Doing this:

* Plan ahead

* Establish a clear list of goals and objectives with your manager. Make sure your moving toward completion of the goals and they can see that. This keeps them off your back.

* Make it clear that you want to manage your own time and ask if that’s going to be an issue. If it is, find out what can be done to alleviate it.

Sorry if that sounded obvious but it’s taken me years to figure this out.

Work remotely and not be micromanaged is how I manage something similar. Mine might be even more extreme. Sometimes the second half of my biphasic work schedule may not occur until as late as 9 PM.

And SO and kids?

People with these sort of ideal solutions rarely have kids. The parent article is better advice in that domain.

In my experience, kids tend to just follow along with their parents habits.

Like one family I know eats dinner at 1 am, because that’s when the father gets home from work. The kids nap in the evening, and do homework past midnight.

I originally thought that was madness, but they have 6 kids and 4 have gone to Ivy League schools apparently it works for them.

Don't underestimate the practicality of telling people to fuck off, even if it will have to be put in different words. If for some reason that's not practical, then that's a problem in itself, so try working on that.

As harsh as it might sound to put it this way, the answer for how some people will be able to manage better with their SO and kids is, "because I don't have your SO and kids for my SO and kids," or more specifically, "by not allowing my relationship with my SO and kids to be like your relationship with your SO and kids." For kids especially and with people I know who have this problem, it's because they infantilize and underestimate their kids (past the point where they're actual infants) and think "that's just how they [i.e. kids] are." Your question posed as if it could have an answer that would somehow be general/widely applicable (and not highly dependent upon the tendencies and personalities of the people involved as individuals) certainly hints towards this.

>> Don't underestimate the practicality of telling people to fuck off, even if it will have to be put in different words.

A valuable (possibly the most?) life skill is to be able to tell people to fuck off in the most sincere and HR approved way imaginable, it's very empowering, would recommend 10 for 10.

Not what I was talking about. What you're describing is a great way to make your co-workers hate you (or make your subordinates hate working for you if you have any and you tolerate this style of communication) while telling yourself how clever you are for figuring out how to flip the script on the system. It's not clever at all. Anyone with a brain can see what's going on when you do it, and it shouldn't be permitted just because someone managed to make their barbs in subtext, rather than explicitly peppering in words like "fuck you." Not-clever toxic passive aggression is one of the worst contributions that office culture has "given" to modern society. And it's certainly not something that makes sense for someone to recommend weaponizing against one's family...

The practicality of telling people to fuck off means saying the equivalent of, "I need you to fuck off right now [so I can take care of something important without any distractions/obstructions]," ideally having cultivated the kind of relationship where the receivers understand that importance, whether it's stated plainly or merely implied.

Having an SO and/or kids can involve more than just tendency and personality issues. Even with the healthiest of boundaries some constraints are non-negotiable and possibly outside ones control.