At work, you've figured it out. You have an assistant, maybe a chief of staff, maybe a whole team. Someone manages your calendar, briefs you before meetings, makes sure you're where you need to be and prepared for what's coming. The system works because you built it, or someone built it for you, and now it runs.
At home, you're still doing it yourself.
You're the one who remembers the pediatrician appointment and the passport renewal and the fact that the car registration expires next week. You're tracking the contractor's timeline and the nanny's vacation days and your mother-in-law's birthday. You're managing the housekeeper's tasks and the grocery order and the thing that broke three weeks ago that still isn't fixed.
You have help, maybe a lot of help, but no one is running it. No one is looking at the whole picture, anticipating what's coming, flagging conflicts before they land on you. The help you have executes tasks. It doesn't think ahead.
I spent years in this exact place. Plenty of help, still exhausted. Still the one who held the whole picture in my head. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize that what I was missing wasn't more help. It was governance.
The way I think about it now
Most people think of household help in roles: nanny, housekeeper, assistant. But the frame that finally made sense to me is a spectrum based on how much thinking the role requires.
At one end is execution. You tell them what to do and they do it. The housekeeper cleans what you've asked them to clean, the babysitter watches the kids during the hours you've specified. The task is defined. The thinking is yours.
