Our next question comes from Kevin. Kevin asks, how do you apply some of your ideas to make sure your family can pursue a deeper life? He elaborates that he is a director of engineering at a SAS company, but he also has a wife and three kids. And he says, while I feel that my professional life is amenable to productivity techniques and systems, I often struggle to feel in control of the day-to-day aspects of my family life.

I would love to hear more about any techniques and systems you and your wife use to get your arms around all of the obligations and chores that come along with family life, and how you free up more time to pursue a deep life together as a family. Well, Kevin, it's a good question.

I think the intersection of family life and deep life is something that a lot of people are thinking about these days, especially on the other end of this pandemic and all the disruption that it created. I will start by saying I'm not an expert on this topic. I think organizing and making the most out of family life has unique challenges to it.

So you can't just take ideas that might work in the world of work and directly port them over. Trust me, I've tried to get my three-year-old to be a better time block planner, and his management of his Trello boards is really quite horrendous. He's not doing a good job of capturing task lists on the back of the digital card.

So it really just doesn't work. I'm going to recommend a couple of books, and then I'll mention a couple of things that we do do in our family. And again, I can't say it's the best advice, but some things we do. But let me start with some books from people who know more about this.

One is Emily Oster's new book, The Family Firm. Emily Oster is an economist at Brown. She applies really interesting data-centric, hyperlogical approaches to questions that take place in life outside of the world of work. So obviously, for nerds like me or like you as a director of engineering at a SaaS company might appreciate this.

So The Family Firm is applying a data-driven approach to try to make lots of decisions about family life. I haven't read it yet, but I like Oster, and I'm sure it's a good book. You might also want to check out the work of my friend Laura Vanderkam. She's written quite a few books that are at least close to this area.

Probably the book that is most in this area would be 168 Hours. It's based off of a lot of interviews and time logs she did with people. And she has some really interesting ideas in there about what to do with the time in your week. One of the big headline ideas from that book is basically to the extent that it is at all financially possible, basically outsource and automate as much of the more drudgery-focused household work that you can, that this is actually a really good strategy and something that we shouldn't think of as unusual or elite, but actually should be at the core of it, especially if you have two working parents, what can we hire someone else to do that we don't actually care about doing ourselves?

So check out that book as well. Now, when it comes to what MyFamily actually does, there's a couple ideas I can think through that might be useful. One thing we try to do is keep one weekend day clear. So when we're working on activities for the kids, we've been doing that this fall, for example, and it's been quite successful, where we keep Saturdays clear of any sort of I have to drive you to this place for this whatever sporting event.

Keep it clear of that. Let those happen on Sunday. And that's been really nice to have a completely open day, because then we can do whatever. Let's go see the grandparents. Let's go for a hike. Let's go to a movie, whatever it is. I think that's been a nice, relaxing trend that we've injected into our lives.

The other thing I'm real big on, and this is probably a battle I'll end up losing at some point, is really trying to keep activities minimized. I think it's important that each of the kids always has something they're doing, especially at their ages, something physical, because otherwise they will literally run up the walls and be ripping drywall from the ceiling by the time we get to bedtime.

But one thing is enough. It's really easy when you hear about these different activities, like, well, they would like that, and this would be enriching for them. Yeah, that would be kind of interesting, and they should do that as well. But the overhead of actually getting people to these places, driving the kids to the places, waiting there, the fragmenting of your schedule.

Now that evening's gone. Now this evening's gone. Now we have something in the middle of the day this day. It's way, I think, underestimated the cost of that overhead. So we've been trying to the extent possible to say, well, why don't you play baseball this fall? And that's good.

And yeah, Boy Scouts might be fun. That Robotics Club seems interesting. And maybe there's this enrichment thing that your school's offering. You know what, let's just not do any of those things. And we're usually happy when we succeed with keeping that limit, because when you have enough kids, one thing per kid takes up a lot of time already.

So those are some hacks that we deploy, but check out those books. Check out Oster's book. Check out Vanderkem's books. You'll get a lot more, let's say, well-thought-through advice on this important question. (upbeat music)