TL;DR: Time isn’t your problem. It’s your system. Here’s how I fixed mine in so that I can sleep again.
Eyelids weigh 20 pounds when you’re sleep deprived.
It’s a sign of one of the biggest challenges all career parents face.
This is the sixth article in my series about identity loss, rediscovery, and reconstruction.
To read the first one, start here.
I stared at the corner of my screen: 1:31 AM.
Great. I lost track of time again…and my kids would wake up at 6:30.
5 hours of sleep…if I was lucky.
When I first took on the mantle of “Night Writer”, most nights felt like a slog through a tub of glue, regardless of whether it was a school day or not.
I tinkered around writing platforms, got a few ideas for my next piece, and promptly overstayed my welcome at the desk.
I used to believe that my problem was lack of time.
Now I know the truth (begrudgingly I might add)…
The real problem is limbic friction (as described by Andrew Huberman).
It wasn’t the hours that I spent staring at the monitor…
It was the speed at which I dropped into my flow state in every session.
Questions like “what should I work on?” and “where did I leave off?” piled in like dirty laundry after a week-long family beach trip.
I needed to hit the ground running the moment I plunked myself down before the keyboard.
Time slips through your grip like a greased pig on a cold morning…especially for 9-5 parents.
Not because we’re lazy, but because more often than not, we’re unprepared for the moments we do get.
When I realized this was my problem, I devised a plug-and-play routine.
So here’s what I do now:
If I have a few seconds, I flick out my phone and record an idea.
With a few minutes, I pull up a page from a book in my Kindle library.
Any larger block of time, and I draft a Substack note, an article, or expand from something I captured earlier.
Building a legacy doesn’t require all the hours to be batched into one late-night push. It requires sustainable systems to ensure you don’t waste the precious time you have.
It absolutely requires knowing what to do when those moments (however brief) arrive.
If you don’t have a process to capture your thoughts, a way to remove the friction, then what you’ve got isn’t lack of time…
It’s lack of a solid, yet flexible, framework that stretches or shrinks with the time you scrape together between cooking, cleaning, and running after a half-naked toddler.
Know your rhythm. Get more done. Reclaim your sleep.
Next time, I’ll share the reason that I’m pushing forward all the time.
I suspect it’s the key to protecting yourself against what is happening out here.
P.S. When was the last time you felt overwhelming guilt when you had to break a streak?
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