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Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

  - I work fulltime  
  - I commute 30 minutes each day during the week  
  - I am a fulltime dad  
  - I exercise 5 times per week 
  - I walk my dog 2x daily  
  - ~10 hours/week on chores/yardwork/construction 
  - I still manage to have a side project.

Its definitely doable, I think you just need to be a little bit mentally ill. :)

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I'm sorry but I'm going to have to call bullshit on that. First of all, 'I work fulltime' and 'I am a fulltime dad' are incompatible.

It is indeed doable, as you say but not at all common. Either your job is very low stress (no on-call, no live services, etc..), you're on meth, you're half-assing most of that or have an exceptionally large spoon [0] but there's no way in hell a regular engineer would have the mental energy to deal with all of that and do a great job at them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

Its a misleading statement, so calling BS is fair :) I am not juggling babies while programming.

By "fulltime" I mean I spend about 40 hours/week in my day job, and about 40 hours per week taking care of my daughter. Breakdown: 1 hour per morning getting her to school, 2.5 hours after work. That is 17.5 hours during the weekdays. I spend probably at least 20-24 hours on the weekend with her on average. (Note that there are 112 waking hours in the week)

However (!) note that I can multitask many other things while taking care of her, particularly chores and yard work (she often plays outside with me while I am doing construction work or yard work). She is also often self-sufficient, and often entertains herself by drawing (we try to minimize the amount of TV she gets). Also (as mentioned in another comment) my wife simultaneously watches her during some of this time so its a bit easier (although as long as she is awake it is near impossible for me to work unless I am out of the house).

About doing a great job: you are absolutely correct. I do not excel at my day job (in terms of putting in overtime), but I am performant enough during my shift to keep them happy. And I do not excel at being a dad, but I consider myself a better dad than many I know, FWIW :)

> but I am performant enough during my shift to keep them happy

That's great. Seriously, good for you. Finding this balance is not easy. To tell you the truth, I was a little envious and that was probably the cause of the acidity in my original comment.

No worries, I understand where you are coming from (really). More than once I have found myself in the position where my day job took too much out of me to do anything else (even before I had a kid). It really comes down to finding a job where working 40 hours per week is acceptable, and you will not be guilt-tripped into working more hours, and ideally reducing your commute if you have one.

A 'full-time dad' must mean different things to different people. To me, it's incompatible with working full time.

Making them breakfast, seeing them off on the bus, picking them up from school, shuttling them off to activities, helping with homework, making dinner, cleaning up, helping them when they have nightmares ... &etc.

It's healthy to think of raising children as a creative, meaningful project on its own merits.

Yep I suppose by "fulltime" is open to interpretation here - in this case I mean during the hours my daughter is not at school, I share half the responsibility of my wife in taking care of her. In spite of this, I still feel like I could do more and feel a bit guilty about that.

I would call this being an engaged parent.

It’s good, your family sounds great!

But it’s definitely not being a full-time dad.

How many hours of sleep, nightly?

Lately I've been meeting many "hustlers" who are swearing up and down I only need 6 hours, or even less, which I thought would be obviously absurd, but this stupid meme keeps cropping up. The 80s sales gurus were teaching us this in highschool with their pep talks, and now the new-rich millenials are devouring it and sending it straight down the line on their instagrams.

I often do 6 hours, but not by intention, just because I get in the zone, but then my next day is totalled (have to go to bed early). I shoot for 8 or even 9 hours when I can get it. I also drink coffee in the evening sometimes but try not to exceed 300mg of caffeine per day, but I am weird in that I can sleep even while caffeine is running through my system. Mostly, I try to compact time as much as possible to free up a contiguous chunk to work on my own stuff, which is usually about 1 productive hour per day if I am lucky.

In the 80s they had cocaine. One is forced to wonder if modern "hustlers" are omitting something in their advice.

Yes, modafinil. The majority of the people I know use it. (So do I, but that's because I work an overnight shift... maybe once I finish this side project I'll be able to land a nice 9-5 software job.)

That still making the rounds? I remember in the coding bootcamp kids were going on about it, so I asked my psych about it as an alternative to adderall (always willing to explore treatments to my adhd), and she was surprised to hear people were taking it thinking it was like adderall. She said "people with narcolepsy take that, it doesn't help focus at all." This was early in days of it, looks like it's a known thing to try to use modafinil as a cognitive enhancer, though there's little data to support it actually works like that:

Modafinil, sold under the brand name Provigil among others, is a medication to treat sleepiness due to narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder, or obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).[3][7] In OSA continuous positive airway pressure is the preferred treatment.[3] While it has seen off-label use as a purported cognitive enhancer, the research on its effectiveness for this use is not conclusive.[8][9] It is taken by mouth.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil

It does help in my experience. Less so than Dexamphetamine, but also feels like it's doing you less damage. I tried Ritalin, but got headaches. We can't get adderall in .au so I don't know about it first hand. The problem is you can't get Modafinil subsidised if you have ADHD, only if you have Narcolepsy, so while Dexamphetamine is probably doing long term damage, it costs me $20 a month where Modafinil is > $200.

"Adrafinil is a precursor to modafinil, meaning the body converts adrafinil to modafinil, and are often discussed together for this reason. Adrafinil is a mild stimulant designed to fight off sleepiness and fatigue."

You can buy it online, legally in the US anyways, probably in Aussieland too.

Sounds like your psych wasn't familiar with off label uses. I know a lot of people who have tried or regularly used Modafinil. It eliminates brain fog and improves focus, like many stimulants do.

It helps if you're tired. I'm not sure if it helps with focus or if most people just have dismal sleep quality.

Could it be the aggressively over prescribed amphetamines?

I've found caffeine to be sufficient, too scared to try anything "harder" - but I suspect many hustlers do not have wives and children, or if they do they are crappy fathers/husbands - I personally know some people like this.

Adderal, its everywhere, and not much in the way of side effects. Taking it while you are in the thick of a task is the way to do it; once it sets in you are working at 150% pace with undivided focus. This is the drug of the future. Much more sustained focus from caffeine, and no stomach discomfort or nausea that you might encounter with high caffeine doses. This drug, along with ritalin, are designed such that you can't get a high enough concentration of the drug in your blood to trigger any physical dependence or tolerance. Plenty of my friends have prescriptions, and doctors generally prescribe enough to be on the drug every waking hour for a month, whereas they might only need to take it a couple times a week for focusing on a specific task, so people whose ADD symptoms are milder tend to build up a surplus.

I don't agree that it's the miracle drug you're indicating.

First off, the effectiveness in diagnosed add / ADHD people vs people just using it doesn't seem to be 1:1. For example, it gets me focused on relevant tasks, whereas my non ADHD friends could easily get sucked into the infamous "clean the entire house" funnel. Or, it just makes them anxious.

I also suspect it dramatically reduces my emotional reaction to things, including art. I feel like it robotocizes me. Sure, I'm more effective, but time seems to just slide by without having any real impact on me. The weeks I don't take it seem to automatically be more "colorful" in my long term memory.

It's certainly made my life a hell of a lot easier as someone with ADHD, but I wouldn't sing its praises as a side-effect-less drug. If anything, the side effects are insidious in a dangerous (emotionally) and undetectable way.

I've been getting about 4 hours a night for the last 5 years and feel fine. I used to swear by 8 hours, but as I've gotten older I just don't need as much.

Well, you must be an outlier, because that "as you get older you need less sleep" meme is not supported by scientific study: https://www.sleep.org/articles/aging-need-less-sleep/

Do you have time for friends? Friends seem to be the last priority these days yet there have been several studies that link having close friends to long-term health and happiness.

I do not have time for friends, as one might expect (unless you count my wife and/or her friends as friends, or "twitter friends"). Which is ok by me, since I am pretty antisocial in the real world. :)

What is your current side project sir?

From his HN profile: https://www.voxelquest.com/about.html

WOW. Thank you. This is really a nice Creative project. So inspiring.

glad you like it. :) As expected, progress is slow these days but you can see my most recent work on my twitter account if you dig through my RTs.

Sure, I'll look for your recent work in your twitter.

Hey, I came across your site a few times and it looks cool, but I was always discouraged by the lack of recent updates ):

There will be more updates coming soon. My current rate of work is about 1/10th to 1/20th of what it was while I was working on VQ full time, and I took about 1 year off from VQ for other side projects, but I am currently back at it with all my spare time.

Glad to hear that :)

How do you have time in your day for this? I'd really like to see your hour by hour to see if I can make more time in my own day.

I wake up for work before the sun rises, and by the time I get back home this time of year, its been set for about 2 hours. Work in preparing dinner, errands or chores, and trying to get in 8 hours of sleep, I'm left with maybe 2-3 hours where I don't have to be doing something or going somewhere in a given weekday. Sure, I could have a side project or a hobby in that time, but then my day would be entirely occupied without any flexibility for if something comes up.

All through college I told myself 6 hours of sleep was fine, that I could catch up on the weekends, but now my sleep schedule seems to be wrecked so 8 hours is nonnegotiable until I stop feeling so exhausted all day.

Times around rounded to the nearest half hour, and give or take for a given day.

Mon-Fri:

  - 7:00am or 7:30 am: wake up .  
  - 8:30am i've prepared breakfast, packed daughter for school, packed myself for work and working out, daughter is brought to school (school is conveniently 3 blocks away) . 
  - 9:00am I have commuted to work . 
  - 5:00pm leave work . 
  - 5:30pm-6:30pm workout . 
  - 7:00pm I have arrived back home . 
  - 7:30-9:30 dinner (if I am hungry), chores, get daughter to bed . 
  - 9:30 - freedom!  
  - 11:00 or 12:00 - go to bed .

Weekends are not generally that free for me, but sometimes I trade off with my wife to free up some time. Usually I am busy doing work around the house (i.e. I recently built some fences, installed a sprinkler system, leveled out and graveled a side yard to put in a shed, etc).

Without caffeine I feel exhausted. I get almost exactly 300mg every day, and also try to time eating such that I don't get tired (food coma).

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