[hinkley]

For procrastination you have to set yourself up for success.

For instance, what if the alarm sent you the product page for the model of battery you need? You order them, silence the alarm, and when they show up you’re reminded you need to change them. Or if that’s a bad time, when the alarm goes off again.

I think we’ve only begun to work out how alarms are the wrong solution to the problem and what we need are prompts.

[ihateolives]

Do you have kids? It doesn't work that way. It will never be urgent enough to waste time even for setting up the alarm or prompt. People vastly overestimate free time when you have kids. They somehow manage to eat up every single minute.

[thr717272]

As a dad with more kids than the average around here I feel you.

For me it has improved slightly lately:

I have recently started giving my kids bonus allowance if they let me work the hours I need.

And lately I have also played more card games and board games with them in the evenings.

That said, I am up at around 0400 to start the day and I have already spent 15 minutes on HN so I need to leave now :-)

[thr717272]

Follow up: it helps that they all sleep through the night now and that the pandemic is over so they are at school or kindergarten during core hours at work.

[doubled112]

A couple of them. They're 5 and 8.

When they were younger, they slept (sometimes) and I didn't. I've never slept much, so I didn't feel like I was missing out on too much.

Last spring I noticed I could finally do things in the daytime again, too. Which is great, I really missed guitar. Suddenly they're interested in what I'm doing too.

Haven't talked either into updating my VM fleet for me, but maybe some day.

I treat my "alerts" as more of a suggested to do list. The things I'm self-hosting are important to us (we all use them), but not critical. Life will go on until I get to it.

I've also learned that "boring tech" is the way to go.

[hinkley]

Kids and a partner with health issues. My days are all chopped to hell. If there's a 5 hour window, everyone wants to put an event smack in the middle of it so I have an hour here and an hour there and any time I have 3 hours it's probably going to yard work. If it weren't for reminders or having tasks queued up things would be much, much worse.

It does get better in highschool, sometimes middle school. Once the idea of autonomy occurs to them they don't need or want you every fifteen minutes. Plus as another responder said, sometimes they want to see you doing things, and once in a while they want to help. Though it's cool when they do and then sad when they change their minds. There was a two week period where mixing compost was the most fun in the world and then they were no longer interested.