Time Management Tips for Parents with Toddlers at Home

I work around 35ish hours a week pretty consistently and I spend 20% of that time browsing the internet. This is what worked for me.

• Understand what times are you generally more productive. Out of morning/afternoon/evening, identify which one are you most productive in. Organize your work so that your most important tasks happen around that block.
• Understand how focused you are as a person. Some people have long attention spans, some people don't. I personally have a very short attention span. Build your focus blocks around how you naturally work around your focus: if you have a short attention span for example, long planned focus blocks will not work (instead plan smaller blocks for shorter bursts of focus).
• After a certain number of hours work, behaviors > impact. If you're doing the same work in the same exact way given the more hours, you will not be rewarded with a higher rating or a promo. Promotions are mainly about developing behaviors that have a higher baseline of impact. For every task/project/whatever you get, ask yourself how this will grow you (towards the next level). If you can't give yourself a clear answer, spend your time trying to shoot down that task instead.

A few tips based on my conversation with a Principal Engineer at Amazon (YT link here):

• Create an environment for deep work. Leave your phone in another room and pause notifications.
• Optimize your schedule. If you can't articulate what value you'd have to a meeting and what value the meeting has for you, you should probably skip it. Ask for meeting notes with key information
• Of all the tickets you have, do the most impactful and important work first. Most engineers start with easy tickets since they're comfortable, but that's not how you get promoted.

I'm not a parent (at least not yet), but I've actually mentored parents at FAANG (i.e. a tough place to perform where everyone is trying to get promoted). I think the main thing to make things work is that you and your spouse need to minimize overlap between your working hours to take care of the kid(s). The tricky part is that you generally both need flexible, remote jobs to do this.

There's also low-hanging fruit by using money to outsource things and buy time (and if you and your spouse are both pushing hard in career, hopefully you have money):

• Instacart for grocery delivery
• Hire people to take care of your house (gardening, small fixes)
• Takeout for food (but don't do this too often as the food is usually unhealthy)

I hope this other discussion helps as well: "How to keep my mental health while working in a competitive team and having kids?"

I also highly recommend the productivity course: Maximize Your Productivity As A Software Engineer