Field-Tested Advice for Time-Crunched Dads

A reader recently wrote in with a question I’ve gotten some version of dozens of times over the years. He’s a year into fatherhood, his wife is about to go back to work, and he’s struggling to fit in exercise, friends, hobbies, and reading while still being a decent husband and dad. What he wanted to know was basically: how do you balance all this stuff?

It’s a perennially tough question for dads. I remember when our kids were babies and toddlers and feeling harried and sleep-deprived changing diapers and doing early morning feedings and playing with them and tending to them when they got sick (little kids get sick a lot, which means you get sick a lot), all while continuing to work and trying to keep up an exercise routine and a glimmer of a social life.

Once the kids were potty trained, I thought time and bandwidth would free up. And it definitely did. The pressure on you becomes less relentless and immediate. But older kids take up your time in new and different ways. When they hit elementary and middle school, they’ve got places to be like basketball practice and church groups and what have you, and you’re the one driving them there and coordinating schedules with your wife. It’s great to watch your kids develop their talents and interests, but it takes a lot of time and mental energy.

Below is the advice I’d give any dad with kids in the house, regardless of what phase of fatherhood he’s in. It’s mostly what I’ve figured out through trial and error since our first kid, Gus, came along sixteen years ago.

1. Drop the Stuff That Doesn’t Matter

When fatherhood hits, it’s the time to reexamine and rearrange your priorities. Do an audit of your life. Are there any commitments — whether social, professional, civic, or religious — that used to make sense in your life and no longer do? Drop them.

Once I had kids, I stopped doing speaking engagements. Especially with those that required travel, they threw off my schedule too much and got me behind on work, and the time away from home simply wasn’t worth the tradeoff in missing out on time with my kids.

2. Scale Back the Stuff You Keep

The good news about fatherhood is that if you become more effective about managing your time and schedule, you should be able to keep all the things that are important to you and all the interests you had before kids. But, you should accept the fact that you might have to scale some of them back a little.

For example, I love to work out. Ideally, I get an hour of exercise in each day, and most of the time I do. But I’ve run into periods of my life as a dad where I can’t get a full 60-minute workout in. Instead of an hour session, I’ll do a 30-minute one. Heck, when all else has failed, I’ve done a 15-minute workout. Even now, when things get busier than usual, I aim to never have an all-or-nothing attitude about exercise; training for a half hour is better than not training at all.

If you’d like to keep working out on the regular, I highly recommend building a garage gym. Saves you so much time by eliminating the commute to a commercial gym. If you can’t afford or don’t have room for plates and a squat rack, a set of dumbbells and a bench will do.

You can do the same scaling back with your other interests. Take reading. Yes, it would be great to read 30 minutes, uninterrupted, every day. But maybe 15 minutes is all you can do right now. Do that. Or instead of reading a book, listen to an audiobook on your commute or while you’re driving kids to practice. I’ve got more tips for reading more, even when you have a busy schedule, here.

3. Get Organized

Maybe before you had kids, you’d manage to get by holding all the to-dos that needed tackling in your head. After you have kids, that’s not going to fly. You’ve got more on your plate, and you need a system for keeping a grip on it.

It doesn’t have to be an elaborate system. Just something to make sure stuff doesn’t slip through the cracks and you can keep moving forward personally and professionally.

For me, I devote a half hour every Sunday to planning my week. This weekly planning session helps me see what’s coming, figure out the most important things I need to do, and keep the big picture in view so the urgent stuff doesn’t crowd out the important stuff.

I first check to see what’s already on the schedule in terms of podcast interviews, meetings, article schedule, kids’ activities, doctors’ appointments, etc. Then I do a mind dump of everything I need to get done across the different domains of my life, from phone calls to chores, and input them into Todoist. (I highly recommend using this app. I’ve talked about Todoist plenty of times on the site — including a detailed breakdown of how I use it to organize my life and templates I employ for recurring tasks — but I don’t have any affiliation with the company; I’m just a very satisfied user.) Once I’ve finished my mind dump, I’ll assign due dates to the tasks that emerged from it.

This weekly planning session is one of the 8 habits that have had the most ROI in my life. Find a system that works for you.

4. Learn to Use Pockets of Time

Your time will become more fragmented as a parent. You won’t have many long, uninterrupted blocks of it anymore. But you will have plenty of pockets of time, and you can chip away at things in those interstices.

I do a lot of my reading while waiting for my kids to get done with practice. I just bring a book or pull one up on the Kindle app on my phone. I’ve also watched a lot of movies in 5- to 10-minute increments, waiting in the carline to pick up my kids from school. It’s not an ideal way to watch a movie, but it works. I also knock out chores in little pockets of time I find myself with at home. Small bits of time add up, so don’t neglect them; there are real possibilities in spare moments!

5. Decide Now How Many Activities Your Kids Will Do

If your kid is still in diapers, now’s a good time to have a conversation with your wife about how many activities and which ones you’re going to let your kids do as they get older. It’s easier to say no to a travel team or dance squad before your kid has ever heard of one than after all their friends are on it or you feel yourself getting caught up in the pressure to move them to an ever more competitive level.

From what I’ve seen of families with kids on travel teams, those teams will consume your life. They’re expensive in terms of both money and time. We didn’t pursue that path for our kids. They have and do play on rec or school teams. A sports psychologist I had on the podcast several years ago argued that all the special coaching and elite-team travel doesn’t do much to turn a kid into a superstar anyway, and it isn’t the only path to playing on the college and professional level. Unless you and your kids enjoy spending your weekends traveling 400 miles to play a game, why invest so much time and money in sports?

Kate and I also set a hard limit on extracurriculars: two at a time, max. This was often one sport + one musical instrument. More than that and things get bonkers and your family gets fragmented.

6. If You’ve Got the Money, Outsource Some Stuff

Pay somebody to do the stuff that doesn’t need to be done by you. Mowing the lawn, removing the leaves, cleaning the house, whatever. A lawn service gives you back hours of time every month, which is time you can spend with your kid (or doing something you want to do) instead of raking leaves that will all be replaced by the following day. Not everybody has the budget for this, I know. But if you do, it’s some of the best money you’ll spend.

7. Keep Up a Social Life, But Lower Your Expectations for It

Having a rich social life is important at every stage in life; it’s a huge contributor to our overall happiness. So it’s not something you should let disappear once you have kids; don’t turn into one of those people who never hangs out with other adults once their house is taken over by the diaper-wearing set.

But maintaining friendships when you have kids isn’t easy. Not only do you have less time, but the people you’d like to hang out with also have less time. Plus, your schedules probably don’t sync up anymore. There’s social discoordination.

So keep up some semblance of a social life, but lower expectations for what it’s going to look like. I aim to get at least one hangout a month with a friend. If I get that, I count it as a success.

If you want to make things a little more consistent, a standing thing (a monthly poker night, a discussion group) is a better approach than trying to schedule something fresh each month. The best and most fruitful social seasons of my life as a dad have been those when I had a set, regular time where I met up with a group.

8. Hold a Weekly Marriage and Family Meeting

Start a weekly marriage meeting with your wife if you haven’t already. Kate and I have done this for years and are big believers in the practice. Once a week, we sit down for 20 minutes and do the four components of a marriage meeting: sharing appreciation for each other, going over household to-dos, planning for good times, and discussing bigger issues. You can find the details of how a marriage meeting works here. The habit helps us stay connected as a couple and keeps our household running smoothly.

I also recommend holding a weekly family meeting that includes your kids (the older your kids are, the more they’ll be able to participate). It’s a chance to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding the calendar and upcoming events, while reinforcing your family’s culture and discussing how things are going with it.

Well, that’s about all the advice I’ve got. Some of it will fit your situation and some of it won’t, and you’ll figure out the rest through trial and error, same as every dad before you.

Popular culture would make it seem like fatherhood just adds a burden of stress and obligation, and that it’s sad that your former childless life has ended. But when you have kids, life doesn’t end, it just changes. You now have more than you and your wife to think about, but there’s a lot of joy in being part of a “little platoon.” As long as you make some adjustments and learn to move as a unit, you’ll find rich satisfaction in taking life on, together.