When I was finishing my book on time pressure and modern life and casting about for ideas for a book cover, a well-meaning editor of mine said he had a great one: “Picture this,” he said excitedly, “A woman in a business suit and high heels in soft focus. Steering a grocery cart.”

I groaned. The idea screamed “For Women Only.” And for too long, that’s where we’ve been stuck as a society when it comes to thinking about how we work and live. As if it only mattered to harried, overwhelmed women. As if failing to manage it all with aplomb has been simply a failing in women. As if the answer were simply for women to go back home, or take a bubble bath and quit whining. Everyone else—that is to say, men—had this work-life thing wired.

Except, of course, they don’t. Which is why my wish for 2016 is this: It’s time to Get Real. Time to break these so-called “work-life” issues out of the Mommy Zone and into the Mainstream where they’ve always belonged. Time to finally start making the workplace, culture and policy changes we all men, women, people with kids or aging parents, people without them, married and single, Millennial, Gen X, Baby Boomer, middle class, working class, rich, poor—need to live our best lives.

There’s no doubt, as time diaries and other data show, that women are time-starved and stretched and still expected to assume most responsibility not just for the housework and child care, but for the mentally taxing tasks of planning and organizing it all, often even when they’re the primary breadwinner.

But let’s get real: Women aren’t the only ones feeling overwhelmed, stressed out and stuck. Recent studies have found that men, too, are not only stressed by the conflicting demands of work and life, but that they’re more stressed out about it than women. Why? Because our workplace cultures are set up to reward those who have no life, those who work like a Wall Street dealmaker with a perpetual billion dollar deal on, or those willing to sleep under their desks like at a high-tech in 24-7 start up mode.

Those insane demands and outsize rewards for meeting them have put women in a tough spot: if caregiving responsibilities keep them from working all hours, they’re see as less committed. If they do work those hours, they’re dinged for shirking family responsibilities. But the demands are also punishing to men who openly try to be more fully involved in home, and more than a “distant paycheck.” They can be passed over for promotion, seen as wimps or fired.

And what are those long work hours for? Let’s get real: The United States works among the longest hours of any advanced economy, but it is not the most productive per hour. That efficiency goes to countries like Norway. Economists like Stanford’s John Pencavel have found a “productivity cliff”—that productivity drops steeply after a 50-hour work week, and drops off a cliff after 55 hours—and that exhausted employees are not only unproductive, but are also more prone to costly “errors, accidents, and sickness.” “Is it possible,” Pencavel wrote, “that employers were unaware that hours could be reduced without loss of output?”

It’s time to Get Real. Time to break these so-called “work-life” issues out of the Mommy Zone and into the Mainstream where they’ve always belonged.

And, though we like to think that technology and information overload is what’s keeping us tied to work, Indiana University sociologist Youngjoo Cha has found that work hours started creeping up in the 1980s. Some feminist scholars have noted that work hours started to get crazy about a decade after women entered the workforce en masse, right when they would have been ready to rise into positions of power. Could it be, they ask, that these punishing work hours are simply another way to keep both men and women stuck in traditional gender roles?

And let’s get really real: That, not productivity, is what long hours are accomplishing. Research is finding that healthy, well-rested workers do better work. Neuroscience shows that inspiration, insight and creative thinking come not by putting in long, grinding hours, but by regularly giving your brain a break, and being happy. And let’s remember that the wolves of Wall Street bragging about those long hours at the office got us into a global financial crisis, and that 95 percent of startups fail.

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