two days of thawing.

Based on articles I’ve read that compared the taste of expensive heritage breed turkeys to frozen supermarket birds, etc., I’m planning to buy a Kosher bird or a frozen Butterball. I’m going to shop for my bird on Sunday. And remember, if you run into any turkey-making snafus, there is always backup. Many turkey companies have advice lines that are even open on Thanksgiving. (I wrote this story about them several years ago.)

Stuffing: Mom sent the family recipe today a few hours after I emailed her:

10 cups dried white bread (I use a variety of stale breads)
1/2 pound pork sausage (breakfast sausage), crumbled. Fry until cooked, but not browned. Remove from pan and set aside.
Heat 1/4 pound butter and 2 tbsp. oil in a frying pan.
Saute the turkey liver, finely chopped, until cooked through.
Add 2 cups chopped onion and 2 cups chopped celery and cook until they are soft, but not brown.
Add 1/2 tbsp. dried sage, 1 tsp. thyme, 1 tsp. salt, 1/2 tsp. pepper.
Sometimes I add 3/4 cup of mushrooms, finely chopped, and I have added 1/2 a chopped apple on occasion.
Add mixture, including the sausage to the bread and mix well. Add enough reserved stock and turkey drippings to make the stuffing moist, but not soaked.
I put stuffing in the turkey cavity and neck, and bake the rest in a covered dish, adding more turkey drippings and reserved stock to keep it moist.

Gravy: My mom also sent the gravy recipe:

1. Make stock: Wash and dry turkey heart, gizzard and neck and brown in 1 tbsp. oil or turkey fat until brown. Add 1 1/2 cups chopped onion, 1 1/2 cups chopped carrot, 1 stalk celery and cook for about three minutes. De-glaze the pan with 1/2 cup white wine. Add 6 cups water and/or chicken stock, 1/2 tsp. dried thyme, salt and pepper and simmer on stove for an hour or so. De-grease and strain into a clean saucepan.

2. About 4 cups gravy: Add 1 cup turkey drippings to about three cups of the reserved stock and whisk in three tbsp. corn starch, or two tbsp. potato starch - add more of the starch wine mixture until you get your desired consistency. Simmer on stove for a few minutes before serving.

Sweet Potatoes: I mulled this over in bed last night. Then I remembered a delicious recipe for a yam and leek gratin from this book.

The recipe calls for thin slices of 6 sweet potatoes, layered with rings of 3 large leeks that have been parboiled and shocked in ice water. Salt and pepper each layer, then pour a cup of heavy cream over it, cover it with tinfoil, and bake for 1 hour at 350. Remove foil and bake for 20 minutes more, until the liquid is absorbed and it is golden brown.

Green Vegetables: I love Brussels sprouts cooked this way: Core and halve the sprouts. In a fry pan, melt a good quantity of butter and continue cooking it until it is well browned. Add the sprouts and saute until they begin browning and becoming slightly soft. Add a large handful of chopped walnuts and cook until the sprouts are tender. In the last minute of cooking, add about a 1/3 of a cup of chicken stock and about 2 teaspoons of soy sauce and cook it down until the liquid has evaporated. Salt and pepper to taste. I’ll wash and cut the sprouts the day before so it’s a quick assembly on Turkey Day.

Green Bean Casserole: This is a maybe and I’ll post on this later this week.

Bread: As I wrote about before, homemade bread isn’t as hard as it sounds. I’m making walnut-cranberry bread based on a recipe from this book and this Juggle bread. I’ll get the bread started on Wednesday and bake on Thursday morning.

Pies: Mom’s bringing them. Phew.

Readers, please share your holiday preparation tips and recipes for our Juggle Thanksgiving countdown!

John just posted on what sort of home features are most desired by jugglers. My family is dealing with these questions  now, as we try to figure out how to reorganize the space in our small house—or possibly do an addition—to make room for our growing family. (We’ve weighed moving to a larger house, but we like our home and neighborhood so much that it’s a less attractive option.)

We’ve made a list of our home needs and wants—an extra bedroom and bathroom, office space for my husband who often works from home—and have even started the process of interviewing architects.

Apparently, if we’re in the market for home improvements, now’s the time. As the my WSJ colleague M.P. McQueen recently reported, “depending on the region and the job, some homeowners are paying as much as 20% less for home-remodeling projects than they would have a few years ago. Many contractors are willing to accept smaller jobs and ‘handyman’ projects that they used to snub. And more projects are being delivered on time and on budget—a stark contrast from the boom years.”

That all sounds great. Except for one big thing: Home-remodeling, no matter how great a deal you get, is often a big pain. Especially for this work-at-home mom with a toddler, a barky dog and a newborn on the way. Remodeling takes lots of time and decisions (who knew there were so many kinds of bathroom tiles?), vigilance to make sure the project is on track, stress and money, not to mention loads of noise and dust. As Sara has written before, many people simply prefer to stay in a cramped home rather than go through the stress, time demands and expense of expanding. Other friends have decided to move into rentals while their homes were under renovation, rather than live amidst the noise and debris.

Despite all the downsides, we think we’ll eventually take the plunge. But we’ll wait a bit until after the new one is born, rather than try to cram a big project in the few months remaining until the due-date. That means we may not be able to take advantage of the attractive builder deals right now.

Readers, how have you dealt with home improvement projects and your daily demands? Have any of you taken advantage of today’s good contracting deals? Or have you chosen to just live in your existing place rather than go through the ordeal? Any helpful tips for those embarking on remodeling projects?

Associated Press

What features are in your dream house?

The now-bygone boom years saw expansion in stock prices, waistlines—and the size of American homes. But while stocks are heading higher again and the nation is as weighty as it’s ever been, houses appear to be getting smaller.

That’s what the Journal’s Michael M. Phillips reported in a page-one article Friday on builders’ new approach to the still-shaken housing market. Mike focuses on the Georgia-based homebuilder John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods, where the downturn has slashed annual houses built to 600 from 1,800 in the past two years. That’s forcing Wieland to reconsider just how much house to build for its diminished client base.

“More often than not, builders say, post-crash buyers of new homes want smaller and simpler,” Mike writes. “The average new single-family house peaked at 2,507 square feet in 2007 and has since slipped to 2,392 square feet, according to Census Bureau data.” With average sale prices continuing to slide—at Wieland, down to $497,000 from $650,000 two years ago—the company now is designing a range of compact homes and stripping out amenities that once seemed almost standard.

Consumers, according to the article, don’t seem to mind giving up soaring staircases and jets in the tub. But there are a few things that many buyers can’t seem to let go: four bedrooms, a downstairs powder room, granite countertops in the kitchen and a master bedroom with its own bathroom.

“Replacing tiled tubs with fiberglass units can slice $4,000 off of the house price,” says the article. “Skipping the fireplace can slash an additional $3,500. In its place, Wieland is trying out a media wall—essentially a place to hang a big television, surrounded by shelves.” In other models, the three-car garage is becoming a two-car garage and the separate mudroom and laundry room merge as a mud-and-laundry room.

To be sure, the trend hasn’t hit all homebuilders—Toll Brothers, for one, reports that its buyers are skittish but still want big, loaded houses when they do buy. Still, as we’ve discussed before, plenty of people are scaling down these days for economic, lifestyle and environmental reasons.

In my family, we’ve been perfectly comfortable for the past six years in our 2,400-square-foot house, a 1958 midcentury-modern design on a third of an acre. The four of us never feel cramped, and we have plenty of space for entertaining. As home fashions wax and wane, we feel like we have the perfect space for our needs, though it could stand some updating.

How about you, readers? If you’re looking for a new house or have bought recently, did you go for a larger or smaller place than your previous one? What trends in home sizes have you seen among your friends and in your neighborhood? And what rooms or amenities are bare-minimum necessities to your family? What home features would you gladly give up, what would you hold on to, and what is on your wish list?

Last night, like a couple of million other loyal viewers, my wife and I were bereft: There was no new episode of “Mad Men.” The much-lauded AMC drama about a New York advertising agency in the early 1960s is richly entertaining and often moving, and the work and family issues it explores resonate with many of today’s jugglers.

SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses plot elements from the show, so if you’re planning to catch up via DVR or DVDs, be warned.

A major theme of the third season, which ended Nov. 8, was economic uncertainty and dislocation–certainly something that a lot of people these days need no fictional depiction to understand. The agency on the show, Sterling Cooper (SC), was bought by the British firm Putnam Powell & Lowe (PPL) at the end of last season, and this season found the American subsidiary in an uneasy relationship with its new overseer. There was extensive cost-cutting, and conflicts arose over business priorities (as when Don Draper, the central character and SC’s creative director, played by Jon Hamm, wanted to engage the new Madison Square Garden as a client for long-term business-relationship reasons but was overruled by PPL for short-term cost reasons).

Things came to a head toward the end of the season as it emerged that PPL had been merely setting SC up to be sold for a quick profit–and then, in the final episode, that PPL itself had been sold to the real-life U.S. firm McCann Erickson. This led Don and some other key characters to engineer a weekend mutiny, appropriating several clients to start a rival agency. While it was exhilarating for viewers to see some beloved characters starting an exciting new venture, it was also sad to see the brief scenes of the co-workers they’d left behind at SC–which is unlikely to survive intact under the new owners now that it’s been shorn of most of its revenue.

While Don was working to put together his new firm in the final episode, back at home in the suburbs his rocky marriage was coming to an end. Don’s wife, Betty (played by January Jones, who hosted “Saturday Night Live” this weekend), throughout the series has illustrated the straits that bound women 50-odd years ago. She holds an anthropology degree from prestigious Bryn Mawr and is fluent in Italian, but with no work experience since her premarriage modeling days a decade earlier, she’s somewhat at the mercy of the men in her life. Determined at last to leave Don because of his philandering and the huge secret she just uncovered (Don, originally Dick Whitman, had stolen another man’s identity in the Korean war), she may be trading one controlling man for another in the person of Henry Francis, the man she’s been having an affair with who wants to marry her. As Betty and Henry consult with a lawyer, Henry shoots down the idea of Betty getting any settlement at all from Don, saying she’ll get all she needs from Henry. Women today do find themselves in similar situations, of course, but Betty has seemed trapped in her societal role in a way that’s far less common now.

There’s plenty more to discuss about “Mad Men,” so have at it–what aspects of the show’s take on work and family life decades ago strike a chord with you today?

Does your juggle energize you? Or does it drain you and leave you feeling as if you are making compromises you don’t want to make?

For me, the answer varies. Ask me on a good day, and I will tell you that playing many roles — parent, employee, volunteer, friend, extended-family member – is energizing.

Ask me on a bad day, and I will tell you that it is impossible – that there simply is not enough time to do more than a couple of things really well, and that I would rather lie down and take a nap than try to be a working mother for one … more … second. Jennifer has posted, and many of you have commented, on these “last straw” moments when all you want to do is quit.

I recently discovered there is actually a theoretical debate among sociological researchers on exactly that split. Which of these patterns – being stimulated by juggling numerous work and home roles, or being wiped out by it – holds true for the largest number of people?

Those who hold what they call a “multiple spheres” view say juggling a lot of roles isn’t a zero-sum game. That is, people draw so much energy from the juggle that their energy for the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. A recent study I posted on recently supports this theory, showing that the more time some people spend doing housework, the more time they are also likely to spend being intimate with their spouses. The same study also linked more time spent on paid work to more closeness among couples. Other studies have shown that dual-earner marriages tend to fare better than solo-breadwinner unions in some ways, and that women who work for pay tend to have lower rates of depression, says Evergreen State College professor Stephanie Coontz, research director for the Council on Contemporary Families.

But other researchers disagree, arguing in favor of what they call the “time availability” hypothesis. Time and human energy are finite, these experts say, and you’re setting yourself up for failure, overwork and poor health if you take on too much. This thinking received a big boost 20 years ago with Arlie Hochschild’s much-discussed book “The Time Bind.” Based on this study of workers at a family-friendly company, putting in long hours at work was so rewarding that many parents plunged into their jobs at the expense of home, justifying their behavior by kidding themselves that the dwindling amounts of time they had left for family was enough. Other research shows married couples are spending less time together, and that houses are getting dirtier as time spent on housework declines.

Readers, what do you think? Which of these two experiences is true more often for you? Do you have more energy because you juggle a lot of undertakings? Or would you be better off focusing on less, because your juggle is so draining?