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Married, two children. I find myself wishing the days lasted 36 hours instead of 24. :P

I have a full time job as well and do not have the time for pet projects. After work I get home and have some family time until it's bed time. Then my wife watches some TV while I work for about 1 hour tops.

As you know, 1 hour is NOTHING when developing. I take at least 45 minutes to get into a groove and ultimately I do nothing of substance.

I envy single people in that regard, they can work until their eyes drop out of their head. Don't waste your time! You hear me single people! Don't waste your time!

3 comments

>>I envy single people in that regard, they can work until their eyes drop out of their head.

Single guy here, and no sorry we can't work until our eyes drop out of our heads. I think working long hours is just a result of training to that over the years, bit by bit and it just comes by practice. I have done that as a student and a good enough part of my working career.

But its not something that someone could do forever. I mean to say the only reason after all these years I can thing of is 'money'. If its not worth the money, I don't even bother. I am not ashamed or afraid to admit that. I am going close to 30's for heaven's sake. Soon there will be family, expenses and what not. I don't like working like a cubicle bound wage slave my whole life. No easy way to get out of all this without working hard.

I just wish I could work on something interesting projects in my spare time, and make some money out of it.

So no, being single or married doesn't make a difference. Although I know having a baby in the home does become demanding, I've had that experience before with my sisters kids.

Serious question, not trolling. Why did you make the choice to have a family, then?

I too have a wife and two children and often feel the same as parent. The choice to get married (at 18) and have kids (first one at 20) was actually quite deliberate. We talked about whether we wanted to live it up now and do all the serious stuff like having kids later in life ... or get the kids out of the way then while we have energy and save our "golden years" for traveling the world, or generally doing whatever we want.

So I'll be 40 when my youngest turns 18 ... just in time for my mid-life crisis :P But in all seriousness, 11 years in (I'm 31, and my daughter is 11) and I'm still happy with our decision. I'll let you know in 9 years how that turns out ;)

I guess what I'm getting at it is not really "why did you choose to have kids at time X in your life" as much as it is "why did you choose to have kids at all?"

I suspect that answer will be different for everyone. Some will have had them as an accident, some will have had them to "save the marriage", some will have had them to bring companionship into their lives, some will have them out of religious duty, some will have them for the tax breaks.

Conversely, some will choose not to have them for various reasons (psychological, physical, etc.). All are equally valid on both sides of the equation.

For me, it was never a matter of if, but when ... as a human, reproducing is what we do. So when things lined up, I decided to pull the trigger (so to speak).

To posit a different answer, some of us had kids well before we were bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.

At 35, I don't consider myself even remotely too old to still be doing things, and my daughter will turn 11 next month. That means that she was born about 11 years ago, and frankly, I had no clear idea of a career path above and beyond just working my way up the company ladder. It wasn't that it hadn't been done obviously, but the internet wasn't as prevalent 11 years ago, and there weren't near the resources then as there are now.

Actually the early you start in these cases the better. Having kids is like making an investment, starting early helps.

I didn't make that choice, it just happened. I don't regret it one bit, if that's the way my previous message came across. I'm just saying that I wish I had more time to work on some ideas I have. But I'll do that once they both enter school in the next couple of years.

is this really your "not-trolling" for monday?

For me, the pros outweigh the cons.

Several thousand times over.

Im in exactly the same situation. 29, 2 kids, wife. Full time job. No time to work on my ideas. I feel like I am just working to pay the bills and keep afloat. I try and pull a late night coding after all are in bed but i get super tired and know I will be wasted for work the next day. I dont know how much longer I can go on without creating something of my own to put out into the world.

Man, I know exactly where you're coming from. By the time I can get some work done it's 11:35pm and my brain is starting to mix up the keys on the keyboard and I get sloppy.

What can be done? I wish there was some sort of hypertime chamber like in Dragonball Z where I could in and work for three weeks but only have left for 1 hour. That would be sweet!