How Can Parents Best Schedule Their Time?

00:00:04.320 | All right, let's move on now to a question from Mark.

00:00:07.680 | Mark says, "Do you have any suggestions for how working parents can schedule their time

00:00:13.600 | to maximize time spent with children, given eight-hour workdays, fitness, and household tasks?"

00:00:20.080 | Well, it's hard because especially household tasks take up a lot of time.

00:00:28.640 | Fitness, you can fit that, you might be able to fit that somewhere else, but household tasks take a lot of time.

00:00:35.040 | Everyone's tired. If it's an eight-hour day, your kids were probably in some sort of aftercare that

00:00:40.640 | they're coming home from. They're tired, you're tired, you've just been working, you've just been commuting.

00:00:44.480 | So set your expectations lower for the actual workdays. I think that is reasonable advice.

00:00:51.440 | Two, maximize the weekends more. So I'm a proponent of be very wary about the instinct to say,

00:00:58.560 | "This would be enriching, so let's do that activity." And you know, "That would be good too, let's do that activity."

00:01:04.080 | And actually, you know, I think it'd be really good for them to spend time with so-and-so.

00:01:07.520 | It's the the allure of child-scheduled construction on paper. You produce this thing that has all these

00:01:14.320 | attributes you like. There's a real allure to that. But when you implement these crowded schedules in

00:01:20.480 | the child's real life, it's mainly basically people yelling in a Honda Odyssey. It's all this overhead,

00:01:27.840 | all this stress, everyone is exhausted. And so your schedule on paper, this is just my personal opinion,

00:01:32.960 | should probably be way more sparse than in the moment when you're creating a schedule for your

00:01:38.880 | kids. You're thinking like, "Well, they should probably do that and probably do this." They don't know.

00:01:41.760 | They want to be with you and not be really tired. So that frees more time on the weekend, so you can

00:01:48.160 | really spend more time together. And then you choose your moments, I suppose, in the weeknights.

00:01:52.000 | We do dinner together. There's build something around the bedtime routine. You know, I'm a big believer

00:01:58.000 | in having one outing per kid per week. All right, we are going to go, I'm going to pick you up from school,

00:02:04.080 | just you, and we're going to go throw the baseball around and get dinner. Okay, me and you are going

00:02:08.720 | to go to the bookstore on this night and get a book. And so, you know, some days are busy, you don't

00:02:12.400 | have time for this. But if a kid is getting, and again, I have no back, I'm not the expert on this.

00:02:17.840 | My only expertise is like everyone else who's a parent. I have a bunch of kids and

00:02:21.440 | this is just me pulling stuff, you know, out of a hat here. So keep that in mind. But

00:02:25.200 | if a kid feels like they've had one serious one-on-one thing with you per week, and there's

00:02:32.720 | time spent with them every day, and they're not completely exhausted being dragged around on the

00:02:37.680 | weekend, I think that's probably pretty good. I think that's probably pretty good. I think you're

00:02:42.320 | about, you're doing everything you need to do. And I wouldn't be too guilty behind it. Fitness, I said

00:02:47.440 | in the beginning, you can probably hack that. I mean, fitness really is a thing that, you know,

00:02:52.080 | if you've got young kids and they're in school, I don't know, I don't think you can, it's optimal

00:02:57.360 | to lose like an hour of that evening time exercising. So I think you should steal that from

00:03:02.480 | work to the extent possible. Just find a way to steal that time from work. Just go during the

00:03:07.040 | lunch hour, bike to work and exercise at the gym nearby before you go to work. Do it in the morning

00:03:12.560 | before you go. I often am exercising after I put the kids to bed, so I don't have a lot of time

00:03:18.080 | then. So I do very intense, high intensity exercising just so I can get it done. That's

00:03:22.160 | something where I think you can steal time from work. That's my other hack. Maybe not all my hacks

00:03:27.040 | should really reduce the steal stuff from work. That's my other hack is steal time from work for

00:03:31.920 | household admin too. I'll be efficient about it, but there's 30 minutes well deployed in the middle

00:03:38.160 | of a workday can get a lot done that needs to be done for the household. So, you know, hopefully no

00:03:47.600 | administrators are working. I used to use the first 30 minutes. I mean, there's no real workday

00:03:51.520 | for being a professor, but I would spend what most people would consider to be the first 30 minutes

00:03:56.400 | of the workday after nine, always doing household admin. And I found if you could do 30 minutes of

00:04:01.360 | household admin every morning before you start your day, the amount that awaits you at the end

00:04:05.920 | of the week or in the evening is actually much less. So this idea that when you're at work as

00:04:10.240 | a knowledge worker, that it's like you're clocking in at a factory and every minute you should be

00:04:13.920 | cranking widgets. That's crazy. There's ups, there's downs, high intensity recovery. So steal

00:04:19.120 | some time for exercise from work, steal some time for household admin, and then mess around with the

00:04:24.720 | type of strategies I talked about before. And I think that's, you'll be doing fine. You'll be doing

00:04:29.520 | fine.

How Can Parents Best Schedule Their Time?

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