A new baby broke my startup

By the time my daughter was eighteen months old, I had quietly decided I’d cracked the whole founder-father time management thing.

My calendar became a thing of precision engineering. I knew precisely how much I could get done before the nursery run, when to cordon time for ‘deep work’, and exactly how many emails I could reply to while pretending to watch the latest episode of Bluey.

Then my son arrived, and my system crashed.

Of course, I knew it wouldn’t be all plain sailing, but I didn’t realise it would prompt such a full and frank restructuring of my priorities and, ultimately, my time. I think my mistake was assuming what I’d built would scale and that I’d be able to apply the same logic I’d used previously, just to two children instead of one.

What I hadn’t accounted for, perhaps naively, is that my newborn doesn’t seem to care much about my existing routines. He’s got his own requirements, his own timetable, his own urgent and non-negotiable demands.

At Magic AI, we talk a lot about system stress-testing: the moment you find out whether what you’ve built actually holds up when faced with real-world conditions. A second child is that moment. Every routine I’d optimised turned out to have been streamlined for a specific set of circumstances that no longer existed.

So I’m back at the beginning, and what I’m slowly relearning is something I probably should have held onto the first time: time management isn’t a problem you can permanently solve. It’s something you just have to try your best to manage, indefinitely, against ever-changing circumstances.

Every founder knows the version of this that applies to their business. The moment you think you’ve built something stable and enduring is usually the moment everything starts to shift again. Turns out, basically the same is true at home.

This content is contributed by a guest author. Startups.co.uk / MVF does not endorse or take responsibility for any views, advice, analysis or claims made within this post.