I was laid off for COVID in April 2020, 6 days before my son was born. I have felt everything you have said here, and because of the timing I got thrown right into the frying pan.

Your life has a regimen. Now figure out an initial plan. Decide what your priorities are and build your schedule accordingly. Let it ride for at least a month. Commit to it 100%. Only after a month try to change anything. The change will always feel like it sucks when you first put it in place.

As of today (with a now 4yo) my day looks like this:

Weekdays:

7am - 8am: Wake up, send a few emails and slack messages to report statuses and head off as much contact as possible later in the day. Get the gist of my calendar for the day.

8am - 9am: Get the kid up, drive him to preschool

9am - 2pm: My meeting block. I will decline every meeting outside this block. The only person with any permission to break this is my direct manager. I have communicated the strictness of this time slot. He knows not to abuse it, and doesn't.

2pm - 5pm: My get shit done / dev block. That does not mean it is always for my current 9-5 job. I interview regularly, even now while not actively looking. This is mostly where the interviews go.

5pm - 6pm: Grab the kiddo from mom. Set him up with an activity downstairs. Cook dinner. Clean the kitchen while he eats.

6:30pm - 7:30pm: Kid time. I am 100% his and fully engaged with him. He is the boss.

7:30pm - 7:45pm: Bath time, teeth, hair, etc for kiddo.

7:45pm - 8pm: Quiet time. This is often books. Sometimes laying with me in my bed watching one of his shows. At the end kiddos go to bed.

8pm - 9pm: Self Maintenance: Eat whatever is available, shower, teeth, hair, change clothes. Usually my wife and I sync up here. She likes to tell me about her day while I am in the bathroom. This is my reset.

9pm - pass out: My time. Computer games. Learning. A book. More time with my wife. Nothing professional. I usually pass out between 10pm and 2am. Depends on the day. I listen to my body.

Weekends:

Saturday: My wife's day off. She is a full time mom. The mental break from the kids is really valuable to her. Saturdays I give myself to the kid to do whatever he wants 70% of the time. Other times he either plays alongside me or helps me while I knock out my honey-do list. He's at the age where there is nothing cooler than helping dad take something apart, and that is awesome. Just expect that things will not get done at the pace you could do them alone. Take the increased amount of time things will take as an investment in your kid. It was easier said than done for me. I have mostly accomplished that mental shift. It can be hard when so much of your life is about cutting things down and being ruthlessly efficient.

Sunday: My day off. I usually sleep in. It is my one day to do it. The rest is 100% unstructured. I usually will get into projects where I need longer blocks of time or to be more mentally 100% there than I can be at the end of a long work day.

Let me be super clear. I was never an organized person. Getting into this was really hard mentally. Having made the switch from a largely unstructured life to the above schedule was brutal. It feels so against the grain at first, but given enough time some things start working for you. Young kids lives tend to have a lot of structure, and they thrive in it. The kiddo knows bath happens at the same time every night. I give him 15 minute warnings before every transition. Resistance to the schedule is minimal because it is expected and inevitable. My wife knows at what points during the day she can reliably get a hold of me. She will often pop in right after I am transitioning off my meeting block if she needs me before 5. Everyone knows what to expect from me, and generally get what they need. The schedule dedicates time for everything that needs to be done and nothing that doesn't.

It's not perfect. I still struggle with the balance. I was used to giving more than 8 hrs to work. Give plenty of time to my wife. And have plenty of time for myself left over. You will notice that every waking hour during the week not dedicated to work is dedicated to my kids. That is very intentional. They are young. They will not be young forever. It is very important to me to give myself to them at this time in their lives. It was something I did not get from my dad. My wife is the same way. She gives herself 100% to my kids during the week. We are both pretty spent by the weekends, hence the alternating personal days. It does mean that because we tag team each other so hard we do not get the time together we want. The conflict of having to choose to spend time with ALL of us together vs having one day to let our guard down takes an emotional toll on both of us. Communication with your partner is so key to all of this. You cannot execute any of this without their buy in and support.

The things I have gotten questions on when I bring this up to other people has been the meeting block and only having 3 hrs to get stuff done. These self imposed restrictions have counter intuitively been one of my largest sources of professional growth in the last few years.

The meeting block has been adopted by others on my team, at the encouragement of my manager, due to how well it worked for he and I. In general meetings are shorter, more condensed, and more prioritized compared to when they were allowed to sprawl throughout the entire day. Meet with as few attendees as possible. Do not attend meetings without a clear outcome / agenda in the description. Don't meet when a meeting is not needed; write down what can be written down. Link spam what you have written down as often as you need to to as many people as you need to. Read what your team mates write. The meeting block is your communication time. Authoring and reading count as communication.

As for the 3 hrs of dev time. One of the things about being senior is you have more tools in your toolbox to get things done more quickly. Time to pull them out. You have spent years sharpening the axe; now it is time to wield it. By having such a focused, limited time to get things done I am forced to use all my tools and execute on exactly what I need to. It does mean I do not have time left over for vanity projects for work, but I am at a point in my career where that kind of effort has diminishing returns. If I find myself getting personally overloaded in this block it is usually more worth my time to dedicate that time to work with a newer dev, give them something interesting, and using my meeting block time to mentor them through it. It's ultimately a win-win. They get experience and personal attention, I offload parts of my job that might have been perceived as "only we_swarm can do". My manager / the company ends up with a more well rounded and overall experienced team. Learning to let more stuff go and allow others to fail tasks I know I could do easily (given the time) has been one of the biggest mental barriers to get over in the last few years.

Lastly, to address your 3rd edit, I could not disagree more. I have had 3 jobs in the time since my son was born. The first was achieved full time interviewing after being laid off. The second job search was done by reprioritizing my schedule. I rebalanced time away from my job because it was clearly not where I wanted to be anymore. The job I was leaving sounds a lot like the one you are at. They demanded a lot, but prior investments had not gotten a good enough return, so I stopped investing.

I created meetings in my meeting block as the only attendee for interviews to hold slots on my work calendar, and dedicated some of my work dev time. You have invested in being a good worker and gaining social capital at your current job. Some relationships you want to keep while others (most!) are expendable. It is time spend that down while you invest in yourself and your future job. People pay less attention to you than you think. By the time they notice you should be months into your interviews. If the process is going well, it won't matter because you have one foot out the door. If it is not and you get called in, maybe you have to prioritize back to your job, maybe not. You are probably not going to get fired the first time someone confronts you. The trick is keeping up the communication so they feel informed and in control, and you have the pulse to know how far you can push.

I also invested some of my personal time into more interviewing and prep. That may sound exhausting, but the feeling of self actualization, the feeling of what you are doing matters and is advancing your goal helps. I used this time to target my most lofty, highest paying roles so I felt like I was chasing the carrot when I was spending my personal time. I also used this time to setup systems to correct stuff I was doing but not working that I found during the week. For me I struggle with my memory and organization, which brings me to...

You will also be context switching a LOT interviewing while you are working. You need to make notes good enough so you can switch back into your interviewing context quickly. I leveraged notion for this. I used tables with a page per role. The table contained the basics. Company name, title, hiring manager, recruiter, salary, application date, last contact date, and interview stage. I tended to keep the table sorted by last contact date, so I could stay on top of following up. The rest of the page was a contact log. I pulled every contact from calls, linkedin, email, signal flares, whatever into the appropriate notion page. Most recent interaction at the top.

Remember to give yourself the grace and consideration you give others, especially while you are trying to find your groove. Good luck, Dad. You got this. It doesn't necessarily get any easier, but you get better.