1) Most routine household/life stuff is a constant nuisance: grocery shopping, preparing healthy meals, dropping off/picking up dry cleaning, getting packages delivered, having someone home to meet repair guys, general house cleaning, sorting mail, paying bills, making/monitoring investments/401ks, getting us and kid various doctor/dentist appointments, etc.

This is largely the result of wife and I both working and 4 year old kid being demanding. By the time he goes to bed, we are both tired and more interested in getting some rest than getting stuff done.

As best I can tell, we need to hire a nanny, a butler, a cook, a maid, and an accountant.

2) Too many ongoing projects, not enough progress (at work and at home).

At home I just don't have enough time (3-4 hours of stuff to do, 1-2 hours of time to do them in) or energy.

At work I have a mix of urgent tasks that do not take much time and less urgent tasks that take a lot of time. I get the urgent tasks done, but they interrupt the less urgent ones which tend to pile up on my desk as I lose focus/interest in them after the interruption.

3) Projects that rely on staff at multiple locations going badly.

My company has offices in several different locations and in the last few years we are doing more and more projects that depend on people in different locations (and timezones) collaborating effectively.

In my experience this is not working well.

Meetings are much less efficient, communication isn't as good, people have less of a personal connection, and getting consensus on complicated issues is significantly harder.

It also seems much easier for "unpopular" decisions to get made as the project manager doesn't have to look people in the eye and be exposed to angry body language. It is much easier to just send an e-mail about a feature being dropped or a deadline getting extended than it is to tell a roomful of 10-15 people.

Also, with everyone in different locations, the members of the project teams tend to have different reporting lines, so it is often difficult or useless to try to escalate issues to management.

I am really bad at managing tasks. At any given time I have a huge list of things to get done plus family obligations. Then, when I actually sit down to do something on the list I get interrupted and another task needs immediate attention so I bounce around from one thing to another and don't give full attention to any one thing which is obviously suboptimal. It's a vicious trend I'm fighting every day.

Mine is very similar to dc_publius, 1)dealing with information overload and distractions. 2) finding someone to work with who I can simultaneously trust and has the same passion as me. 3) see #1


also, you going to use this for linkbait ideas for distilled??

Wasn't planning on it being linkbait but that's a pretty good idea!

You just need a nanny.

I am single with no children, but my brothers wife is Hispanic and it is somewhat of a custom to have live in help, and she had a nanny when they met as she was working full time with a son from a previous marriage.

They have a new daughter now, and their live in nanny she brought down from Mexico lives with them, cooks, cleans, and takes care of the children and leaves on the weekends to visit and stay with family on the weekends. They pay her a price which is less then most day cares I believe and its a nice wage for her apparently. She loves living there in the u.s, sends home money and is amazing with the children so she is pretty much like part of the family.

My brother says he doesn't (cant even if he tries to) use the same towel twice out of the shower, and there is never a dirty plate, dish, carpet, or area anywhere ever.

Sounds nice, because I have no idea how the average person does it without such a set up.

Sounds like a good situation for your brother; even people with nannies rarely get the combination of good nanny/good maid/good cook (and I'm guessing paid "off the books").

We considered nanny v. daycare and went with daycare for some reasons which I still think were right (for us), but there are definitely times I wish we had gone with a nanny for the convenience factor alone.

You should check out taskrabbit.com for some of the stuff you listed earlier if it's in your city.

All of my problems can be solved by hiring a personal assistant and a babysitter. The second part is done. Just need to do the first part.

A big thing right now is writing my book. I also maintain a blog and write for another website, and when I sit down to write for the blog/site, I think "Shouldn't I just write these 1000 words in my book?" Then I do nothing. That sucks.