Wow, three kids! Developer here with a software side project/business I’m passionate about, going to be a first-time dad soon. Any high impact advice to maximize both productivity and family quality of life during the early years?
I've got two kids and I work from home. If you really really need to focus, the get out of the house. Even with someone watching your small kids at the house, your lizard brain is still monitoring ALL the noise in the house, expecting some kind of disaster. (Your kids will be at home around the clock for the first year, or three.)
My (awful) hack is that I stay up really late while the house is quiet.
As a first time dad, do as many diapers as you can, wash and dry all of the bottles and/or pumping stuff you can, get the kid in and out of the car as much as you can, and just do everything you possibly can. No matter how exhausting it is, it's orders of magnitude easier than pregnancy, birth, and the first year for your wife. She'll definitely appreciate it, and it'll really help your marriage.
Unless you’re pushing parenting duties solely into your partner, like the absentee father who’s trying to make partner at the law firm, you’re going to be limited to working 40 hours per week, or less, and sleep deprived for months, maybe years depending when the baby starts sleeping through the night.
With that, if you’re one of those hyper-conscientious types that gets more done than everyone else yet always seems to have free time in the work day and never works nights or weekends, it may have little effect on your work.
If, however, you’re like me and take on more than you can chew but make up for it by obsessively learning every waking hour outside of regular working hours, your productivity is going to get crushed.
My only advice is:
* There’s the pain of the thing, and there’s the pain of resisting the thing, and one of those is optional.
> Any high impact advice to maximize both productivity and family quality of life during the early years?
throw expectations out the window and set yourself (and business) up to be resilient to you having other time commitments / balancing with family time.
I have one 1.8yo, and another on the way; I can only ever get things done if I wake up at 6am and the little one doesn't have her eyes shoot open at that time.
Would not trade this time (with the kids) for all the success in the world though; you don't realise how much other stuff doesn't matter, until there's something else more important.
