Ryan Deiss leaves work at 5:30 PM daily to have dinner with his family. He found that hard time limits forced him to prioritize ruthlessly, made him more productive, and proved that scaling a business doesn't create extra time, it just adds complexity.
Your kids don't want your money. Your kids want your calendar. And the commitment that I made to my wife after that was, I will leave every day. I will leave for work after the kids are up, so, and I'll get to work at 9 and I'll leave at 5:30 so I can be home for dinner. I don't know how I will make it work, but I will make it work. We will also, as a family, take a vacation every summer. Magically, everything still got done. When I had allowed myself to just work, work, work, work, work, and I was doing it while telling myself that like, you're a good person and you're a good dad and you're such a martyr and ooh, look at you. It turned out that I could take forever to get work done because I gave myself forever. When I gave myself a constraint, what do you know? I actually got more done and the stuff I got done was more important because I was forced to prioritize. You are not, as your business scales, going to magically get more time back. Just like as businesses scale, they don't magically become more profitable. Scale creates— the natural state of scale is complexity and thin margins. And so, If you want more time, you have to bake in that time. You have to give your family first dibs on your calendar, and the work has to get everything else.
