The nice thing about having kids is that it forces you to think about time management. Think about how much time you waste chit chatting, eating lunch, watching TV, surfing the Internet, etc. After kids, you'll want to rethink how you spend time and cut down on non-productive activities. That's exactly what I did - I reconfigured my time around productive work and kids. On week days, I allocate 7-8 hours for my day job, 2-3 hours for kids and family, and 2-3 hours for myself - blogging, writing, learning, etc. Weekends is more flexible. So think hard about how you spend your time and cut down on things that aren't important for you - you'll find more time than you think you had.
This. Part of the adjustment is working in pockets of time rather than decent stretches with time to get into "the zone". I did well during the young kids era by keeping a text file of exactly what I wanted to do next. At the time I was using a paren-prefix language (Scheme) that made it easy to come back to half-finished code and see where I was going with it. In other languages you might want to write a bunch of one-line comments describing what the code is going to do, then fill in the code under the comments.
Time management, to me, is a more powerful "skill up" than anything that could keep your GitHub green. When you know you have limited hours in the day and you have hard time commitments, you have no choice but to learn and work efficiently.
The nice thing about having kids is that it forces you to think about time.
It's the time that rolls on whether you are present or not. It's the time when you said something to your kids and you realized you are becoming your father or your mother. It's the happy times and the sad times, it's the times of intense passions and times of gentleness. It's the time of living fully, without regrets, the time with the people you love, walking the path with purpose.
