The biggest challenge for 9-5 parents

It felt like there were two 20-lb. weights around my eyelids.

I stared at the corner of my screen: 1:31 AM.

Great. I lost track of time. Again. My kids were going to wake up at 6:30.

I had 5 hours of sleep…if I was lucky.

When I first started doing this whole Night Writer thing, this is what most nights looked like, regardless of whether it was a school day or not.

I tinkered around with writing platforms, got a few ideas for what I was going to share next, and promptly overstayed my welcome at the desk.

I used to believe that my problem was not having enough time.

Now I know the truth (begrudgingly I might add):

It wasn’t the hours that I spent staring into space (I’ve always needed those).

It was actually the speed at which I ramped-up and wound-down every session.

All those questions like “what should I work on?” and “where did I leave off?” seemed to stuff themselves in like the dirty clothing in luggage after a week’s worth of haphazard travel.

I needed to offload all that work elsewhere so that I could just hit the ground running the moment I plunked my ass down at the desk.

The fact of the matter is that time slips through the cracks, especially us 9-5 parents.

Not because we’re lazy, but because more often than not, we’re unprepared for the moments we do get.

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 on an idea I captured from the first two bullets.

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 more of 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.

Knowing how you work goes a long way toward getting more done in less time, meaning you can actually start reclaiming your sleep (because you can’t afford to ignore it anymore)

Wow, six down and one to go!

In the final one of these, I’ll share the scariest fear that I have that I’m sure hangs over most of us:

What if I disappear tomorrow?