Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from parents just like you all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Always look for this.

It can feel like there's never enough time as a parent. And it's true.

There isn't. Yet part of this is our fault. As Seneca would say, it's not just that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it.

As parents, we have to look for opportunities to save time so we can spend more of it with the people we love.

Emily Oster, the economics professor whose ideas we have featured before and whose books we recommend, has spoken of watching her own mother, also an economist, do this well.

Instead of meandering the aisles aimlessly at the grocery store, her mother, Sharon Oster,

would fax in a shopping

list to their local grocer who would then gather those items for her. Today, this kind of time-saving

strategy is even easier with apps and delivery options. We even have a name for this type of behavior.

They're called life hacks. And yet yet you'll still find grocery stores filled with

parents who can afford otherwise. You'll find dads in the yard pushing a mower or in the driveway

changing their oil, claiming to be teaching their kids a lesson about self-reliance, when they are, in

fact, inadvertently making a statement about priorities. We all have more things asking for our time than we can

handle, which is why we have to be ruthless and effective and efficient in how we spend it. We have to

be conscious of the choices we make and the things we say yes to. We have to take a moment and sit

down with our schedule and ask ourselves, where could I steal a few more minutes?

Not from my children, but from tasks I could do faster or better yet not do at all.

The entire point of life hacks like these is to give you back a little bit more of your time.

Not so you can just do other stuff you don't like to do or that someone else could do faster or cheaper.

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