Tom's blog: Degrees of exhaustion

I read an article in the Evening Standard last week about Karen Blackett, who's an inspiration for all sorts of reasons (CEO of MediaCom, OBE, first business woman to top the UK Powerlist, makes time to drop her son at school twice a week – the list goes on) but the thing that particularly caught my eye was her ability to carry on with so little sleep: Five and a half hours a night on average.

Many of us aren't much better. We want to make the most of our quality time with our children but we won't let our home life impact on our work. Something has to give, and it's usually our sleep.

My alarm goes off at 6am so I can get the kids dressed and make their breakfasts, and by the time I've finished work at night and made the packed lunches for the next day, I'm never in bed before midnight. So, even on a good day, I don't manage to get much more than 6 hours' sleep, and let's face it, it's not often we actually get one of the 'good days'. When work gets out of hand it can be 2am before I'm in bed, which eats into those precious few hours' sleep even more. Other perennial interrupted sleep scenarios include the wet bed and the sick child.  

There are degrees of exhaustion, of course. My favourite (but unscientific) method of measuring tiredness is to monitor how early in the day I find myself dozing off. If I make it as far as the 10 O'Clock news before my eyelids start drooping, I know I'm suffering only mild sleep deprivation. When I drift off at my desk in the middle of the afternoon I know things have gone up a gear. But if I'm already snoring when my train pulls into Liverpool Street in the morning and a stranger has to wake me up by hitting me with a copy of Metro, I know things are out of control.

The reality is that feeling shattered is an unavoidable side effect of being a Cityfather. But I guess there's no point feeling sorry for ourselves: We're not the only ones. A friend of mine who's a civil servant has an 8 year old son with a medical condition that needs monitoring every three hours throughout the night. He and his wife go through that routine every night, week after week, year after year, and they'll carry on doing it until their son's old enough to do it himself. But I've never heard my friend complain. Permanently feeling shattered is a small price to pay for the privilege of being a Dad.

Tom is a senior associate in a magic circle law firm. He is married with three children, and works fulltime with one day per week spent working at home.