Comment by eitally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eitally | Hacker News Reader

For fun, here's an actual account of my typical workday routine. I'm a married not-quite-exec with two toddlers managing a globally dispersed (9 countries, 14 time zones) IT department focusing mostly on appdev.

0550 Alarm (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobitobi.a... -- I LOVE this app!!) goes off and I sneak out of the bedroom trying not to wake the 1 year old.

0551 Instant coffee in microwave & bio-needs-management. pull on shorts from previous day and clean t-shirt.

0600 prepare lunches & snacks for wife & kids

[0620-0630 optional time to catch up on email if I was adequately well-prepared in advance for food prep the night before]

0630 wake 1yo & wife. change diaper, dress, feed, and sunscreen 1yo.

0645 wake 3yo, usually with help from 1yo.

0705 wife leaves for work and i leave to drop off the kids at daycare/preschool.

0745-1630 lots of meetings, some real work, possibly some exercise, dinner prep, laundry, and possibly a couple of errands.

1630 pick up kids and proceed with the evening family craziness until putting them to bed around 2030.

2030-2230 fluctuates between doing the real work I couldn't get done during the work day and spending time with my wife. Usually more of the latter than the former, something I am extremely thankful for.

The point isn't the schedule. The point is that finding a work-life balance that accommodates productivity and supports happiness in both areas is a very personal thing, and as jgc's sarcasm shows it's ultimately about what one can accomplish and how one feels while working toward those accomplishments, not the self-congratulatory circle-jerk minutiae so many people focus on.

Only startup founders and not-quite-exec's at other companies have kids that are born with a special gene that programs them to wake up or be woken up at the precise time prescribed by some app only available on iphone. Everybody else's kids (or if you have an Android--sucks for you) wake up at random times at night, scream bloody murder and generally don't follow any schedule other than their own.

Eh? That link was to the google play store. It's an Android app, and I use it myself on my Android.

GP's kid had to get up to go to day care, he didn't get a vote, and would have had to get up regardless of the alarm clock his dad uses.

What's driving me crazy is all these guys getting their kids to bed by 7:00 or even 8:30. Oh, how I would love to have my kids in bed by those times. Of course, my kids sleep till 9:00AM, but by then, I've been up and gone for 4 hours, so don't get to enjoy a quiet house at either end of the day.

Have you tried any of the traditional "sleep training" stuff (e.g. Ferberizing etc)? We have a 7mo that we just started sleep training last week, and it's going surprisingly well. She goes to bed around 7:30-8pm, sleeps through night, and wakes up around 7am.

Some people prefer to actually parent their children, no matter what time of day it is.

I'd like to echo this. I know it's off-topic, but we've tried "graduated extinction with parental presence" (i.e. I sit in the room next to my son's crib after I put him down but do not pick him up) and it really DOES work if you've got the stomach for it. The problem is that once the grandparents visit for a week and spoil him, you'll need to retrain all over again (which we're doing now, sigh).

But seriously: it really does work. It's hard for the first 2 nights or so but gets exponentially better as time goes on.

Routine routine routine.

Kids will sleep to whatever schedule you set if you decide on a routine and stick to it. Some will take more work than others, but success is possible for nearly everyone.

Exactly, there is always the exception to the rule but if you want your kids to stick to a schedule (which is a good thing to teach them as youngsters) you'd better have a good schedule yourself and guard it like a drill sergeant. I for one make sure my kids (2yo and 4yo) are in bed at 8pm each weekday and have to wake them up at 7am each morning and it works beautifully. Maybe they are a little grumpy when they get up but after a nice warm cup of milk and their morning sandwich they are as happy as can be and ready to run off to school.

It's indeed just routine, routine, routine, ...

A coworker manages to get his kids to bed by 8:30... he dines at 7 which is insanely early by my country's standard (Uruguay).

As brc says, it's routine, routine, routine. I'll definitely get my coworker's advice by the time I have children !! :) .

My schadenfreude is approaching a million right now. /got 8.5 hours of sleep last night. I'm actually being serious here, but zooming-out and looking at the world from the perspective of rational self interest, and hence preserving my own health and sanity: shouldn't the government PAY you to raise kids? Since I believe we have mostly overridden our evolutionary instincts I don't really see why people chose to procreate at all, unless for evolutionary or cultural means which under certain worldviews are considered irrational, as they minimize the freedom of the individual and maximize the role of the children/government/religion. Either way, children are still de-facto property of the government and in one case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_Communal_child_rearing_... entirely collectivized, which didn't work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com