A good way to ship more weekend projects is to become a parent. Specifically the parent of a child between 6 and 18 months.
This does not make sense at first glance. Parents are busy, but children do (hopefully) take a nap or two during the day. And their margin nap is your opportunity. A child’s weekend snooze gives you the ideal window of time to sit in front of a keyboard and build as fast as you can.
The ~6 month mark is important, though, because before that age the naps are too short and too unpredictable. My social media consumption skyrocketed when my kid was younger because I did not have the time to make progress on anything. My son’s naps averaged about 35 minutes in those days. I could only scroll on my phone and eat intellectual junk food.
All of that has changed since the kid started napping for more than 35 minutes at a time. We consistently get him down for two 90-minute naps; one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The result is more personal production than I’ve managed in years. I put my thoughts on paper more. I ship more weekend projects. I get more done. I decided to combine all three of those qualities and write down why I think this is true despite being counterintuitive.
You are going to be around the house.
Small children cannot, generally, be left unattended. You need to be nearby. Even if you make plans with very understanding friends, you’re probably going to be around the house for at least some chunk of the day while your kid naps.
You might get lucky and have a kid who can nap away from their bedroom, but I’m not sure that I’ve met any parent who has a kid under one year old who can take every daytime nap away from home. At some point, you’re going to spend an hour or two within a few meters of your child’s bedroom.
You don’t have grand plans.
My wife and I still manage to be social even as the parents of a small child. However, the plans we make are less ambitious.
We go to dinners thanks to a wonderful babysitter down the street. We meet up with other parents and go to the park. We have people over in our home. All wonderful things, but less day-consuming than when we were childless.
We are not making frequent plans to go on a big day trip somewhere. Our agendas do not involve a sequence of events where we are out of the house for 6+ hours. Exceptions exist when we just let our kid nap in the stroller or under an umbrella at the beach, but they are not that common.
At some point this will change. A Saturday will probably look like breakfast, a hike, a soccer practice, a lunch, a birthday party, and some errands all before returning home. Right now, though, we have four hours of naps quota to meet.
You will consider a rabbit hole and decide against it.
The clock is ticking. At any moment your child might wake up from their nap. You do not have time to go down Wikipedia rabbit holes about water infrastructure during the Roman Empire. You have to make progress.
The alarm clock has no snooze button.
The other exciting thing is that this break from childcare is entirely unpredictable. If your child is like mine, the nap could last anywhere from 35 minutes to 2 hours.
Your chores are better together.
Yes, you can and should use naps for some household chores. It’s a great time to clean the kitchen and vacuum. However, most chores are better with your little one.
One of my favorite things is to hang up laundry while my son sits and listens to me narrate what I’m doing. One of the worst things would be me just typing away at a keyboard while he watched me do that.
Toddlers are captivated by anything that you’re doing as boring as you think it might be. It’s exciting to them just to be hanging out and listening to you. I’d rather batch all the chores I have to do when my son can be part of them.
That means that I might have a long to-do list as my kid settles down for a nap but I am okay with deferring it until he wakes back up.
You want to feel like an adult. You want to remember that you have another purpose.
Everything else in this list is a circumstance. Your kid naps. They probably nap at home. You need to be there. Ergo, you can use that time for weekend projects on your computer.
That doesn’t capture something that can feel missing when you become a parent. You lose a bit of who you are in the copy-pasting of yourself.
Hobbies become more difficult to practice. The gym, a coffee shop walk, the ability to just convert an errand into a day out - the routines that made up your previous identity get squeezed. Your priority becomes being a parent. And that is a wonderful, rewarding, beautiful thing. It’s just not the full extent of who you are.
I like to build silly projects and write gonzo blog posts because they allow me to be creative. They allow me to craft an identity. They allow me to feel like, in an existential way, I can say “Sam was here” on this earth at this time. And now I get to do that in 90 minute intervals.