AMA - How Do I Cope With Everything
This is the second AMA post I've written. I'm currently sat on a flight to Florida, so I'm wading through these to help quell the boredom.
Anyway, Marco on Fosstodon asked this one; hopefully it will be a bit more positive than the last one. He asked:
How do you cope with wife, kids, animals, hobbies, Fosstodon, watches and all other things?
Marco is right, there's a lot of things that we manage. Here's an incomplete list off the top of my head:
- A full-time (and very stressful) job
- A wife
- 2 young kids
- 2 dogs
- a blind cat
- 3 aquariums
- 12 chickens
- Various DIY projects
- a vegetable patch
- 2.5 acres of land
- Various projects like Fosstodon, 500 Social and this blog
- 2 motorbikes
- A ride on lawn mower
- A 5 foot flail mower
I think the first thing to call out here is that most of this I don't do alone. I don't "manage" my wife (she actually manages me, usually). She supports me. We're a partnership and share this list out between us, among everything else that's needed in the household too.
She couldn't do it without me, and I certainly couldn't do it without her.
But that still doesn't leave much in terms of spare time, and that's fine. I like being busy, but honestly, when I hear people say they don't have time to do something, I usually call bullshit on that. For most people there's always time that you can find somewhere.
So anyway, we manage it all by working together. This allows us to get a tonne of shit done, but still have time for ourselves, and every now and then, time for each other.