[kemiller2002]

Having kids taught me how to use every spare minute I have. I'm a single parent with 2 kids, so I have no back up to take care of them if I am busy with something else. Half of my free time is spent with my kids, so I have to make everything else count. My process looks a little chaotic, but I carefully plan out what I'm going to do, and when I need to do it by. My entire day is on a mental schedule. Unless I deliberately want to, I waste very little in "screwing around." Everything is mentally prioritized and evaluated.

Having kids emphasized what I already learned in the food industry, don't do silly extraneous tasks ever, and do things as fast as possible without compromising what I do. I rarely wait and do one thing at a time when I'm trying to get stuff done. For example, I'm normally cooking one meal and prepping the kids lunch at the same time.

Unless I absolutely need a break, I don't watch T.V. idly. It maybe in the background, but I'm normally only half paying attention. I turn on CC so I can read the text, and half listen. Watch videos to learn something? You can read (I've heard 4 times) faster than watching a video, so I almost always take that route. The one thing I don't do is listen to podcasts in the car. That is reserved for NPR to catch up on world news.

Most of the time when people want to meet dealing with business, I demand an agenda, then I decide if it's worth it. I've been known to be ruthless at work with this. I focus my life around things like this.

[ryandrake]

Yes, it teaches you to manage your precious time to the second, but it also teaches you how to effectively get things done when you only have sparse 15-30 minute chunks rather than long stretches of time to concentrate. It used to take me 30 minutes just to "get in the zone." Keep that up and you'll never get anything done as a parent. You need to be able to snap yourself into the zone in 30 seconds, get something accomplished, and then go deal with throw-up.

Your life becomes interrupt-driven rather than batch processes. Even if you have the same quantity of time (you won't), you need to live differently to handle it.

[thatwebdude]

And applying parallel processes in your life when possibly also really helps. Especially in the morning.

Explaining the concept to my 4-year-old daughter was fun, and is trusted enough to execute these processes in a timely manner (without killing someone).

[wj]

I still struggle with this. Anything for me that needs creativity or critical thinking (programming and writing mostly) really suffers with the interruptions.

[kemiller2002]

Steven King wrote something that really made me focus on changing this. He essentially said that the difference between an amateur and a professional writer is that the professional write even when not in the mood. That made me think a lot about how I write code etc. and how I can use my free time even when I don't want to when I have to absolutely get something done.

[emperorcezar]

I really like the idea of demanding a schedule and being ruthless about the worth of the meeting.

[xLFC]

Watching videos at 1.5x or 2x helps.