The trouble when you have a job like mine is it's your social life as well, so I need to actually [find] something to do in my downtime when my kids are at school.
The focus of our family life was homework and what was for dinner; getting to ballet rehearsal and getting my brother to soccer.
Too often, tributes to the home-cooked meal assume every family has a schedule that gets everyone home by 5:30 P.M. And too many recipes treat cooking as a solitary pursuit that requires the cook - still most often Mom - to take time away from other family interactions and chores.
Basically, I am a night owl. My wife is an early bird, so she goes to bed around 9:30, and my kids are in bed about 8. So, if I am home, I will usually start writing about 9:30 and go till about 12:30 or 1:30, depending on what my energy level is.
I love my job and I love my children. It's really about figuring out your schedules and getting everything down that you need to do and sticking to your plan.
I've got great people who handle my schedule, and everything does revolve around the children. If there's a parents' night or an Easter bonnet parade or a Nativity play, whatever it might be, then I plan everything around that.
We have the Google family calendar. Before a week starts, my wife and I sit down to decide who's driving who to school or when can we go out on a date.
It's very important to us, family, and the balance of family within the band is probably the most important. Metallica is important, but when you have your wife and your kids, and you need to maintain that and keep the peace, it's important to work around the schedule of the kids' schools.
It's such a weird thing to try to plan a baby around a TV season. There's a three-month or four-month window in the summertime to have a baby and hang out with it a little bit before hopefully going back to work, so we were just very lucky.
For me, making schedules are critical to make sure we attend to all the needs of the kids and our family. After adding everyone's schedule on the calendar, I make sure that every day I have some sacred time for myself so I can recharge.
I like to write in the mornings, so I try to protect 9 A.M. - 12 P.M. for me. I can drop our older two kids at school then write for a few hours.
I go to bed when the kids go to bed because I get up when they get up at 5.
We turn off the TV, video games and computer - except for homework - during the week. The TV's reserved for Friday night, Saturday and Sunday just because that's the time to do homework, and it makes it that much less chaotic in our house.
I'm real adamant that, when we have family time scheduled, that we stick to it.
I've created an internal rule that Sunday is off-limits unless I put it on the schedule myself. That's family time.
