I was curious about this passage from How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens:

[Niklas] Luhmann's only real help was a housekeeper who cooked for him and his children during the week, not that extraordinary considering he had to raise three children on his own after his wife died early. Five warm meals a week of course do not explain the production of roughly 60 influential books and countless articles.

As I am still figuring out how to fit my thoughts around my 8-year-old's desire for my attention (wonderful, time-limited opportunity that it is), I wanted to understand more about what that domestic situation might have been like.

It took a bit of digging, but eventually I found out that Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) and Ursula von Walter (couldn't find her birth year; I think she died in 1977, although some pages report 1971) had three children:

• Veronika Luhmann-Schröder (1961-)
• Clemens Luhmann (1963-)
• Jörg Luhmann (1963-)

which would've made them around 14-16 years (+/- a little, couldn't find months) old when their mother died in 1977. [source]​

So yeah, teenagers, whole 'nother kettle of fish.

The kiddo will be a teenager eventually and I'll miss these days, so I might as well make the most of them. Maybe reading/thinking/writing in small bits can help me still feel like I get to learn things I want to learn about, in addition to all the random Minecraft and Star Wars trivia I've been picking up. I am starting to be able to have a little more time to put together thoughts, so that's encouraging. Trust the process and just keep feeding the slipbox, people say. I hope I can get to it before things scramble my brain even further. We'll see in a few years.

Also, Niklas Luhmann's children ended up fighting for years in court over ownership and copyright,[source]​ particularly over his slipbox. He had transferred all his copyrights to Veronika in 1995 before his death in 1998 (71 years old) and didn't want his intellectual legacy split up, which the courts upheld in 2004.[source]​ It's tough when family fights over money, and even tougher if they're fighting for such a long time in the courts.

Anyway, still looking for more figures to learn from. Among other thoughts in the Art of Manliness podcast on treating your to-do list as a river, Oliver Burkeman pokes a little fun at the YouTube productivity influencer culture: "So much of that is dominated by young men who are still a few years away from having kids and telling you how to exactly nail your morning." He goes on to say that it's nice to have maybe 3 or 4 hours of focused time, but you shouldn't strive to be walled off and completely uninterruptible. It's good to be able to go with the flow. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf wrote about the challenges of chasing a fleeting idea, and the necessity for women to have your own money and a room with a lock on the door. Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Motherhood and Creativity felt mostly like people stretched almost to the point of breaking, but still managing to (mostly) survive thanks to the people around them.

I appreciate the homeschooling group we often hang out with. It's nice to know other people grappling with similar challenges.

I'm lucky that my thinking activities are discretionary. Neither food nor shelter depends on my being able to write code or think thoughts at this particular moment. I'm learning to go with the flow. I draft this as the kiddo is presumably sleeping in the other room. She had sent me off earlier with, "I think I'll try sleeping on my own tonight."