What's Annabel Crabb's secret? About 200 cups of tea.

If all women had wives, would life be easier?

It was the point that Annabel Crabb made to perfect in 2015, in her best-selling book The Wife Drought.

“What we’re really meaning by that,” the Fairfax and ABC journalist, and host of Kitchen Cabinet host says, “is ‘if only it was somebody else’s responsibility to pick up all this stuff’.  The stuff that drives you crazy in the end is not having a family, which is the most lovely thing ever, and it’s not having a job, which is fulfilling in other ways.”

“It’s when the two of them are in constant yammering competition.”

And that is the dilemma so many women face. But as Annabel points out, the fault is not in choosing one over the other, it is in holding one above the other- in “assign[ing] a value to either of those pursuits.”

So how does Crabb pursue three children, a career in political journalism, writing non-fiction and hosting a cookery-meets-politics television show?

With about 81263 cups of tea for a start.

She starts the day with one, “I will probably have three more before the school run. I hammer them down.  I don’t drink coffee, coffee makes me anxious, but I drink a lot of tea.”

Your maths is correct. That’s four cups of the good stuff before school drop-off.

Where do you find peace and quiet in a busy day? How do you find a moment to just stop, and soak in all the necessary information that’s going to help you get through the next day? In the car maybe, the garden or the gym?

The shower.

“Quite often I’ll have a cup of tea next to the shower and I’ll be banging that down while I’m washing because multitasking is the secret.”

But her tea drinking and bathing routine are about all that are consistent in Annabel Crabb’s life.

“I work from home sometimes,” she told Sarah MacDonald on I Don’t Know How She Does It. “I work from the ABC when I’m in the studio. I do a lot of writing.  I sort of time shift my work as well.  Often I do a lot of writing when the kids go back to bed and that’s kind of nice and quiet.  That allows me to do the school pick up if that’s required.”

No two days are the same?

“Nope.  And sometimes I’ll be traveling as well.”

Hear more of how Annabel manages three children with her excellent career, here: