
Ask HN: How do you manage long hours vs. spending time with loved ones? - raleigh_user
I&#x27;ve been experiencing a problem over the last few years and am asking for help on how to solve. I work a lot of variable hours&#x2F;travel (startup) and my spouse works as a nurse so her schedule is all over the place as well.<p>We can&#x27;t seem to find a way to manage our schedules very well. What ends up happening is we go extended amounts of time without an overlap in free time and then miss out on dates, time with friends, etc.<p>We both love our work so quitting isn&#x27;t exactly helpful.<p>Some things we&#x27;ve tried:<p>Shared Google Calendar: This works well but we never <i></i>actually<i></i> update. Its tedious too. And we don&#x27;t like sharing exactly what we&#x27;re doing with our friends to coordinate schedules with. I&#x27;d prefer the calendar just said busy 9-9 not 9-11am doctors appointment, 12-3pm taking son to therapy,etc, etc. This is just a simple example<p>Paper&#x2F;Pen - This is what we&#x27;ve used most often but things always come up and we always end up losing the paper. Slash leaving it in our cars, it being outdated because of a change.<p>Text - We text each other schedule updates and text other friends with similar work&#x2F;life schedules a lot. This works the best in a 1:1 scenario but I always feel annoying texting 3 friends about making plans and having to do it 5 times because those 3 also are at work&#x2F;out of town&#x2F;unavailable.<p>I&#x27;ve heard some use calendly accounts. We haven&#x27;t tried that but I don&#x27;t generally see my less tech family&#x2F;friends using that.<p>This isn&#x27;t some existential crisis but we&#x27;ve really struggled to continually find time (and plan things out in advance when we have overlapping time) and others have to deal with this as well.<p>So any help would be appreciated. I can provide more context if needed. Thanks in advance.
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jason_slack
I feel for you. My wife and I are sort of in the exact same place. She is in
nursing school and has a full-time job. I am taking a few classes, work full-
time too. We also have 2 brand new kids since October.

I manage our digital calendar and actually we both still use a paper planner.
We take time to sync each Sunday. We sync deep though. We know what each other
has, kid obligations, what is for breakfast, lunch, dinner each day, what is
the grocery list, etc, etc. This lets each one of us operate with a full
understanding of the week. If one of us gets extra bandwidth or a gap opens up
we first see if there is the possibility of free/family time before filing it
with something else. Even if it is 10 mins meeting for coffee.

This may sound weird but we are both obligated to making this work. If my wife
gets done class early then I jet over to grab coffee at Starbucks near here.
If I am out and a meeting changes time she jets over to me, etc.

~~~
raleigh_user
Thanks for being helpful. Nursing school with a full time job is our exact
situation as well. Well, she's doing an advanced nursing school so instead of
2 years its 15 months (and she's still working about 25-30 hours a week).

We do the same with the gaps. Sometimes we have them and it works out.
Sometimes it doesn't. I agree with you on the making it work thing. Some of
the comments below about "quitting" are not quite in focus.

We have another 6 months before my schedule will be predictable and hers as
well.

What do you use for a digital calendar? I find google calendar so annoying to
input lots of info in. We are trying to get better about syncing up on
weekends but she usually is doing a 7pm (sat night) - 7am (sun morning) shift
and needs to sleep while I am awake.

~~~
jason_slack
We use Google calendars. But I use Fantastical (on phone or ipad) to interface
with it. Lets me type things in plain English instead of checking boxes.

[https://flexibits.com/fantastical](https://flexibits.com/fantastical)

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sephoric
> We both love our work so quitting isn't exactly helpful.

This sticks out to me, as it seems to be a false dilemma. Maybe you can work
it out without either quitting, but having one of you quit is a real solution
that you shouldn't throw out the window. After all, I'm sure you both love
each other more than your work. Big life changes can be hard. (We got rid of
our home internet, despite the fact that my whole employment relies on the
internet.) But they're doable and shouldn't be dismissed so quickly.

~~~
raleigh_user
This could potentially be solved down the road but at this time we're not
thinking about it. Thanks for the comment though. How you go without home
internet I have no idea!

~~~
sephoric
It seemed scary at first but our whole family is actually much happier and
closer than ever before and none of us regrets it at all.

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CodeWriter23
Obviously you need an electronic calendar. And you need to make maintaining it
more of a priority than work. We use iCloud calendar and Siri streamlines
input of events. Friends either we or they make an appointment via text, voice
or email. We enter it into our own calendar then share the event with
attendees via whatever medium the conversation started. We share events not
entire calendars.

But it seems to me you’re looking at the symptoms and not the root problem.
I’m not harshing on you. It’s just a tough truth. If family time is more
important to you, you have to MAKE it more important. I call this feeling-
labor inversion. We all want the feeling and some of us avoid the necessary
labor that creates the feeling (e.g., maintaining the calendar). Until labor
takes priority over the feeling, the problem will continue.

~~~
raleigh_user
Here is a real life schedule. Not to harsh on you but making family time more
important is a tad more difficult than you're making it seem

Me: leave home 7:30am. Generally get back around 6:30pm. Make dinner, work
out. Do any chores/else needs to get done. Go to sleep.

Her: class during day. leave at 7:30am. Generally back home for lunch and then
gone again til 4:30ish. Few hours of homework. work out. chores/else needs to
get done.

Weekends - she works night shifts at the hospital so she needs to sleep ASAP
friday afternoon. I get up sat morning and read/watch tv.etc. She needs to
sleep til about 2-3pm to do her night shift 7pm-7am. Then rinse and repeat.
Factor in any tests or family commitments and you can see when this headache
starts to get worse.

We certainly have __some __time together, but as I mentioned, if we do not
plan it out exactly it is such little time that it can often be wasted
entirely.

~~~
Spooky23
I’m not sure how much of that is commute, but I’ll echo other comments, try to
reduce your hours.

You’re going through a slog with your wife in school. Figure out a way to roll
back your time away between now and when she is done with the schooling.

I was in your boat a few years ago. Now I work 8:30-4:30 and will stay late
two days a week only. It was tough to get there but we’ll worth it. End of the
day, you’ll manage better with a time constraint.

With kids especially, every minute counts. You have a few years and at some
point they won’t want to be around you. Don’t lose that time.

For friends, the best luck we’ve had has been setting standing times in
advance.

Trying to juggle five calendars over text is a recipie for drama. We have
standing group happy hours / dinners that we do on a monthly cycle. It’s less
spontaneous, but turned into an awesome tradition.

~~~
raleigh_user
Standing hours might be the best way to do this. To make matters even more
complicated our couple friends are either er surgeons/er nurses and 2 other
entrepreneurs. Makes for great splits for conversations over dinner. But
incredible scheduling headaches.

The 5 calendars over text is whats driving me insane.

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toomuchtodo
When you're older or near death, will you miss the time you missed out on with
each other because you loved your work?

As others have mentioned, it's just work; it's not going to love you back.
Time is finite, and you have to prioritize what is important to you.

~~~
honkycat
> As others have mentioned, it's just work; it's not going to love you back.

I love this. I am stealing this.

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muzani
If you're doing a startup, you probably have more flexible hours. What I
actually do is start work around 4 or 5 AM and finish at about 3 PM. My family
is not awake so I don't miss any time with them. Less time on commuting,
finding parking, etc, and plenty of time to work. And I have huge gaps of time
to play with my kids.

But if possible, I'd recommend finding a way to work less hours. I find that
lots of scheduled time kills a lot of opportunities.

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honkycat
Work less hours. You are probably wasting them at work anyway. Most research
points to about 3-4 hours of good "deep work" a day.

If you need to work more hours because your start-up is lazy about tracking
productivity and "time in seat" == "more productivity" then try and build and
document an empirical way to measure your productivity. There are a ton of
good books out there on this subject. I recommend "Accelerate."

Go ask your grandfather if he wishes he had worked more or spent more time
with family. Relationships NEED nurturing. Not making time to be together can
and will kill your relationship.

Check out "Deep Work - Cal Newport" and "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work -
by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson". You do read and do research on how
to run your company and track your productivity, don't you? Or do you just
fart your way through life and are consistently amazed at how the harder you
work the further away the goal-post is?

~~~
raleigh_user
Consistently farting 24/7\. Its actually a problem

~~~
xfitm3
I’m not sure if you are receptive to advice that isn’t aligned with your
questions narrative - but I’ll give it a shot.

Can you delegate, hire, etc to reduce your workload?

~~~
raleigh_user
Goal is to get there in next few months. Laying groundwork to do so now.
Definitely receptive

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cimmanom
It is possible to share a google calendar and reveal only free/busy on a per-
user basis, fwiw. It’s somewhere in the sharing settings.

~~~
raleigh_user
oh ok that might be helpful. I will try to find. typical google. Have one of
best features buried so deep you can't find it

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jakobegger
There aren't enough hours in the week for all that.

\- one partner has a startup

\- the other has a full time job

\- and goes to school

\- apparently you also have a kid

\- and you want to go on dates

\- and you want to do stuff with a group of friends on the weekend

I seriously doubt that the choice of calendar software is going to make a
difference here.

At some point you are going to have to set priorities. I'm not saying you
should work less, because you seem to love it. But maybe just accept the fact
that you're going to meet your group of friends only once or twice a year, or
that date night is going to happen less often.

I meet some of my best friends only once or twice a year now. It's not what I
imagined, but when everyone has a job and family and doesn't live in the same
place anymore.... I don't think changing to a different calendar app could fix
that.

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a-saleh
I have a shared calendar with just my wife that has reasonably detailed
schedule.

With rest of my friends we just send each other a doodle [1] once every 3
weeks or so, so that we go for a beer or something. Using doodle solved the
"texting everybody every update until we agree on time" problem :-)

Going for lunches with my friends turned out fairly well, because most people
need to lunch during the day somewhere, so we might as well lunch together :)
This of course requires you to work reasonably close together.

[1] [https://doodle.com/](https://doodle.com/)

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thiago_fm
Do you love your wife or your work?

Why does your son goes to therapy?

I would take a step back before trying to "manage" long hours vs. spending
time with loved ones, and look at the root of the problem.

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itamarst
Work fewer hours (not possible for a nurse, but definitely for a programmer).
It'll make you _more_ productive:
[https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/10/always-more-work-
to-...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/10/always-more-work-to-do/)

------
ryancodes
If your friends are close to you, they shouldn't be annoyed that you're
texting them. Wanting to spend time with your friends is a good thing, and if
they're legitimately annoyed, make certain you're communicating that you value
the time that you get to spend with them (this is especially key if your time
is sparse.)

~~~
raleigh_user
They are close. And annoyed isn't the __right __word. More it feels annoying
to me to text 5 friends to find out all 5 are traveling until Sunday or are x,
y or z with other commitments. Maybe that makes more sense. All of us are busy
and finding time is hard so for each try (2-3x a week) we usually can get
together twice a month

~~~
em-bee
i know that feeling, it's like you are chasing after your friends, and need to
put in energy to figure out when they are free because you don't already know
their schedule.

i have a gut feeling though that if you don't already know the schedule of
your friends, and (as you mentioned) you aren't comfortable to share your
detailed schedule with them, then maybe they are not that close and you won't
miss them if you don't see them every week.

if you do miss them, then pick one or two that you feel close enough to
actually share your detailed schedule and let them help with coordinating with
the others.

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awaywopassd
Group sms works great. But you or someone should take charge and summarize the
conversation/plan as last a text.

My friends use group texts a lot but sometimes conversation gets out of hand
and I have to read through 100 messages to find out if there were any concrete
plans.

~~~
raleigh_user
Yeah that is another annoyance with them. Seems to get complicated fast. We do
use group texts with friends. But it is a little annoying to have 100 texts go
by and then either not be able to make the plans or not be interested.

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jdlyga
I set up Google Calendar invites. It's the same way I handle getting time with
a busy manager at work. Wife is super busy in the next few weeks? Set up an
event on the calendar so they can plan around it.

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mbrodersen
if you truly love your wife then quit your job and find something better.
Seriously. You only live once and your jobs should not be your life.

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drugme
_We both love our work so quitting isn 't exactly helpful._

But your work doesn't love you, apparently.

Otherwise it wouldn't be forcing you to make a draconian choice like this.

~~~
raleigh_user
shes working full time and full time in school. Im ceo of a venture funded
startup. so for the next few years this is our life. We did it to ourselves.
But just trying to figure out how to manage best with the time we have.

~~~
drugme
My comment was a bit presumptuous then. Sincere apologies.

~~~
em-bee
there is some truth to it though, because even as a CEO, actually, especially
as a CEO you need to make sure you have time for your family. or more
importantly, you need to make sure you don't burn out. OPs question suggests
that he is getting exhausted with his current schedule. that is the road that
leads to burn out, and if i were an investor or an employee in his company i
would tell him to slow down, because the company needs him in the long run.

