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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

Apologies for veering slightly off-topic here, but if we're talking about living well, this feels semi-relevant. My continual struggle is trying to find a balance between:

* ensuring my kid knows he is loved by his parents

* doing interesting work as a software dev, with some career progression

* taking care of myself adequately

The current setup feels extremely tight from a time perspective, causing the latter point to get cut consistently. This ends up wearing me out over time, making me worse at all the above slowly. So I feel the strain of time already.

Fellow parents on HN, how do you make all of this happen?

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I don't! :)

Yesterday I was on a conf call during my son's soccer practice. I was walking around the woods with my daughter at the same time. I was doing none of the above well.

It occurred to me recently that most folks who have been promoted around me don't have children, or just started to have children. There is no upside at work, only in your life.

[edit more] And this morning my daughter told me to get off my phone as I was checking emails (I'm oncall at the moment).

Kids absolutely know that you aren't paying attention to them.

I'd love to quit and just take some time off. I worry that this is the wrong example to set. I've been working regularly for 20 years, but my kids don't know that. But I dunno... thats just fear I suppose.

> I'd love to quit and just take some time off. I worry that this is the wrong example to set. I've been working regularly for 20 years, but my kids don't know that.

Frame it as a sabbatical. I think what your kids see is how you think, feel and talk about work. Taking time off does not diminish any of those things. In fact, it gives a counter-example to the mistaken belief that ages 23-60 MUST be spent working away.

I take one every seven years, not for religious reasons (though that is the exact number of years from Leviticus), but because that is an ideal cadence for me. It is not often enough for employers to get worried about it, yet it is short enough for me to not get too far off the rails.

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