I’ll skip the part where I pretend this is easy.
Running two companies while being an actually present parent of four is a constant exercise in triage. The question is never “how do I do everything?” — it’s “what are the right things to not do today?”
The Myth of Deep Focus
Cal Newport is right that deep work produces better outcomes. He’s describing an ideal world. In the world I actually live in, deep focus is a destination I visit, not a permanent address.
What I’ve found is that structured context switching is much less damaging than reactive context switching.
Reactive: you’re in flow, a Slack notification pulls you out, you spend 45 minutes in a thread, you never fully return to the original task.
Structured: you decide in advance when you switch, what you’re switching to, and what you need to capture before you leave the current context.
My Actual System
Morning block (7–9am): One company, no meetings, hardest thinking.
Midday: Comms clearing, asynchronous decisions, kid logistics.
Afternoon block (2–5pm): Second company, or deep collaborative work that needs other humans.
Evening: Family. Hard stop. The emails will still be there.
The key insight: I treat my attention as a shared resource that needs scheduling, not willpower.
What Actually Breaks
The system breaks under two conditions: genuine emergencies, and self-inflicted crises from not delegating early enough.
The first is unavoidable. The second is a choice.
Most of what feels urgent isn’t. Most of what gets treated as a real emergency is actually a delegation failure from two weeks ago.
Fix the upstream cause, not the downstream symptom.