(upbeat music) - Hi Cal, my name is Mark. I'm a software engineer in Michigan. I'm married with a three-year-old son. I have a really good job. They respect my time and I'm able to keep my schedule under 40 hours a week. And so I feel really good about that bucket of my life right now and the progress I've made in becoming a better employee.

And what I want is more quality time with my family. Like a lot of adults, I struggle with the balance of family against all the other demands in my life. I've got a good amount of weight to lose. So I need a non-trivial amount of time for fitness. A lot of household administration that comes up and then kind of separately household projects that I ended up being responsible for.

And so family ends up feeling like just another chore. You look for inspiration on this and you get the social media version that portrays an unrealistic vision for the family. So if in my professional life, I've become good at reflecting on how I work to become a better employee, how might I do the same thing for my family life?

So that way I can improve how I approach being a father and a husband. Be curious some of the things that you do here or if there's anyone that you respect on this subject. Thank you. - Well, look, I'm pretty careful to have my household manager tell my nanny to bring my kids into my presence at least once a day for five minutes so that I can say, "How was your day today?" And they say, "Yes, Papa, we had a good day." And then I give a subtle nod to my nanny and they bring the kids out and the household manager make sure I don't have to see them again for 24 hours.

So that's what I would advise. Just make sure your staff brings your kids into your presence for a few minutes every day. By the way, there's people out there that somehow assume for whatever reason that somehow my life is like this where basically I just never see my kids and there's some sort of like giant staff that takes care of them for me.

So not everyone's gonna get that joke. Okay, so a couple of recommendations here. One, good shut down, complete ritual. So even if you are physically in the presence of your family if your mind is psychologically on work, this email I have to send, this meeting that's coming up, this thing that I may be not making much progress on, they're only getting a small bit of the benefit.

So definitely lean into your shutdown ritual. Then make sure you're closing all the open loops. You have a good plan for the next day. That plan fits into a weekly plan. You can trust it. You're not missing anything. You check that shutdown box in your time block planner or say a phrase like schedule shutdown complete so that your brain can actually release work.

I think that's really important. Two, see if there's ways you can reduce the footprint of logistical or administrative non-family oriented time consuming work in your life. So the whole point of working, not the whole point, but a large point of working is to get money in exchange for your time that that money can then be invested to get outcomes that are useful for you.

So it sounds like you're good at your job. You have a good job. It's probably a well-paying job based on what I can tell from your question. Don't be shy about saying, I want to invest a non-trivial amount of the money generated in this job to actually free up my time outside of the job.

I think sometimes we get in this mindset of, if I don't have to spend money on X, then I won't. Like you have beat the system. But if you have the money to spend and it's going to free up time, then maybe you should actually consider doing that if that is possible.

And you might have to really readjust your budget. We're going to do less of this so that we can get more time to do that. Someone who's written well about this is my friend, Laura Vanderkam. And she has a book called "168 Hours." I always get numbers wrong when I do this, but I think it's 168 or 162, hundred something hours.

But anyways, it's about productivity. And in particular, the intersection between household admin and productivity. And she's a big advocate of, hey, if you can afford it, spend money to take things off your plate. That's kind of the point of money, right? That if you happen to have it, that's a pretty good thing to use it on.

You could buy a nicer car or a, you know, whatever, a lot of unnecessary exercise equipment, or you might be able to get a yard crew so that you don't have to rake your leaves and weed for three hours on the weekend because you have a young kid and that's not really what you want to be doing.

So you want to reduce that time. I mean, I'm kind of looking towards Jesse because he knows more about fitness than I do, but I'm not sure if I agree with this idea that if your goal is you need to lose weight, you're talking about that being a substantial time involving activity.

I mean, 80% of that is probably getting your diet in order. And do I have that more or less right? Like you got to lock in your diet. That doesn't take any, it doesn't take any more time to eat clean than it does to eat junk. And honestly, when it comes to weight, I mean, you're not going to go Peloton off if you're a guy that has the extra 20 pounds.

The reason, the way that's going to go away is you're gonna stop eating so much sugar and you're gonna stop drinking so much beer. And so, you know, maybe you need to go through a phase where you're really focused on your healthy eating and you have some sort of less time consuming, you know, trade intensity for time type of exercise.

I mean, I do this, Jesse might shake his head here because he knows much more about fitness than I do. My time saving hack with fitness, especially when I had young kids is I said, okay, I can't get to a gym necessarily. I can't do long exercising. So what I did is I said, I'm gonna do a thousand pull-ups a month at a minimum.

And some months are shorter than others. So I just do 36 pull-ups every day. It is really intense, but it only takes four minutes, especially once you get good at it, right? And it at least keeps your muscles moving or what have you and active and so they don't atrophy.

I mean, honestly, if you had to do that for a year, you know, a thousand pull-ups a month, a thousand pushups a month, and you're eating well, you're probably gonna be better off than the 90 minutes you're doing in the gym twice a week right now. And then as your kids get older, you can actually go figure out how to do the stuff that you probably should be doing with weights, et cetera.

I don't know how that works, but all right. So I'm just throwing that out there as well. All right, so we wanna summarize here, good shutdown routine. Two, invest money where you can so that you have more time outside of work, taking things off your plate, taking things off your family's plate.

And three, you talked about this social media fantasy about what parenting life should be. I've seen some of these accounts. As far as I can tell, parenting life is, if you're a woman, is all about you and your kids are wearing white linen and are in fields. So according to Instagram, it's like, what moms are supposed to do is be in fields with their kids and there's flowers and they're wearing white linen and they're very well lit.

And they're usually doing some sort of project, like we're pressing flowers between tissue paper to make a set of wind chimes with which we can celebrate Mother Gaia. And I also have a kind of a nice glow behind me as I take the picture. All right, we all know the reality is within seven seconds, the one kid will be eating the tissue paper while the other one is using the pressed flower to see if they can blind their sister by getting it ground up and blown into their eyes.

And somehow you have urine on your white linen dress because that's just how that goes down. And if you're a man, as far as I can tell from the social media things, you basically are supposed to be, as far as I can tell, either a professional athletic coach who is training the next Olympic athlete out of their kids, or you have a full-fledged movie caliber special effects laboratory and maker shop in which you are building life-size robotic mechs that you can ride in and your kids can move around in and they're controlled, remote controlled, and you're videotaping it with professional level filming.

And these are these fun projects that you're doing with your kids. All this is impossible. No one actually really does all this, right? So ignore social media. It's better to have, to be around. Hey, you're just around. We're having dinner together, I'm around, you know? And then having something you do with each of your kids.

And it might not be every day, but it might be, I'm helping this kid with baseball. So once a week I pick him up from the bus and we go by the playground and we play some baseball. And this other kid we're into risk. My oldest right now is really into risk.

We play a lot, we play some risk. And that's just what we do. And it's not every day, but we play risk or whatever. You have a thing you're doing with their kids that your kids can think like, dad does this with me, even if it's just once a week, right?

That's kind of where you need to be. And you're around and you're not lost. And you're around and not with the leaf blower till 9 p.m. because you didn't wanna spend the 100 bucks to have someone come do your yard. All of these things work together and I think you'll be much better off.

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