Parenting work-life balance

Dad, interrupted

Being a parent is constant interruption. There are the things in my mental list I want to do. And the list of things everyone else in the household wants to ask me to do.

Photo by August de Richelieu on

Kind of like being a database administrator. There is the operations list of maintenance work. Then management (the kid) throws in project work assuming your 40 hour work week is for that. Then things break.

And the 3 am alarms go off about either peeing in the bed or a server crashed. Who knows anymore?

The challenge to interruption is getting back on track. I tend to interrupt even myself.

Thankfully, I have had years of preparation as a DBA for this. The difference is that as a DBA, I was able to hand off on-call duty to someone else after a week or two and only came back into rotation after a couple weeks off.

My strategy?

  1. Prioritize the doable: they are quickly done and off the mental load.
  2. Prioritize the biggest impact: they ensure the greatest contentment.
  3. Rely on the external brain: tools that track things (lists, reminders) work better than my brain.