New dad, new defaults

Our nights used to be quiet in a particular way.

Quiet, and full of the same handful of conversations. Where we’d go next. What we wanted out of the year. Whether the trip in October was actually happening or whether we’d talk about it until December. The project we kept saying we’d start together. Her dreams, mine, the ones we’d stitched into a shared list somewhere along the way.

Those were unhurried conversations. That’s the part I didn’t notice at the time — not what we talked about, but that we could take an evening to talk about it. Time was the one thing we had a surplus of, and a surplus is invisible while you have it.

Then a small person decided to join the adventure, and the nights got quiet in an entirely different way.

The planner problem

I have been a planner my whole life.

Not casually. Structurally. Certainty is what I run on — I make a plan because the plan is what lets me be confident, and confidence is what lets me do the work. Chaos isn’t something I dislike aesthetically. It’s something I actively engineer out of my week, because when the week is legible I’m good, and when it isn’t I’m not.

So the first real collision wasn’t sleep, or nappies, or most of the people tell you about

It was this: I was holding my daughter, and I was still trying to plan. Because that’s how I’m wired. That’s the reflex. And the plan had nowhere to attach itself, because the input it depended on — some reliable quantity of hours, arriving on schedule — was gone.

I kept planning anyway. For weeks. Making a version of the week that assumed a person who no longer existed.

The equation that stopped working

Here’s the belief I didn’t know I held until it broke.

Hard work, sincerity, and hours invested are directly proportional to success. Put more in, get more out. It had been true for me for long enough that I’d stopped experiencing it as a belief at all. It was just how the world was arranged.

It stops being true when time stops being abundant.

Not because effort stops mattering. Because the input you were scaling is capped now, and it’s capped at a number you don’t control. You can be exactly as sincere as you were before and get less out, and there is nothing in the old model that explains that. The first time you feel it, it doesn’t read as a change in circumstances. It reads as a personal failure.

The version I remember most clearly is a quarter I planned the way I’d always planned them. Area strategy, three bets, the usual scaffolding, all of it sequenced against evenings I assumed I’d have. Six weeks in, a single customer escalation arrived — the kind I would previously have absorbed personally, out of some mix of ownership and, honestly, enjoyment — and I took it, because that’s who I’d been. It ate the weeks. The three bets moved a little. The escalation closed.

The old me would have counted that as a good quarter. Fires out, customer happy, personally indispensable. What I actually did was spend my scarcest resource on the smallest surface available.

The part nobody says

I want to be careful here, because this is the section that usually gets written as a lesson, and it wasn’t a lesson at the time. It was just how it was.

It was lonely.

That’s the honest word. There was no one to learn this from. Plenty of people to congratulate me, plenty of advice about sleep schedules, nothing at all about the thing I was actually dealing with — that my entire operating model for being competent had quietly stopped working and I didn’t have a replacement. Nobody I knew was talking about that part. So I assumed it was mine.

And underneath the loneliness, the thing I’d rather not put in writing: I felt inadequate. Not as a father, exactly. As everything at once. Inadequate at work because I was giving it less. Inadequate at home because the version of me that showed up there had already been spent. Understanding the role of a provider perfectly well, and understanding it only as far as what I’d been taught and had seen, which turned out not to be very far.

I don’t think that’s unusual. I think it’s close to universal and almost never said, which is exactly what makes it feel unusual when you’re in it.

The new defaults

What I do now is different, and most of it is unglamorous.

The day starts with brutal prioritisation. Not a list — a decision about what genuinely cannot slip, made before anything else gets a vote. Everything else is explicitly allowed to move.

Things do slip out of my hands. I’ve stopped treating that as a defect. Some of it slipping is the price of the rest of it holding, and pretending otherwise just means I choose what slips by accident instead of on purpose.

Divide and delegate wherever it’s possible. Not as a management technique. As arithmetic.

And the biggest one: invest the hours in the bigger thing, not the loudest one. The passionate product manager I used to be wanted to personally solve everything, and got a real hit off doing it. The product leader I’m trying to become understands that extended value delivered across the area matters more than one customer complaint resolved beautifully by me.

I didn't become less ambitious.
I became much more expensive.

Where this is still wrong

I’d be lying if I presented that as solved.

Delegation has a cost I keep underestimating. Handing something over isn’t free — it takes explanation, judgement, and follow-up, and on a bad week I’ve spent more time delegating a thing than doing it would have taken. I still get that trade wrong.

And “one customer complaint” is doing a lot of work in that sentence above. Sometimes the single complaint is the signal. Sometimes it’s the early, badly-worded version of the thing that will define the next two years, and the only reason I used to catch those was that I was close enough to the ground to hear them. Distance buys me leverage and costs me exactly that. I don’t have a clean rule for telling the two apart, and I’ve been wrong in both directions.

I’m also aware that “letting things slip is fine” can be a healthy reframe or a slow slide, and that the difference between them is mostly invisible from inside.

So: no tidy landing.

The defaults changed because they had to, not because I figured something out. What I’d offer anyone in the same year isn’t advice — it’s just the fact that the equation breaking is not a sign that you’ve become worse at your life. It’s a sign the equation was always incomplete, and you happen to be the one holding it when it failed.

It took me far too long, and it was the only thing that actually helped.