[sanderjd]

I think when people say "not enough time", they just mean "uninterrupted time". This is the thing that is extremely difficult in conjunction with parenting (and not just toddlers). There is a close to zero sum tradeoff between being truly present with your kids, and having intellectually high quality uninterrupted time. But there is actually lots of time scattered about throughout the days! It's just in little moments here and there before you hear "dad, can you help me?". I really struggle with this, I have enough time in these scattered moments for my mind to get bored frequently, but I have nowhere close to the uninterrupted time necessary to develop a real serious hobby like woodworking. (Parenting is also the best thing in the world, this is not a complaint about parenting, it just happens to be that the specific topic of this article is the hardest thing about it, for me.)

[stevetron]

Uninterrupted time? Is there such a thing? Let me explain: Having retired from a tech world that didn't provide me with very many gigs, I have found myself being the roommate of my own mother. I am 69 and 1/2 years old. She is 93 and 1/2. She is in a wheelchair. And she has been widowed twice. I have never been married, and there are no prospects. I do all the cooking. That isn't easy as I am vegetarian, and have trouble cooking for her since she is not. But she can't live alone, and doesn't want to get married a third time.

Basically, I have windows of 5 minutes when I can do almost anything, then she calls me to do something for her that takes 15 minutes, then I have another 5 minutes of work. Instead of coding, my writing efforts have transitioned to writing fiction.

[munificent]

When I had kids, I made a deliberate choice to focus on hobbies that were more amenable to interruption.

I mostly put aside music and any physical artform that required getting out and putting stuff away each session. Instead, I did a lot more writing, programming, and making stuff on my laptop since pausing and resuming was only a Ctrl-S away.

It also required learning the meta-skill of being able to break a large project into tiny pieces. I got a lot better at leaving notes to myself, not having too many projects going on in parallel, and thinking about problems when I was otherwise idle.

[sanderjd]

This makes sense but I don't think it works for me. I get irritable when I'm trying to do something like the activities you listed, if I can't focus on what I'm doing without interruption, and then that's bad for everyone, both the interruptee and the interruptor. This seems to be a personality thing (disorder?), my wife seems to be able to switch back and forth from working to parenting without it affecting her ability to perform on either task.

[thunderbong]

That's a really nice point - about uninterrupted time.

I do notice however, in myself as well as in others, that given an amount of uninterrupted time, we quickly get bored and pick up our phones to break it.

I recall that when Covid hit, I suddenly had a lot of interrupted time on my hands. It quite felt like the times from when we were kids, when he had these vast swathes of time in the afternoon and before bedtime.

I think for a lot of adults, besides the chores and errands that keep life busy, it's become a habit for us to fill up what little uninterrupted time we get with distractions.