No Time for Flow
How to keep building when parenthood takes away the long uninterrupted hours that deep work used to depend on.
Having a kid gives you a lot. There’s nothing that yet compares to the joy of my tiny human, except maybe watching him become a slightly bigger human. I have more fun, more heartbreakingly-sweet moments, and more deep-diving intellectual questions (albeit at the toddler level) now every day than ever before.
What I don’t have, for better or worse, is more time.
My husband and I both work with computers. Before becoming parents we were extremely content with our ability to sit down for hours a day, uninterrupted, in front of our IDEs, to a soundscape of mechanical keyboard clacks and the occasional “I just found something really cool,” conversational interlude. We were in flow state almost all the time, chasing interests, turning thoughts into software, producing.
The first thing I had to really come to terms with after the birth of our son was that I will, possibly never (okay, maybe when I’m an old-ass empty nester) get the chance to do that again.
If our groceries depended on some SaaS income of mine, we’d be saying Hail Marys. In that first year of newbornness I couldn’t count the minutes a day I got to do anything on my own, because they didn’t really exist. If I wasn’t holding/feeding/changing baby, I was in the shower or on the toilet. I wouldn’t trade it for a second, but also, I missed being in flow.
By year one-ish I’d realized that if I was ever going to do anything I wanted to do again, I needed to figure out how to do it in almost no time at all.
Flow in under 10 minutes
Sometimes describing an unsolvable problem makes it seem a lot more solvable. From my years of flow practice, I knew that it typically took me about 20 minutes to go from some mundane thing like eating a meal or traveling somewhere to being in a deep, super productive flow state. I definitely didn’t have 20 minutes to do that anymore; this was the first bottleneck.
On a good day, I probably had a smattering of ten-minute windows, broken up by the jarring screech of a one-year-old who’d dropped a yogurt spoon or couldn’t reach his water. (Parent dev pro tip: buy extra keyboard time with snacks that take a long time to eat.) I needed to get into flow in as little time as possible so I had as much time as possible remaining in those ten minutes to actually get something done.
Context recovery
You might think that if you’re trying to do things quickly, it helps to spend less time writing notes and comments. The opposite is true. The more notes and comments I left myself, the faster I could pick up exactly what I was working on before I had to stop to clean up a spilled (thrown) milk cup. A 10-second scan of the last thing I wrote and I’m back on keyboard.
Don’t write these in long flowing prose (like this article). Write notes to self in dumb-caveman-speak:
add historyId to output bc messageContext no exist
make letter-tracing KG Primary Dotted
write cat story after intro
5-10 words every time you get an idea, before you chase the dopamine to make it real.
You can jot things down anywhere but my favorite place is right in the middle of the code/prose/chat I’m working in. Hunting around for a notebook/notes file takes extra minutes I don’t have.
Outsource
AI is a parent’s best friend these days (as long as it’s not literally your best friend—but that’s a different post). Anything the machine can do, I let it do. Minutes I’m not spending adding groceries to my cart or reading and archiving routine emails is time I can spend in flow. Poke (poke.com) manages my to-do list , Hermes (hermes-agent.nousresearch.com ) makes my meal plans, and I’m free to build more homeschooling materials for my toddler or luxuriate in producing essays like this one.
As far as coding goes, hand-writing your own is quickly becoming an artisan pastime. Certainly never, ever write your own JavaScript, unless you really enjoy it.
Besides recovering minutes from mundane tasks, outsourcing gets me into flow faster, too. I fire off a quick question or research topic. Later, when I’m ready to write and synthesize, the information is neatly summarized and waiting for me.
Off-keyboard tooling
My post How I Run an AI Agent Without Touching My Phone recently shocked me with 80,000+ impressions on 𝕏—it clearly resonated. Besides being a way to improve staying present with your kid, not using your phone or computer to run your agents lets you be in flow even when you’re not hunkered down in front of a screen. In short: iMessage via dictation on Apple Watch to prompt Poke or Hermes, a digital-pen-and-paper approach for percolating on larger projects, and scheduled cron jobs for the boring always-on stuff.
None of this is about 10x productivity or coding faster, exactly. It’s about getting anything done at all in a life that doesn’t permit you uninterrupted hours in front of a screen. The good news is that all that hands-on-keyboard time is less necessary with the tools we have today. The main shift from programmer to parent might just come down to being a better PM.
Building alongside your kids instead of around them? 12 Weeks of Tech Projects for Toddlers is the companion to all of this — computational thinking from age 2+. At buildwithyourkid.com .