FINITE System
If you haven’t read The Tail End by Tim Urban, you absolutely should. Seriously, go do it, I’ll wait. He basically uses stick figures and dumpling emojis to help us understand the finiteness of time and experience, especially with the people we love. He calculates that by the time he graduated from high school, he had already used up 93% of his in-person time with his parents. Granted, he lives the other side of the country from his parents, but even if you end up living close together geographically, the bulk of your time with your children is when they live with you.
It’s simple maths, you see each other every day, then they go to college and live on their own, and you see them a handful of times a year or, at best, once a week if they live really close by.
Why am I telling you this? Part of the reason I started ‘Parenting by Design’ is that I want to really enjoy the time I get with my children – to savour our time together, to be present with them and to build really strong relationships with them – especially when they are little. I want to remember this time as a family as really rich in quality time and shared experience. There is no do-over, no catch-up time once they are adults.
I don’t say this to make anyone feel guilty. We’re all doing the best we can as parents and it’s not easy. It’s why I believe it is essential to be intentional about your time and attention as a parent.
Efficiency with tasks
One of my principles is to be generous with my time with my child, and efficient with tasks.
In service of that, I’ve developed the FINITE system to streamline everything related to running the house and family. It’s called FINITE as a reminder that my time and energy are finite. While I describe it here as a linear exercise, it is a system and a way of thinking that I continuously apply and evolve.
Here is what it stands for:
Focus: Intentionally define what matters and what doesn’t
Inventory: Take stock of everything I am doing today
Needs: Solve for my needs
Industrialize: Automate and industrialize repeat tasks
Take-away: Prioritise against my focus areas and delete anything that isn’t important
Engage: Engage help to outsource what is left
Focus: Intentionally define what matters and what doesn’t
It’s not possible to be a working parent without making trade-offs. The trade-offs that I’m making today are very different to my pre-kids life. My partner and I took time to articulate what was important to us as a family early on in our parenting journey.
Many people think prioritization is about ranking what is most important to least important. It’s not. Prioritization is 90% about defining what the goals are and then 10% prioritizing with respect to that goal. When prioritization is hard or I feel overwhelmed, it’s almost always because the goal isn’t well-defined enough.
That’s why I start the FINITE model by defining what’s really important to us as a family and what’s not. It’s very helpful to list non-goals explicitly. For me this is:
Goals:
Creating an environment of self-learning and joint-learning
Creating an environment to nurture emotional intelligence and positivity
Creating healthy habits around food, exercise and mental health
Adventure travel and trying new things
Spending quality time with a short list of important people, including my family
Non-goals:
Material stuff (having cool clothes, the car we drive etc.)
Religion
Doing lots of extra-curricular activities
Holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas etc.
Having a big house and garden
Maintaining a wide social circle
Having pets
Knowing what is important and what’s not important is the foundation to all of the steps below. It’s much easier for me to choose not to do something when it isn’t clearly aligned with my goals.
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What is important to your family? What is not important?
Inventory: Take stock and assign owners
To streamline operations, we first take stock of everything my partner and I are doing outside of our work and childcare. You can’t truly know the extent of your commitments unless you have it all written down. This is best done in a spreadsheet or a notion table.
Next to each item, we have an owner. I also take note of whether it is an activity that gives me energy or not. For example, I enjoy some cooking during the week but meal planning makes me miserable.
Where possible, we make sure ownership is end-to-end. In my house, we also follow the theory of household verticals, which Sara El-Amine discusses in her post. This means we own a whole area which massively reduces coordination overhead. For example, I do all things food which means grocery shopping and cooking. My partner does all things cleaning and laundry related. Because I do everything food related, I don’t need to discuss this with my partner.
This list forms the basis from which I streamline.
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List out all the tasks that you have to do to keep the house and family running. Who owns which task? Which tasks give you energy and which do not?
Needs: Solve for your needs
I read recently that burnout is not caused by doing too much. It’s caused by doing too many things you don’t want to do. To prevent parent burnout, it’s important to make time to do things that you really enjoy and need as an adult.
I realised at some point that I was resenting my partner for going to dinner regularly – the solution wasn’t him going less; it was me also making sure that I was doing something that I enjoyed and needed. One of the outcomes of the FINITE system is increasing the percentage of my time spent on things that give me energy and reducing the time and energy on things that drain me.
I started with one thing that I knew I needed to make me happier and more myself. The key here is not to start too big. I picked working out twice a week which is what I am working to consistently incorporate into my week. Once I have a good routine with that added in, then I might consider adding another need.
This also gives me another thing to trade-off against. Do I want to start a new project or do I want to meet this need? We can’t be our best with our children if we give up everything that brings us joy and fulfils us.
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What is one need that you need met? If you are partnered, how will you support each other to have this need met?
Industrialize: Use technology to automate tasks and batch decision making
Working through my inventory, I look for tasks that are repetitive, take a lot of time and drain my energy. These are really good things to automate and industrialize. We live in a time of wild technological productivity, and yet, very few people apply technology to their family lives in the same way we apply it at work.
Here are some examples of ways I have implemented this step:
Automated tasks: Use technology like spreadsheets, email and zapier to automate regular tasks. Examples:
Automated child clothes: I rent my son’s clothes through upchoose so I don’t have to shop for him. When his clothes get small, I ask them to send the next size up and get a new set.
Automated meal-planning: I have a spreadsheet where I keep a database of all my recipes and the ingredients needed. I also have an 8-week rotating meal plan. Each week I go into the spreadsheet, select which week we are in and order the groceries off the autogenerated list. Using this, meal planning and ordering grocery delivery take ~20 mins per week, down from > 1 hour.
Automated finances: All bill payments, credit card payments, and investing can be set up to be automatic.
Batching decisions can also be a good way to industrialise processes and streamline them. For example, Marc Rousset batches his weekend planning on a quarterly basis using a simple email template.
Each of the above does take time to set up, but the breakeven time is often less than a month. I have freed up a lot of mental time and energy by automating and industrializing processes.
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What are you doing every week or month that can be automated? What decisions are you making repeatedly that can be batched together?
Take-away: Prioritise against your focus areas and remove any superfluous or ‘nice-to-have’ work
Spending time intentionally is an exercise in subtraction. I try to regularly go through my inventory and take off anything that doesn’t align with my priorities. I ask three questions: Why am I doing this? Is this really important to us? Can I delete this task / project or can I make it 90% smaller?
This is probably the hardest section, because your default will is that I can’t drop things. Often “I can’t” is hiding behind a really hard decision or a really hard conversation.
Here are some examples of things I don’t do:
Halloween costumes: My partner and I don’t do Halloween with our kid. He’s too young to care and for us, finding a costume and spending an evening walking him around isn’t important. It would probably be a lot of fun, sure, but to us, it’s not worth the time and energy investment. One-offs like this can easily eat up 5-10 hours per month.
Pets: We don’t have any pets at home because that’s extra work we don’t need.
This section gets super valuable when we become really detailed.
Let’s say you’re tidying up the toys in the house a lot. Maybe you don’t want to stop having a tidy house. You can significantly reduce the number of toys. Instead of having thirty different toys available at a time, make it ten – now you’ve reduced the size of this task by 66%. Or like Yin Lu suggests, have the children share a room to make tidying up quicker.
This is an opportunity to be ruthless. There are hundreds of nice-to-have’s in life, but everything extra that is on my plate takes energy and time away from my focus areas and spending quality time with my son. Is it worth it?
One benefit from doing this step well is that it helps train my mind to assess new projects that come in and starts shifting my default to take away instead of adding to the home workload.
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What can be taken away from the inventory? How might you make a task 90% smaller?
Engage: Engage help to outsource what is left
Lastly, I try to engage help with what is left on my inventory that I don’t want to do What’s important here is that the task can be handed off once, and the help is consistent. Here is the help that we engage
Family virtual assistant: Great VA’s can be found for $15 - $40 per hour and can take on a wide range of tasks from vacation booking to research to online shopping to managing medical appointments.
Grocery delivery: All of our grocery shopping is done online
Cleaning: We have a cleaner that comes every two weeks
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What remaining tasks can be outsourced? Who can you engage to help?