Division of Labor

Division of Labor

          As I approach retirement age I am forced to wonder what my days will be like.  Everyone I speak to says they have no problem whatsoever filling up their days.  What this tells me is that as people move into retirement, their comfort with lying about how they spend their time goes up.  I will conjecture that what was allocated for lying about the length of their commute and their take-home pay just got reapportioned to their schedule.  I prefer the About A Boy approach to daily life explained by Hugh Grant in that movie.  He talks of breaking the day up into units of one half hour and then finding things to allocate units to and voila! the day goes by.

         I have been married three times now.  That is the subject of several books, but suffice it say that my social contract with each of my wives was that I was the sole breadwinner for the duration of that marriage.  I was happy to be that and was fortunate enough to have a professional career that allowed that to be a reasonable undertaking.  That meant there were certain other duties in the household that needed to be allocated and assigned.  Leaving things unallocated and just floating is a recipe for disaster both financially and matrimonially.  The “I thought you were handling it” argument is never a good one to have.  So, I have always found it reasonable to have that discussion with my wife and agree on what duties she will undertake.

          Let’s begin with an important understanding, whether it is a generalization or specific to the women that will put up with me, I have never found it productive to demand anything of them.  Demands breed resentment and resentment is cumulative and rarely goes away.  I have always found it useful in these conjugal arrangements to be able to claim that making demands of me is unreasonable since I never make demands of them.  It never scores as many points as I think it will or should, but I can imagine that the absence of that shield could be very problematic.  I have generally found the female position that they deserve a lot just for putting up with my sorry ass to be a compelling argument that is hard to argue.

          The duties that are non-work fall into several categories.  There are the household chores, the life organization arrangements, kid management, taxes, investments, bill-paying, insurance, external relations and, my favorite, ex-wife management.  I’m sure there are more, but these are the big ones.  Tackling the easy ones first, kid management is going to be under her control no matter what, so try to just make it her choice so you don’t lose points.  You and I both know there is a big arbitrage here where you would pay a lot for her to do it, but no sense it wasting points unnecessarily.  As for household chores, I have found that I like to declare up-front that I will keep my shit neat, but I will outsource this job to someone if she does not want to do this.  Most women only want so much of other women (even servants) messing with their shit, so you are on pretty safe ground here, but do expect to pay for some housekeeping. 

Life organization if a jump-ball that hinges on core competencies.  I like macro trip-planning (daily details not so much) and I can easily consider life organization on my to-do list since control orientation is a demanding mistress anyway.  This is sometimes linked with external relations, but here again, I like to let her take this on if she is willing since I can take or leave most people, but she tends ot have much stronger feelings in both directions.  If you let her take that one, many of the life organizational issues will naturally flow her way, which is not all bad.

The mundane financial stuff is a matter of personal preference.  I am a finance guy, so I would never hive off taxes and investments and bill-paying has gotten so easy, relatively speaking, that there is more control and information loss than there is work offloading involved with giving her that.  I always feel bad for my buddies that have forsaken all this bookkeeping because it feels a lot like being driven around by your wife.  Don’t get me wrong, many wives are better drivers than their husbands, and its pleasant sometimes to be a passenger, but to always be the guy who’s wife drives makes you look pretty feeble.  I’m sorry, but its true. I handle the taxes, the investments and the bookkeeping.

The insurance is another matter altogether.  Insurance is not a manly thing by its nature.  We all have it and we are even sometimes damn glad we have it.  But managing claims tracking and filing is for the birds. That is one that I have always wanted to give to someone else to do and all of my wives have handled that for me.  My first wife was administratively proficient.  My second wife had been a corporate cash manager and had many family-related claims before she met me, so she was good at the insurance game.  My current wife handles it just fine and without complaint.  Mostly.

Today, what got me started on all this, my wife emailed me and said that there was an Aetna healthcare claim for which I needed to input my Medicare insurance information.  She very nicely said she would do it if I gave her the information or I could just input it with the following ID and password.  The earth suddenly stood still.  I don’t do insurance forms.  But then I thought about it and realized that she is as busy as I am these days (even though I am still working), but in the not-too-distant future I might not be so busy.  I figured it was Friday, so I gave it a whirl.  I went online and put in the information and then called Aetna’s claim service to see that they had everying they needed.  It all went along swimmingly.  I am not clear whether that is a good or bad thing since I would really still rather not be the insurance person in our marriage.  Let’s just say that I now know I could do it if I was in a pinch.

The final task to be delegated is the management of my ex-wives.  This is a pretty new category and one which I feel I may be pioneering.  My wife is a sweetheart that gets lots of love and respect from everyone who knows her.  She has had the same impact on my ex-wives, mostly, I suspect, because the kids all love her so much.  Ex-wife #1 is easy to take by any measure.  She and I have lots of mutual respect and the management of that relationship has been easy all around.  Ex-wife #2 not so much. She is a bit of a handful and she started not listening to anything I said about three weeks into our ten year marriage.  She actually once tried to get out of a moving car on the Long Island Expressway to avoid having to listen to me.  But here’s the thing, she listens to my wife.  In fact, my wife is the only person I know who can talk straight to her and get through quite effectively.  If I tried that, we would be launching WWIII.

Adam Smith gave us the concept of the Division of Labor.  He said it was simply more efficient.

• Workers need less training to master a small number of tasks.
• It is faster to use one particular tool and do one job.
• No time is wasted.
• Workers can gain loyalty and a sense of achievement.
• There is no need to move around the factory.
• Workers can concentrate on those jobs which best suit their skills and temperament.

Potential problems of division of labor also exist. The job can become very boring and repetitive, causing low morale.  Low morale in a marriage leads to many bad outcomes.  So, I consider myself a marital Theory Y manager as I approach retirement. Division of labor is still good, but enlightened self-interest inludes taking over some of the shitty tasks just to keep the peace in the household. Maybe I’ll write a book on it…and then again, maybe not.