I have 4 children ages 1 to 10. My wife left her position as medical practitioner to work as a full time mom. We also had to externalize some work that I and her where doing, we hire someone for lawn service, we have a girl come and help with cleaning and we now employ a mechanic when we have car troubles. We home-school so that creates more demand on our time to be parents. I would say it was tough for both of us to adjust but probably more so for me. I grew up on an farm where from the time we woke up to the time dinner was served we worked and fixed our own issues. It was a perfect example of self reliance. My grandfather (grandparents raised me) was also an aircraft mechanic in the Air Force, so we fixed all car / truck / tractor issues ourselves. Anyways, long story short it was very tough for a person of that upbringing to adapt to hiring people to deal with personal life based work.
I read a good article once that convinced me to try it and it could be summed up as, if the job is not a specialty job (e.g electrician) and it cost more to hire someone than your hourly rate then do it yourself. If not you should be hiring someone and applying those hours to your business or project or personal life hours. This rule of thumb has worked well for me after I let go of past upbringing and applied it. It was hard for me to let go of vehicle repairs due to the cost of repairs but when factored out it is more cost effective to have the shop do it and apply those hours to my firm or enjoy time with the kids.
In a nutshell the trick is to delegate work to third parties, household work is usually the cheapest work to do so with, this will free up more hours for work life balance and more hours to commit to projects / consultancy.
I read a good article once that convinced me to try it and it could be summed up as, if the job is not a specialty job (e.g electrician) and it cost more to hire someone than your hourly rate then do it yourself. If not you should be hiring someone and applying those hours to your business or project or personal life hours. This rule of thumb has worked well for me after I let go of past upbringing and applied it. It was hard for me to let go of vehicle repairs due to the cost of repairs but when factored out it is more cost effective to have the shop do it and apply those hours to my firm or enjoy time with the kids.
In a nutshell the trick is to delegate work to third parties, household work is usually the cheapest work to do so with, this will free up more hours for work life balance and more hours to commit to projects / consultancy.