My Sleep Schedule as a Full-Time Software Engineer with a Newborn
Date: 2025-08-06 | health | parent | productivity | reflect | sleep | software-engineer |
Everyone told me having a kid was hard. I believed them.
But I guess I didn't internalize what it would entail - the amount of new chores, constant attention, and changes to my sleep schedule.
I've been back at work as a full-time software engineer for a couple weeks with my newborn and want to share the sleep schedule that's been working for us so far.
Newborn Feeding Schedule
First we need to talk about how newborns eat because that dictates a large part of the new work you must do as a parent.
Newborns have tiny stomachs and are trying to grow a lot which means they need lots of nutrients but can't hold much at one time - thus frequent feedings. In practice this means they will typically eat every 2-3h. We've found this is often closer to 2h during the day and 4h at night.
This means there is no 6-8h block where parents can get all their sleep - the baby will wake up and need to be taken care of.
Sleeping at the same time didn't work for us
The first thing we tried was just to keep our normal sleep schedule - sleep at night, wake up in morning.
This meant my partner and I sleeping in the same room at the same time with the baby. This seems to be the default sleep pattern for new parents but it didn't work well for us because it meant neither parent got decent chunks of uninterrupted sleep. Instead neither of us got more than 3h of sleep at a time and we became irritable zombies who felt like it was going to be impossible to live like this.
After a week of tears, exasperation, and sleep deprivation we figured we had to try something new - ideally something that was fair and gave both parents decent sleep.
Sleeping in schedules has been much more sustainable.
We ended up experimenting with sleeping schedules and have eventually fallen into a routine that works for us.
My schedule:
- 2100-0300 - I sleep
- 0300-0700 - I take care of child and try to sleep when I can
- 0700-1000 - I take care of child and do chores / work when I can
- 1000-1800 - Uninterrupted work time
- 1800-2100 - I take care of child
My partner's schedule:
- 0300-1000 - Sleep
- 1000-1800 - Take care of child
- 1800-2100 - Rest
- 2100-0300 - Take care of child
This sleep schedule protects ~6h of sleep for each of us, though this usually ends up being closer to 5 if we account for chores, personal time, and actually falling asleep. This has made the whole situation feel a LOT more manageable and made it clear a lot of our feelings of doom were stemming from our sleep deprivation.
Our sleep schedule takes into account that I need to be at work in the morning and am a morning person while my wife can generally sleep in as she has a long maternity leave. I get my 6h in before the morning hits so when it does I'm fully rested and can take care of our kid and start working. Once my wife gets up at 1000, she takes the kid and I can log the rest of my hours without interruption - important as that's when meetings start popping up on my calendar.
This sleep schedule isn't getting me the 100 sleep scores I achieved before becoming a parent but it is regularly hitting 70-80 which is MUCH better than the 40-50 I had in those first couple weeks. We're now regularly getting 5-7 hours of decent sleep which makes everything feel a bit more possible.
Next
As a software engineer I find that sleep is immensely important for enabling me to solve problems and build robust code. When I'm sleep deprived I work far less effectively - moving slower and making more mistakes. So getting decent sleep is critical for me to perform.
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