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My wife and I are co-founders and we have a 3 year-old daughter. Our startup is also still in its early stages, so things are pretty busy and often chaotic. I can definitely say that, as a necessity, we've become much better at time management than we ever were before. Our days are fairly planned and we try to keep things routine as much as possible, consistency helps immensely. Also we've managed to ensure everything we need is fairly close by. We live about 10-15 minutes from work and our daycare and gym are both in close proximity to our office. We each typically have two scheduled mornings a week to hit the gym, one of us goes to the gym and the other deals with daycare. We also occasionally hand off daycare pick-up to allow the other to work a bit later. In fact, we hand-off on a lot of things to make everything work, particularly meetings, typically only one of us will go so the other can stay at work and grind on other things. As a software developer this is pretty important, I can skip out of a lot of meetings and keep working on product and we can catch up on what happened in the evening. Having a child means our days need to be somewhat time-boxed so there's little room for severely late work hours. I actually believe this to be a good thing, as I'm forced to get the most out of my work time and continue to improve on my time management skills. That said, we're often catching up on things during downtime, weekends, evenings and since we live together, we have the advantage (or disadvantage depending on how you look at it) of being able to discuss work whenever we need to. To make things even more interesting my brother and father work in a related business, so family dinners can be... interesting. Outside of that we try to keep everything pretty normal and we enjoy our downtime. We like to cook a lot, we make a regular trip to the market most Saturdays with our daughter. We cook dinner with our daughter often and eat at home often which provides valuable family time. The grandparents usually watch our daughter on Friday nights so we can hang out of with friends once a week as well, and we occasionally sneak out to have a drink together, after her bed-time, while they stay and watch her. Almost all of our family lives nearby, so my parents and her parents help out a lot. It really starts to become a team effort to make everything work out without an excessive level of stress. I can't stress enough how important family is when things get to this level of "busy". Like most people here, we love what we do. We don't mind being somewhat "always on" and we try to plan our lives in a way the reminds us to do other things too and not to neglect family and friends. That's the bigger challenge I think, not figuring out how to work hard at something you love, but remembering to live your life too. Overall, we are very fortunate things have worked out as well as they have. |