Tough Times at Work: The Simple Things That Actually Matter

It's dark when I leave the house and dark when I get back. That is the honest summary of the last few weeks. The business is in its early years, which is a polite way of saying it takes most of what I've got and then asks for a bit more. Long days. Time away from home. A laptop open on the kitchen table at nine at night when I'd rather be watching something rubbish with my wife.

I'm not writing this to complain. I'm writing it because it's easy to see the good and not share the bad. Work life balance as a working dad isn't something I've solved, but I've got better at the part I can actually control.

The dark mornings do something to your head

There's a specific sort of tiredness that comes with leaving before sunrise and getting home after it. The clocks go back, the commute goes dark in both directions, and the week starts to feel like a corridor rather than a life.

The first few years of running a company are like this. I knew that before I started. What I didn't expect was how quickly the guilt creeps in: the feeling that every hour at a desk is an hour stolen from the kids, and every hour with the kids is an hour the business needs.

Dwelling on that is a trap. I've tried it. It doesn't give you anything back.

What I've started doing instead

Work life balance as a working dad, at least in my house, is built out of small things rather than big gestures. None of this is clever. That's the point. When time is short, the small things are the only things and I've tried to make sure I know whats going on in their lives.

• One question in the car. "What was the best bit of yesterday?" beats "how was school?" every single time.

• Saying goodnight in the room. Not from the doorway, not from the top of the stairs. In the room, lights low, two minutes.

• One thing a month that's just ours. A trip to the cinema, visitto milkshake shack or dinner. Booked in advance so it actually happens.

I'm not managing a hundred small improvements. A few is plenty.

Work life balance as a working dad doesn't fit a spreadsheet

I've tried to work it out in hours. If I get home at half seven, that's an hour and a half before bed, minus bath time, minus teeth, minus the twenty minutes where everyone loses the plot. On paper it looks like nothing.

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But an hour and a half spent properly is worth more than three hours spent half-present with one eye on my inbox. That's the trade I'm making now. When I'm in the room, I'm in the room. The emails will still be there at ten, and they usually look less urgent than they did at seven.

The business is hard work and that's allowed to be true

Owning a company in the first few years is genuinely tough. Cash flow, hiring, the constant low hum of things that could go wrong. I write about recruitment and running a business elsewhere on this blog, and I try to be useful about it, but I don't want to pretend it's a smooth ride.

The honest position is this: the work is hard, and being away is hard, and both can be true at the same time without meaning I'm failing at either. What I can control is what happens in the hours I'm home.

The takeaway

You can't get the lost hours back. You can decide what you do with the ones you've got. For me that means less dwelling, more sitting on the floor playing a game I don't understand, and a phone that lives in a different room between six and eight.

If you're in the same stretch, the dark commute and the guilt and the business that won't leave you alone, I'd like to hear what's working for you. Leave a comment with the one small thing that's kept your week together. And if you need an excuse to leave the laptop at home for a morning, the golf course reviews by price per round are a decent place to start.