In many cultures it is common practice for men to work and the women to stay home and take care of the kids. I agree with this role for married couples to some degree but as with anything you need to be flexible with this traditional family model. It is easy to take this stereotype and abuse it and use it as an excuse to basically be a selfish guy who uses the traditional roles in a marriage as a way to escape his fatherly duties. My number one suggestion is to never allow yourself as a guy to find your identity in your career. By allowing your job to define who you are you unintentionally prioritize things like career, work, and business tasks over your kids and wife. In this situation when it would normally be time to take your son to the playground to talk to him and push him on the swing you find yourself checking your stock portfolio or emails on your Iphone and trying to push the swing at the same time.

There are tricks you can use to assist in moving yourself away from finding your identity in your career and instead find your identity in who you are as a person. Some pragmatic ways to start off with would be to first get things organized at work. By knocking out the things at work that have you stressing and staying up late at night thinking about them you will be able to give 100 percent quality time to your son and for that matter your wife as well. I recommend sectioning out 2 hour time periods throughout your work day and complete the most important priorities that cause you to take work home with you. You may see yourself as your job only because your so buried in your work you cannot seem to find any way out. For instance, if you have never setup a payroll system but are winging it chances are you may not be reporting things correctly to the government taxing authorities. In this situation the longer this problem goes unsolved the more you will find yourself bringing work home with you and stressing about all the unfinished things you have yet to finish at the office.

To move things in the right direction at home so you have that quality time with your son playing at the playground and throwing a ball around go ahead and handle those mind distracting problems at work first. Even though there are things at work critical to do so you are making money it is still recommended to get the mind distracting things out of the way first. If you think about it although you make a lot of money doing one task if you have things undone allowing your mind to wonder each day you can become extremely inefficient. So in the case of the guy who has yet to finish setting up a payroll system, that should be done right away to alleviate that distraction so the real money making tasks can be completed. If that payroll problem and potential government tax problem was the only major distraction at work and you get it out of the way you will likely get a lot of real work done and so when you get home you will not feel the need to check your emails on your phone at the same time your playing with your son. The goal is to get to where you devote 100 percent of your time and attention while on a work task, at home with your family, and when just talking to a friend instead allowing constant distractions to steal that quality time away.

After work when you get home if you still find yourself checking emails on your phone and looking at news articles you likely are consumed with the not enough time in the day feeling. What is happening is that you are playing catch up because of the distractions at the office that kept you from doing real work. You are still not giving the 100 percent attention to your son that they need to get the fatherly upbringing every son should have. At this point you should really think about adding in another efficiency trick regarding phone calls and emails. Section out a 30 minute time period in the day that you respond to text messages, emails, and phone calls. You can even setup an auto responder on your email system and voice mailbox. Let people know that you appreciate their email or phone call and that you have allotted a certain time in the day which you specify to respond to these messages in which you will give 100 percent of your attention to these requests. By taking emails, phone calls, and text messages out of your daily work distractions some people have increased their work efficiency by three times. You will also train yourself to prioritize things like email to be given top priority only within a set interval of time. This exercise in efficiency will allow you to devote 100 percent of your attention to your son, family, friends, and work without the constant distraction every couple of minutes from an email or phone call.

In summary these few small steps in prioritizing and organizing your work and family life will give you the ability to prioritize your time with your precious son and his upbringing the same way you had success in prioritizing your work. If you think about it what is more precious in life than the time spent with father and son? These times go quickly and if they are not treated as precious you will lose those days. For many dads their son will be all grown up and he will feel like he did not get to know his father and will have no idea how to be a man of honor, integrity, love, and courage. It is important that you handle the distractions at work to unbury yourself from a yarn ball of unfinished tasks and then put your priorities in the proper order as they should be. Your time with your son and your family should come first and I believe this simple advice will help create a shortcut to get you there.