Efficiency and Kids
2026-11-08
If I wanted to be the most efficient engineer I would probably do things a little different. I would make less exotic food, peanut butter on toast is pretty efficient. I would take less showers and read less. Etc etc. I would just do more engineering, and in my case more software engineering. And AI is much more efficient than I am, so I would run a bunch of AI agents and write a ton of code, and be so efficient. I could measure my lines of code per day and try to make the graph go up and to the right.
But being efficient and writing lines of code doesn’t really interest me. I can’t be whole inefficient, if I never wrote a single line of code I probably wouldn’t be a very good software engineer. But I do t feel the need to min max this part of my life.
I listened to this podcast
Which argued for leisure time. And I found myself agreeing with the sentiment. I need time to exercise, read, day dream, think, etc. and actually the most productive version of myself is probably has gotten a good night sleep, is physically and emotionally well, and takes a shower everyday. Some of this is hard with young kids, but I have heard it gets a little easier as they get older. I will continue to tell myself this is just a season of life.
And this is where the kid realization came in, I made coffee this morning with my youngest and he wants to help. He will cry if he doesn’t help. So I am making espresso, and he wants to run the bean grinder. And if I touch the grinder again he will cry. So normally grinding the beans takes 30 seconds but this morning it took 5 minutes. And same with tamping the grounds, he wants to do it. And so he takes the tamper and spills some grounds and this process also takes much much longer than it should. And at first I was a bit frustrated, making coffee for myself and my lovely wife took 5x the time it normally would. And that is a valid way to look at the situation. And the my lovely wife mentioned, ‘we will miss these times’ and she is right. It is hard to see because it is so far away but one day our kids will move out of our house and it will be a more quiet house and we will wish our kids were there to make coffee with us. So I tried to be a bit more zen and think instead about how I got to spend extra time with my youngest and how independent he is. I tried to live more in the moment.
And this is a nice story, I can’t always think like this, I am not that zen all of the time. If I am rushing to meet someone and am already late and my kids are refusing to get in the car seat and instead are running around the back of the car, I will be angry and not zen. There is no way.
But back to being efficient. Having kids does a lot of things for me, it is a new type of love for me, I get less sleep and have less free time, I get to see them learn and grow, i travel less, and they force me to be inefficient. And there is no way around that. So again I will try to enjoy the journey, and appreciate the inefficiency.