Jack Barrett 
I want to be upfront about something before I get into this: I have not been to every great pizza place in Chicago. The list of spots I keep meaning to get to is long, it keeps growing, and I have two young kids which means spontaneous restaurant decisions no longer exist in my life … Read more
I spent a long time trying to meal plan properly before I accepted that I was using the wrong definition of “properly.” Proper meal planning, as I understood it, meant sitting down on Sunday with a list of seven distinct dinners, cross-referencing ingredients, building a shopping list, and executing the week with something resembling intentionality. … Read more
Last Tuesday my kids had Tombstone pizza for dinner and I felt nothing. No guilt, no apology, no mental asterisk. I slid it out of the oven, cut it into rectangles, put it on their plates, and sat down to eat it myself, and it was fine. It was, in fact, good. It took eleven … Read more
I spent several years professionally building systems that made complex operations run more smoothly. Intake processes, handoff protocols, accountability structures, escalation paths. I’m reasonably good at this. People pay me to do it. Then I came home and couldn’t figure out why we kept running out of dish soap. The dish soap thing bothered me … Read more
Every Sunday around 8 PM, after the kids are down, my wife and I sit on the couch and have what I can only describe as a very mild business meeting about our lives. It started as an experiment. It’s been going long enough now that skipping it produces a noticeably worse week. This was … Read more
My oldest figured out that I don’t have a strong position on whether the hall light “counts” as a nightlight, and he has been exploiting this ambiguity for eight months. He’s five. He is operating with the strategic clarity of someone who has done a thorough threat assessment and identified the weakest point in the … Read more
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something through them, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to things I actually use or would buy myself. I want to be upfront: stretching before bed did not transform my life. It didn’t unlock some deep sleep state, … Read more
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something through them, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to things I actually use or would buy myself. For years I treated a 20-minute workout the way I treated the small coffee: a consolation prize. What you do … Read more
Disclosure: Links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy something through them, I get a small commission at no cost to you. This is not medical advice — talk to your doctor, not a tired dad with a supplement habit. There’s a version of me from five years ago who would have a … Read more
There’s an appointment I forgot to schedule for six weeks. Not a big one. A routine thing — one of those items that lives on the “I should do that” list in my head, below “call back about the thing” and above “figure out what that smell is in the car.” It sat there for … Read more