If you don’t have kids, I think I have an insight that you may find interesting.

It’s funny, but before we had kids, it’s amazing how much less housework got done. I remember the dishwasher didn’t get unloaded in a timely manner, or the floors didn’t get vacuumed as often as they should. The laundry didn’t get folded. The weird thing is, now that we have three kids, we’re way more on top of that stuff. Yet we have a lot less time. How is that possible?

There are a lot of things in our lives that distract us. The big time suckers have screens: smart phones are the new offenders, but before that it was the internet, video games, and of course television. Personally I’ve gone to excessive lengths to curtail these distractions, particularly at work. I leave my phone in airplane mode about 95% of the time. Email notifications are always turned off. I use a browser add-in that blocks my favorite websites except at specific times of the day, or blocks them after a specific number of minutes used each day. Overall, these small barriers to distraction really do make a difference, but there’s actually another much more potent barrier to screen distractions: young children!

Whether it’s one child or three, they demand attention almost constantly. You can’t get lost for 10 minutes on your phone if your two-year-old interrupts you every 90 seconds. Parents never “surf” the web, they go to a website, lookup whatever it is they need, and slam the lid on the laptop before the sticky fingers come around. God forbid you get the idea to play a video game… you’ll never get past the loading screen before you have to attend to some crisis.

When kids are around, you can’t do anything that requires concentration and focus (a.k.a. flow) because the constant interruptions prevent you from making progress. On the other hand, if you focus 100% on your kids, you’ll drive yourself insane. They’re always doing something that makes you slightly nervous, like playing too close to a lamp, crawling over the back of the sofa, or jumping on their bed (no matter how many times you’ve warned them). In fact, so called “helicopter parents” are just the parents that spend all their time focused on what their kids are doing. The rest of us realize that we need to ignore most of it, and just keep one ear open for the real dangerous stuff.

So as parents we’re left with having to do something that doesn’t require our full attention. Do you know what kinds of things are ideal? Housework. Laundry. Tidying. Cleaning. Taking out the garbage. These are the kinds of tasks that can be done with half your brain. It doesn’t matter if you get interrupted while you’re folding laundry, because you can pick it back up almost instantly. It takes just enough of our attention to keep us from actively focusing on the kids, but your subconscious still alerts you when they get (a) too noisy, or (b) too quiet. Best of all, it gives you a much needed feeling of productivity. Yes, housework is actually a coping mechanism for parents to keep their sanity.

So if you don’t have kids, and you wonder why you’re not the productivity powerhouse that you remember your Mom being when you grew up, don’t worry… she probably wasn’t that on top of things until she had you!