Dr. Jill Biden Opens Up About Managing Her Duties, Suffering from Mom Guilt — and Her Post-It Habit

Dr. Jill Biden is a mom, a grandmother, a teacher and the first lady of the United States — but she still manages to get her seven-and-a-half hours of sleep each night. And if she doesn’t, she says she’s “mastered the art of the catnap.”

In a new interview with Real Simple, the first lady says she sleeps well “most nights,” adding that she might take a nap if she’s been teaching all day and has an event with the president that night.

“I can sleep for 20 minutes and wake up fresh,” she tells the magazine.

Despite her hectic schedule, Dr. Biden, 71, insists she wouldn’t have it any other way. Acknowledging that she made history when she became the only first lady in memory to maintain a paying job outside the White House, Biden says she “knew” she could “make it work.”

The September issue of REAL SIMPLE is on sale August 12. LELANIE FOSTER/REAL SIMPLE

“I think people were a little skeptical,” the first lady told Real Simple of the announcement that she planned to work as an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College while maintaining her duties as first lady.

“Could I truly do it, since I was the first one to try it? But I knew I wanted to teach. And so I said, ‘This is what I want to do. We have to figure it out.’ I knew I could do both. I’d done it as second lady, and at that time my staff said, ‘There’s no way you can do this,’ and then they saw that I could. I saw it work then, and I knew we could figure out how to do it now.”

Like any working mom, Dr. Biden says she experiences occasional guilt — but the feeling extends to both her kids and her students.

“You’re always thinking, ‘Did I spend enough time at his game?’ Or, ‘Should I have said that?’ You’re always questioning yourself because you want to be the best mother you can be, the best teacher you can be. You’re thinking, ‘Did I give that student enough attention?'”

So, in an effort to do all of the above — and then some — Dr. Biden tells Real Simple she’s come up with a unique way of asking for help from others: delegation via Post-it notes.

The September issue of REAL SIMPLE is on sale August 12. LELANIE FOSTER/REAL SIMPLE

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For almost every large dinner she and her husband host, Dr. Biden says she is responsible for the main dish, but she enlists help from others.

“I know my meal and what I’m going to serve, so I do Post-it notes, like ‘Fill the glasses with ice,’ ‘Light the candles,’ and I put them on the cabinet above my kitchen counter,” she says. “Then I put out the salad bowl with the tomatoes or the lemons or whatever needs to be cut, and every-thing is set up so when somebody comes in, they do what they want to do.”

The Post-it note habit extends to other areas of her home life, too, as she tells the outlet: “If I want to get a message to Joe, I put one on his mirror. It may be a nice ‘I missed you’ or ‘I hope you get whatever it is you’re working on.'”

The September issue of REAL SIMPLE is on sale August 12. LELANIE FOSTER/REAL SIMPLE

And while it may sound like a great balancing act, Dr. Biden says she prefers the term “managing” to “juggling” or “balancing.”

“You can’t do anything in a haphazard way,” she tells Real Simple. “You have to have purpose while you’re doing it, and it has to be organized. That’s the key to it.”

Another of the first lady’s favored phrases, she says, is “showing up.”

“In your own life, it means so much to people when you show up in the tough times as well as the happy times,” she says. “And I think it’s important to do the unexpected thing. The little kindness. When I’m at school and somebody’s husband is sick, I might leave cookies on their desk, or a note, to acknowledge what they’re going through.”