Becoming a father changed everything

I used to think I had an infinite amount of time. Or at least, I operated as if I did. Back when Fredrik and I were building Mediapilot in Stockholm, I would happily sit through two-hour meetings about the exact colour of a button on a client's campaign. We were growing, eventually creating more than a hundred jobs, and I was in my early thirties. I had boundless energy and no real constraints outside of my own ambition. I would stay at the office until eight in the evening, order food, and think I was being productive. Time felt incredibly cheap. Then I became a father.

I'll be honest with you. I am not going to give you a soft, glowing monologue about how holding your baby for the first time magically rearranges your soul. I am sure it does, but you can read about that elsewhere. The most immediate, physical shock to my system was how fatherhood completely destroyed my tolerance for other people wasting my time. The moment you realise that every extra hour in the office is an hour you are actively choosing not to spend with your child, the math changes. It is a brutal calculation. Suddenly, an unstructured status update meeting becomes a form of theft. You are stealing an hour of my evening, an hour of bath time or bedtime reading, because you could not be bothered to write a three-line email.

The collapse of patience

I started looking at my calendar with a level of ruthlessness that probably offended some people. I stopped going to industry drinks where people stood around holding lukewarm beers, waiting for an opportunity to pitch themselves. I would rather be at home opening a decent bottle of wine and actually talking to my family. If a problem could be solved in a quick phone call, I refused to schedule a thirty-minute video catch-up for it. Later on, when I was working on the commercial side at Happeo, this efficiency became a strict rule I lived by. You get in, you do the work, you make the decisions, and you log off. The badge of honour for working a fourteen-hour day vanished overnight. I started judging myself by how quickly I could leave my desk without things falling apart.

The moment you realise that every extra hour in the office is an hour you are actively choosing not to spend with your child, the math changes.

The life plan adjustments

I have kept a written 'life plan' since roughly 2010. I sit down once a year and rate different areas of my life out of ten: family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. Before children, 'personal time' meant travelling around the world disconnected, as I did for a stretch, or just doing whatever I wanted on a Saturday. After children, the scores started looking very different. I got this wrong for years. I tried to maintain an eight or a nine in 'work' while artificially bumping up 'family' and pretending I was getting enough sleep to score well on 'health'. It does not work like that. Time is finite, and you have to decide what takes the hit. For me, personal hobbies took a hit. I play tennis often here in Spain, but I play badly, and I have had to make peace with the fact that I will likely never have the spare hours required to get significantly better.

Moving the horizon

When we moved the family from Sweden to Marbella in 2018, the plan was to stay for two years. It was supposed to be a temporary break, an experiment in living somewhere warmer, eating better food, and seeing how it worked. We are still here. That decision is tied directly to how having children alters your time horizon. When you are twenty-five and working on commission-only sales at a PR agency, which I did against the advice of everyone around me, you think in quarters. You think about the next bonus, the next client, the next Friday night out. When you have kids, you are suddenly forced to think in decades. You start wondering what kind of environment they will be teenagers in. You think about how old you will be when they leave home, and what kind of relationship you want to have with them when they are adults. The focus shifts from the immediate sprint to a very long marathon.

Today, I spend my time building and investing. I am working on Anchor, which uses AI to help alienated fathers, a project that feels incredibly urgent when you understand how fragile the bond between a parent and child can be. I am also involved with Substrat, building infrastructure for AI developers, alongside a small number of angel investments and property projects. I tell the founders I work with exactly what Fredrik Bage told me years ago: you have to figure out what actually moves the needle and cut the rest out. I haven't got this perfectly figured out. I still occasionally catch myself staring at my phone during dinner, drafting a reply in my head that could easily wait until morning. But the difference is that now, I know exactly what it costs to look down at that screen.