I would say work vs kids vs wife (quality time) vs hobbies vs sleep vs income. I have prioritised kids, wife and sleep. I work as a deceloper contractor in Sweden and only work 80% (32hr/week) in order to ger everything to work. So income, hobbies and spending lots of time working is not what I'm doing right now. I try to see the big picture and might increase those three things when the kids are more independent. But right now they need their father and I want to have a goid relationship to them. Plus they are fun.

Just say no. You are better on a full night of sleep for both your family and your job. They need to be understanding there.

Totally agree. I worked on an app where we had customers who had installed our 'agent'. We were forced to do a late night update. Whoops - sent out a version that would never be able to update again - there went 100K customers we could never upgrade.

Wow, what went so wrong to the point that it blocked the update process?

In my case, there is lot of inefficiencies. I can easily cut down on few things

(a) I spend time browsing emails while lying down (easily eats 30 mins per night). (b) No meetups in evenings. (c) Excuse from business meetings after a certain time (d) Cut down on social events on weekdays. (e) Push all non-essential things to weekends.

I made this list for myself and it helps free up evenings. Your situation may differ.

I realized that my kids are my investments as well. In to someone's future/life (not trying to sound too dramatic). So, that's highest priority at this point and hence the sleep.

I see this all too much, my reasoning for working 8-9 hour days and nothing more is its being dishonest to the company to put in longer hours. Obviously estimates (and estimates always turn into deadlines) have been done wrong and by putting in those all nighters/extra hours you are only covering up those bad estimates. I find it much better to learn from mistakes so next time the estimates are done better.

> work vs family vs sleep

If I have to make a choice, I always choose sleep. Why? The other two priorities have a one-way dependency on it. I can sleep well while neglecting work or family, but I cannot make a decent contribution to work or family if I do not have enough sleep.