The promotion and the twins arrived within the same six months. People kept telling me it was wonderful timing. It was not wonderful timing. It was, however, extremely clarifying.
For most of my career I’d treated time like a budget with room to trim. Cut an inefficiency here, batch a task there, and you find more hours. That stops being true when there are genuinely no hours to find. The only lever left is deciding what doesn’t get done and being honest that “everything” is not an option.
The weeks I tried to do it all were the worst weeks. The weeks I picked the three things that mattered and let the rest slide were the ones I look back on without wincing. Thankfully, my firm were very supportive. Although I was only able to have the standard two weeks paternity, I have been able to take annual leave on short notice as and when required to attend appointments. My wife has been supportive and understanding that getting to work on time, and having few distractions while I’m there are important to my role and my work ethic.
A good-enough dinner, a short walk instead of a full lap, a two-line reply instead of a considered one. Done beats perfect every single time.
Both my family, and my wife’s are very supportive and it took us a while to accept that help. I lost track of the times that my mother or my mother in law offered to have the children for a few hours so we could have a nap but we refused. I confused coping alone with competence. They are not the same thing, and pretending they are just means everyone around you is worse off while you prove a point to nobody.
If there’s a lesson, it’s this: the year didn’t reward effort. It rewarded honesty about what I could carry.
I'm a senior manager at a UK accountancy firm, with a particular interest in construction and inheritance tax — and, off the clock, a parent of three under three. Carried Forward is where I write about money, work, and the decisions that shape both, in plain English and without the jargon.