|
My kids are 8 and 6, last thing I learnt was to knit some months ago. Last thing I coded in my spare time was a midi generator. I'm not a super human, need to sleep 7-8 hours, don't go to the gym and instead bike to work every other day and enjoy playing videogames. It is difficult to find a balance as responsibilities don't scale linearly, combination of different situations are more complex than the sum of the parts. Just think about this: When you get out of the office, what do you have to do? I'm not referring to what you want to do but to the things that you are "forced" to do. Probably nothing or very little (gym, laundry, etc). When you have a family, you have to consider lots of unknowns when returning home: problems, chores, play time, illness, vacations, homework, parties, injuries, different hobbies per family member, sibling rivalry, etc. You have to consider everyone in the family and all the combinations so, of course you have way less spare time to enjoy for yourself. That being said, here are some ideas: 1) There are lots of things to learn other than what can be shared in your Github account graph. Having kids forces you to diversify and that is good. 2) Kids are a great opportunity to learn mentorship. They need to learn everything: how to talk, walk, ride a bicycle, eat, manage their time, etc. Learning how to distill your knowledge and propagate it is a really good skill for a programmer. 3) All the good programmers that keep up and share things: It is easy to see 20 great programmers sharing their projects in twitter and think that they a super-human, but remember that for some of them, that is their job and that it is easy to feel you don't do much when comparing yourself to a collective that is delivering every day something awesome. 4) There are things you never got to learn/do but with kids you can have the opportunity (or be forced :)) to. In my case: camping and surfing The ultimate trick is to stay in a mental state that allows you to do those things, it is easy to sometimes feel overwhelmed with so many things going on that depend on you. |