Dec 22, 2022
To-do items like scheduling appointments and planning meals are essential tasks to keep the household functioning, and the mental load of managing these tasks doesn’t stop when life gets chaotic. Aimee chats with Ashley Butler, the founder and CEO of MySherri, about the most common home care tasks her company’s clients ask for help with. Ashley also breaks down why ‘having it all’ is a myth and shares why it’s sometimes harder to accept help than to ask for it.
Episode Highlights
Keeping track of to-dos is a mental burden -- that often falls on women.
Everyday to-do list items like doing a load of laundry or running errands are essential for keeping households functioning, but they also require mental processing. In our culture, this mental load often falls disproportionately on women.
“Women still manage more,” Ashley said. “They manage more in terms of time, and calendaring, and childcare, and in the household duties. It’s not that our partners aren’t supportive, but there's an underlying cultural movement here that we’re starting to reframe and rewrite.”
‘Having it all’ is a myth.
Women especially tend to feel that they should be ‘doing it all’ or ‘having it all.’ Finding or hiring help for home care tasks can free up valuable time for women, which is why Ashley started her home services company MySherri and why she speaks to the true messiness of life.
“Life is messy,” she said. “It’s not perfect. It’s not the curated Instagram real. We are doing a disservice to ourselves by inundating our brains with this perfect imagery.”
Ideas to help friends at home.
Not everyone can afford to hire someone to come into their home and help them out. But if you want to help a friend or family member going through a hard time, Ashley has a few ideas that are popular with MySherri clients:
- Create a meal plan
- Prep food to cook later
- Do a load of laundry
- Wash the dishes
- Water the plants
- Make some phone calls
- Schedule (or reschedule) appointments
- Run an errand
- Arrange transportation for family members
- Sort mail into piles of important, entertainment, and junk
“There’s a lot of the things we think of as mundane or trivial, but it stacks up in our minds,” Ashley said.
Accepting help is hard.
One factor Ashley has encountered in her role as CEO is that it’s often difficult for people to ask for and accept help, and sometimes, the accepting part is harder. That’s the case for Ashley, who is currently overwhelmed by the process of finding an executive assistant for her business.
“I’m over here struggling,” Ashley said. “I got stuck myself in the gap of asking for help and then receiving because it feels so overwhelming. What do I ask for? How do I ask for it? How do I download it?”
Resources + Links
- MySherri
- Aimee Kandrac: Website, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
- WhatFriendsDo: Website, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
About Aimee and WhatFriendsDo
Aimee Kandrac is a speaker, consultant, and the co-founder and CEO of WhatFriendsDo. Her work is instrumental for organizing support during life-changing events, and she speaks to organizations about creative ways to help friends and family during times of crisis. Aimee has been recognized as a Top 50 Mompreneur by Babble.com and is the first female CEO in the state of Indiana to close a $500,000 funding round. She has been featured in Forbes, Time, the LA Times, Oprah.com, the Indianapolis Star, and more.
WhatFriendsDo is a simpler way to create organized and actionable support during a time of crisis. The free, online platform empowers healthcare facilities, HR departments, families, and friends to easily coordinate meals, errands, transportation, childcare, communication, and more for those in the midst of a life-changing event. The women-founded and women-led company started as a solution for a friend with terminal cancer. WhatFriendsDo is based out of Indianapolis.