[ashark]

I have three young kids. My experience has been:

1) sleep (a normal amount, not extra)

2) being an OK parent

3) a house that is almost always fairly clean

4) side projects/learning

5) friends

6) a relationship with your partner/spouse that's doing OK

7) actual solo leisure time

Pick four. :-/

[EDIT] Oh, and "staying halfway in shape" comes out of your "actual solo leisure time" hours or possibly "friends" hours if you have the right kind of friends for that.

[laughfactory]

Well put! I like how you Incorporated trade-offs into this comment. Yes, you can have X, but something will have to give. Sleep, time with friends, alone time, time with spouse, learning time, etc... There's only so much time to go around, and it's amazing how the arrival of each kid diminishes your available time further and further. With three little ones now it seems virtually impossible to keep up with everything we got done when we had only two. There are days I do nothing but kid stuff: feeding, cleaning up after, playing with, wiping butts, vacuuming, cooking, dishes, blah blah blah. I don't know how dual-earner households do it. My wife is a stay-at-home Mom, and even so we're both maxed out.

[pavel_lishin]

Did you list those in order of importance, or just randomly?

Because my rank would be (2), (6), (1) and (7) - and (6) and (1) are damn close, since we both need (1) to maintain (6).

[ashark]

No particular order. I've mostly settled into 2,5,6,7.

I can't seem to give up 7 for 1 without hating life, even though going low-sleep sucks a ton. It'd be sweet if we could afford housekeeping to take care of 3, but oh well.

These aren't perfectly identical categories anyway, of course. You can sneak an hour or two worth of 7 in per week depending on what you do, 15 minutes here, 10 there, even if you don't make any other time for it, but doing that with 4 is nearly impossible, and the quality or benefit of any of the activities will tend to be lower that way (you definitely do a fair amount of cleaning no matter what, for instance, though maybe not enough to achieve 3).

Dedicated, significant chunks of time with all the pieces in place for the various activities are what's hard to come by, and what forces in general picking some of them over the others. You just gotta let some stuff go or you'll go insane trying to keep up with it all, and failing to do so anyway.

[smnplk]

I pick 7777