The Invisible Toggle

The hardest part of juggling parenting and building software isn’t the work itself.

It’s the context switching.

Product strategy → bus stop pick up → homework → sibling mediation → listen to what happened at school → back to my desk → map out the evening → code → check traffic → get the kids ready for sports → get everyone out the door.

That’s not a bad day. That’s a Tuesday.

And for a long time, I let it beat me up. I’d sit back down at my desk after the afternoon chaos and wonder why I couldn’t just “lock in.”

Then I realized something.

I context-switch 15+ times between 3pm and 6pm. And I was treating it like a personal failure instead of what it actually is: an operational problem. One that at work, I’d have real tools to solve. At home? I had a shared Google Calendar and a group text.

So I started treating my household like I’d treat any high-performance team.

I pre-brief my kids on the evening schedule the same way I’d prep a team before a sprint. When everyone knows the plan, the chaos drops.

I used to check Google Maps every day before leaving and make mental calculations to make sure we got to events on-time. Now I’ve built a tool that syncs travel time into our family schedule with traffic estimates. What a game changer. No more, “What time do we need to leave?”

“I thought you were getting them.” That sentence used to run our household. Now we have clear assignments for every pickup, drop-off, and practices. No assumptions. No last-minute scrambles in the group text.

I didn’t get less busy. I got more intentional.

The context switches don’t go away. But the right systems and the right tools turn the most overwhelming part of your day into the part where you can finally breathe.