I have 90 minutes of real focus time per day. Some days less. Some days zero.
I used to be an engineering director with a calendar full of deep-work blocks and a standing desk in an office where nobody bothered me for hours. Now my office is the kitchen counter, my sprint window is the gap between bedtime and the moment I physically cannot stay awake, and my ever-present co-founder is three years old.
Here’s a sample of what I’ve shipped from that kitchen counter in the last few months: a book, a newsletter with weekly posts, a product line on Gumroad, several open-source tools, and a daily content operation across three platforms. Not from grinding twelve-hour days – I just stopped being the person who does the work and became the person who reviews it.
Here’s how I set myself up to create the time to ship where none exists.
The reframe
The biggest unlock wasn’t a tool. It was a shift in how I think about my own job.
I used to believe my job was: research, write, build, design, post, promote, respond. All of it, every day, in my 90 minutes. No wonder nothing shipped.
Now my job is to communicate intent, review, and approve. That’s it. I went from doing the work to directing it – from the person pushing the code to the person reviewing the pull request. The work still gets done. It just no longer depends on me being the one putting in the hours.
The async everything stack
Here’s my actual setup. None of it is theoretical – I run this every day.
OpenClaw + iMessage: the async command layer
I have an AI agent (OpenClaw ) that I talk to over iMessage. I text it from my phone. While my kid plays. While I’m at the park. While I’m making lunch.
I don’t sit down at a computer to manage my pipelines. I text “schedule the new posts” from the playground and it happens. I text “show me the overnight report” and get a summary of what got done while I slept. I text “draft an about page using these two files” and review the output when I have five minutes.
The thing that makes this work is the lack of friction. I don’t have to get to my laptop, open a terminal, or log into a dashboard. The tool lives where I already am – the same app I use to text my husband and my mom. My phone’s in my pocket, and the cognitive overhead is close to zero.
Cron jobs: the night shift
While I sleep, scheduled jobs run:
- Content research: my agent browses, researches new ideas, and outlines notes and posts. I wake up to a summary of what it explored and a set of new markdown files waiting for review.
- Research digest: a nightly scan of HN, dev Twitter, and a few niche blogs compiles a digest on topics I’m tracking. It’s my own high-signal, personal-interest newsletter, and I read it over coffee.
None of these need me awake. I set the schedule once. They run. I review the output in the morning.
So the morning doesn’t start with “sit down and figure out what to do today.” It starts with reviewing what’s already done and approving what ships next.
The content pipeline: from creator to reviewer
Here’s a typical day.
7am: I text “gm.” My agent sends the overnight report – what drafts got written, what research got compiled, what tasks finished.
Throughout the day (in 2-minute bursts): I review on my phone. “This is good, queue it.” “Turn this post into a tweet.” A rambly stream-of-consciousness thought about something my 3yo did becomes a new article. My involvement drops from hours of writing to a few minutes of grammatically-imperfect notes.
After bedtime: my one real focus block. Because the research is done, the drafts exist, and the admin is handled, I can spend it on the one thing that genuinely needs my brain – writing the newsletter, editing the book, building something new. The 90 minutes isn’t spread thin across twenty tasks. It’s concentrated on the one I can’t delegate.
The principle: decouple work from presence
The operating principle underneath all of this: your work and your schedule need to be decoupled in time.
The content gets drafted at 1am by an agent. I review it at 10am from my phone. It posts at 2pm automatically. A visitor reads it at 8pm and becomes a customer. At no point did I have to be present, one-on-one, to make that sale.
This is what makes the parent-developer life actually work. It has nothing to do with hustling harder or waking up earlier, and definitely nothing to do with Pomodoro timers. You build systems where the work happens when you’re not there, and your job becomes directing the intent and reviewing the output. (The screen-free, no-phone version of running an agent like this is its own post .)
What you actually need
The specific tools matter less than the pattern. But since people always ask:
- An AI agent you can talk to async (I use OpenClaw over iMessage, but the idea works with anything that doesn’t require you to be at a desk)
- Scheduled automation for anything repetitive (cron jobs, Zapier, whatever – the point is that it runs without you)
- A review queue, not a to-do list – your daily work is approving and editing, not creating from scratch
- One focus block protected for the work only you can do
The 90 minutes was never the real limitation. Ninety minutes is plenty, as long as you’re not burning it on things a system could handle.
The unfair advantage
Here’s what the solopreneur-Twitter crowd misses about parent-developers: the constraint IS the advantage.
When you have 90 minutes, you don’t over-engineer. You don’t build features nobody asked for. You don’t spend three hours picking a font. You ship the thing that matters, and you ship it now, because bedtime is a hard deadline and toddlers don’t come with a pause button.
I’ve shipped more in the last few months of 90-minute windows than I did in some quarters with a full engineering team. The difference isn’t raw speed – it’s that I’m forced into focus. I can’t afford feature creep or busywork. No slack time means no wasted time. (For the dollars-and-hours version of that claim, I did the actual math here .)
Every parent-developer already has this skill. You’ve been project-managing under uncertainty since the day your kid was born. You just need systems that let you spend your scarce time on decisions instead of execution.
The tools exist. The hours don’t need to. You just have to stop being the one who does the work and start being the one who decides what ships.
This is the TOOLS pillar of Raising Pixels – the parent developer’s toolkit. I write about computational thinking for kids, hands-on building projects, and the workflows that make it all possible when your coworker is three.