The Chaos is the Point: For Parents Who Build

Gaurav Chande / July 03, 2025 (494 Words, 3 Minutes)

There’s a moment. If you’re a parent in the trenches of a startup or a demanding tech career, you know exactly the one I mean. It’s 8:00 AM. You’re coaxing a toddler into putting on pants, which for some reason is a deeply offensive request today. Your phone buzzes on the counter. It’s a Slack message in a critical channel. In that single instant, you feel the pull of two different universes. One smells like burnt toast and overwhelming love. The other smells like broken code and existential dread.

In this moment, the phrase “work-life balance” feels like a cruel joke.

What a useless metaphor! “Balance” conjures up this image of an old-timey small town shopkeeper, perfectly weighing “Work” against “Life.” It’s an industrial-age relic, left over from a time when work was a place you went and a whistle blew. For us – the builders, the programmers, the founders – that separation never existed. The factory is our laptop, and the whistle is a notification that can sound at any time.

My best solution to a gnarly engineering problem last month didn’t come to me at my desk; it ambushed me while trying to host a tea party for a dozen stuffed animals. Was that work or was that life? Yes.

The reality is that we’re living one chaotic, intertwined life. I’ve read the self-help business books and I’ve tried to build higher walls between my work and my family. It doesn’t fucking work. A sick kid doesn’t respect your deep-work block. A brilliant product idea doesn’t wait for Monday morning. The walls were always breached.

This integration brings immense flexibility. I can be there for the scraped knees and mid-afternoon parent-teacher meetings. But it also creates a low-grade hum of guilt. The feeling that in trying to be everything everywhere, you’re succeeding at nothing. The perfect family vacations on social media only amplify the messy reality of your own burnt toast and Slack alerts.

For a long time, I saw this mess as a bug to be fixed. Now, I’m starting to think the mess is the model. The question isn’t how to eliminate the chaos – it’s how to thrive within it.

So what does thriving in chaos actually look like? Some things that have helped me navigate this:

Embrace the seasons. There are weeks, like before a big launch, where the “balance” will be laughably skewed towards work. And there are weeks, like when the baby is having sleep regression, where work becomes a second-class citizen. Fighting this is futile and exhausting. The trick is to communicate it clearly, trust that the season will eventually pass, and give yourself grace in the meantime.

Redefine what a “good day” means. Four hours of truly uninterrupted, deep work is infinitely more valuable than eight hours of distracted, notification-filled “availability.” Similarly, one hour of truly present, phone-in-the-other-room playtime with my kids is worth more than three hours of being physically there but mentally absent. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s “Make Time” framework has been helpful here – particulary their idea of identifying and prioritizing a single “Highlight” each day.

Finally, be confidently vulnerable about the struggle. We in the tech world are masters of projecting competence. But as you get close to other founders and parents, you realize beneath the surface there is a shared, chaotic reality. The admission that “I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m trying” creates real connection.

The goal isn’t to eliminate the chaos or achieve some mythical balance. It’s to become skilled at navigating the blend. Some days you’ll be better at the parent thing. Some days you’ll be better at the builder thing. Most days you’ll feel mediocre at both. That’s Real Life.

So, screw work-life balance! The people selling you that myth have never tried to debug code while a toddler complains to you about your fruit cutting skills. It’s a moment of absolute fullness: a life defined by both the bug and the hug. The chaos isn’t the problem. It’s the point.