Shiv Shankar
Shiv is a Director of Engineering at Ava Labs, a blockchain startup that builds and grows the Avalanche ecosystem. He’s worked in different engineering roles in small, large and extra-large companies across three different continents. Shiv and his wife (Swetha) live in Kirkland, Washington, with their 5-year-old daughter Meera.
What does your normal working day look like?
We have three alarms that go off in our house at different times.
4:45am: For me
5am: For my wife
6:30am: For my daughter
For the past year, I have been trying to invest in my health, and I earmarked that 5am to 6am to do something healthy. These days, I put on something on Apple+ Fitness (meditation, yoga, rowing, pilates) and spend 30 minutes on myself before getting ready.
I make sure Meera is out of her bed after her alarm goes off and get her started on her day. She likes to sit at the table sipping her milk in silence till her mother has gotten ready and comes downstairs.
I normally prepare breakfast for us whilst Swetha gets Meera ready for school. I work east coast hours, so I try to get in front of my computer at 7am. Swetha has the morning childcare shift and drops Meera at school (which is ~15 min away).
From 7am - 3:30pm, I am in meetings, responding to slack and doing lots of synchronous activities. I get an hour between 330pm to 430pm to finish up pieces of work that require focus.
I take the evening childcare shift. I pick up Meera and spend some time with her in what I call ‘real-world activities’ – things like going to Costco or the local supermarket, doing laundry, cleaning up, or taking out the trash.
Later in the evening, Swetha (who works as a Senior PM at Amazon) joins us, and we either go to the park (in Summer or Autumn) or play some Just Dance on Kinect if it's too cold or wet outside. At the moment, Meera prefers reading and doing some drawing on the whiteboard.
We have dinner around 8pm and then things start winding down with Swetha reading to Meera before bed (apparently, I don’t emote enough when reading aloud). Then Swetha and I watch a little TV, before going to bed ourselves.
How long have you had this routine?
We have been following this routine for the past year. The early days of Covid were a mess - but we found our rhythm through (lots of) trial and error.
How has it changed as your children have gotten older or as your family has grown?
Meera was 3 when we started working from home. She needed a lot more supervision, and that meant it was pretty much impossible to work if she was unwell or if school was out. Now I can give her an ‘assignment’ or put a bowl of fruit in front of her and go take a meeting. That has really made things like snow days or sick days much more manageable.
Moreover, Meera drives a lot of her playtime these days. She tells us she wants to go to the library or the mall (I take her window shopping) or make pancakes - this has made life a bit easier. Before, we would be unsure what we could do to entertain her (without turning on the TV).
What boundaries have you set around your work and how did you work with your colleagues to enable them?
I communicated quite early on (perhaps even my first 1:1 with my manager) that I have a kid and that I would take the evening shift to pick up and be with my daughter. I make sure that my colleagues know that I won’t be checking messages during that time and my responses might be delayed.
I have a calendar block during the late evenings to ensure that no one accidentally sets up meetings. I also reflect that calendar block on slack and avoid checking my phone during the time I am with my family. Overall, my colleagues have been very supportive.
What systems do you have in place to have a successful day?
I am a strong advocate for the zero-inbox lifestyle. I barely have any unread emails (or even slack messages) at any given point in time. I ack emails and messages and just create a to-do list of things that are generated by them.
For emails, I have a decent number of filters that reduce noise from system-generated emails, and I aggressively unsubscribe from email blasts. For legitimate emails. I either ‘read and archive’ or ‘read and star’ if any of them need follow-up.
I don’t do any emails after 7pm. I do keep my phone in my bedroom (in case I get paged), but I’ve managed to train myself not to pick it up.
For slack, I use a dedicated monitor (rotated 90 degrees for a portrait view); this extra real estate helps me be really responsive on slack. This really reduces any FOMO I might get when I get off work. It also gives me the satisfaction of a day well spent.
At home, we religiously use Twist to manage complicated discussions/decisions. Twist is supposed to be used by companies - but my wife and I found it much more useful as a way to discuss/plan things like birthday parties, vacations, finance and so on. It’s just the both of us as the primary users on all the channels and threads. We also occasionally add other folks to certain channels to discuss long-running topics (which is free to do on Twist).
We also use it for knowledge management: I have tons of archived channels on how we chose our kindergarten or why we chose to buy a car, or what I considered before investing in a certain stock.
Switching to weekends, what are the most important things to get right to have an excellent weekend day?
On weekends (both days), we take Meera swimming at the local gym. We splurged a bit on getting her 1:1 lessons when we realized she really enjoyed the water. The trainers get her moving and encourage her to find good form; we’ve noticed how this has sharpened her focus over the last 18 months and given her a challenge to overcome.
While Meera is in the water, we hit the gym. After 18 months with the same instructor, Meera is now really comfortable with the instructor and does not need us by the water at all. It sort of feels like ‘Fitness Hour with the Shankars’, we have been trying to make it a habit to invest in health during the weekends.
We also cook during the weekend. I make sure Saturday lunch is a thing. I usually try to whip up something authentically South Indian and we try to introduce Meera to new flavours with admittedly limited success.
What have been the most impactful things you've done to save time / energy in your family?
For Swetha and me, delegation has become the most important thing. We are very clear on who is driving what, and then we trust that person to own that area and all the decisions that come along with it. We have borrowed the STO/SPOC (single-threaded owner/single point of contact) concept from work and ported it to our family life.
Examples:
For Meera’s school, Swetha deals with all the emails from teachers, any fees-related matters and school events.
I deal with everything related to car maintenance: insurance, cleaning, DMV fees, servicing etc.
We trust each other to make good decisions and do not waste any bandwidth checking on each other. It is kind of liberating because we choose tasks we would be good at and just chase them down.
What principles have served you best in your parenting?
In a lot of ways, Swetha and I felt that we could easily get swept off by all the things that come with being working parents. We made a mindful choice to make sure that did not happen to us and spent a lot of time discussing how we wanted to raise our child.
We aligned on quite a few things like how many kids we wanted to have, how we wanted to deal with pressure from our parents, what would be our approach to sleep training, when do we want to start daycare.
I think it’s one thing to strive for open and honest conversations and another thing to make time for them. We will often chat on iMessages during the middle of the day and then decide we should eat lunch together or get a cup of coffee and talk.
We actively make time to discuss how things are going - what toll some activities are taking on us and what we can do to fix those situations. This has been the only thing that has helped us keep things going without major issues.
What is your approach to screen time?
We found early on that Meera has an appreciable dip in engagement if she spends regular time watching something on the screen vs interacting with it. We observed that apps like Khan Academy Kids or playing Just Dance on the Kinect seemed to be fine, however watching episodes of cartoons just seemed to bring her down.
Given this, we do not have her watch anything throughout the week except for Thursday evenings when we do a Movie night (with popcorn and blankets and lots of extra pillows). No appreciable screen time creates a lot of work for us, but the rewards are outsized.
Is there a primary parent in your household or do you split the parenting evenly?
Parenting is split pretty evenly, especially since we avoid screens. However, we try to play to our strengths. Swetha is an ideal playmate for Meera, and both of them do a lot of work on activity sheets, stories and crafts together.
I take Meera out on random rides and take her to places like Ikea or Costco or the Post Office to expose her to different environments. We split all the regular tasks like laundry, clean up, bathtime, and food down the middle.
How do you divide the work and make sure that it is fair?
Instead of striving for balance up front, we try to strive for a dynamic balance with respect to workload so that in the long run, we end up contributing more or less equally to parenting. Swetha and I often take up some new duties and check in with each other to make sure we are doing ok. We are very cognizant that at different points in time, we are going to shoulder different amounts of parenting responsibility and a kind word or a freshly brewed cup of coffee goes some way to make up for that in the short term.
What is your process for updating your parenting model as a child's needs or a parent's needs change?
Often talking to other parents is a great way to absorb new information and wisdom. I will usually go up to parents at school or at parties and talk to them about the challenges I am facing. I always find a useful tidbit that I can use to start my google searches.
What routines / games / practices do you have in your family to make your children feel loved?
We want Meera to feel like an equal part of the family and also in the decisions we make - so she gets a turn in picking the movie for movie night, restaurant for Sat evening and the tunes we play in the car.
What is something unusual or unique that you do in your family?
One of the big ‘concerns’ we have is that Meera will grow up without learning any Indian language. My wife and I speak Hindi, Tamil and Bengali - so we often just pick a language and talk to Meera in Tam-glish or Hin-glish, so she starts picking up some Hindi or Tamil from context.