Perhaps your child had a birthday recently. Or a school play. Or some smaller milestone you half-caught between other things.

And with it, you felt a moment: not sad exactly, more like startled that another one had passed you by. And the distance between the parent you want to be and who you've actually been this month suddenly felt more like a chasm.

Then Monday arrived. Nothing changed. Not because you didn't care. Because you didn't know where to start. And then the week happened, and that moment quietly disappeared.

You handle complexity for a living. You'd fix a situation like this at work. I spent years not applying that logic at home.

A moment of clarity, a general sense that something needs to shift, and then life takes over again. And part of the reason life takes over is that the clarity doesn't quite extend to knowing where and how to start fixing things. If it did, maybe you'd direct your energy more decisively.

What I found was that more effort and better intentions weren't really the answer. What helped was realising where the actual gap was - what I was doing or not doing that was making it hard to thrive at home, not just at work. Once I knew that, I could put my energy somewhere specific.

Several different areas make a credible claim to being the challenge. Time. Presence. Consistency. How much you're investing in being a better parent. Whether you're actually making memories. Each one feels urgent. Each one has a case for being where you start.

Getting the diagnosis right makes an enormous difference to what happens next. Here's a simple diagnostic: five questions, spend no more than two minutes on each, and by the end you'll know exactly where to start.

If five areas of your org were underperforming, you wouldn't divide your effort equally across all of them and hope something moved. You'd diagnose first. You'd work out which gap was doing the most damage, which one - fixed first - would make everything else easier to address.

Most of us haven't applied that same discipline at home. We either try to work on everything simultaneously - presence, time, consistency, investment, memories - and make real progress on none of it. Or we focus on the easiest thing and leave the hardest one untouched.

The five questions below each surface a different area. Answer all of them honestly. The discomfort is the data - don't skip the one that makes you want to negotiate with your own answer.

Open your calendar from last week. Count the protected, non-negotiable commitments to your family. Not intentions. Not "I'll try to make dinner." Actual blocked time - the kind you'd treat like a board meeting, that couldn't move without a real conversation.

What number did you get?

On an average evening at home, what percentage of the time is your phone within arm's reach? On the table, in your pocket, within a two-second grab. Not in another room. Not face-down on the counter. Within reach.

Be honest with yourself here..

Think of the last three specific things you promised your children. Not grand ones - small ones. "I'll be at pick-up." "We'll do that this weekend." "I'll come and see your sketch in 5 mins."

How many of those three actually happened?

When did you last deliberately invest in becoming a better parent? Not as a side effect of something else you were doing - but intentionally. A course, a book, some form of skill building, chosen and undertaken with the same care you'd bring to getting better at your job.

Take a moment with that one.

Think about the last significant memory-worthy moment you had with your family - a trip, a weekend, an occasion. How did you capture it? Not just photos gathering virtual dust in a smartphone camera roll. Something that you and your family did together, something you can - and will - go back to, revisit, and actually feel again.

When did you last do that deliberately?̀̀̀

Here's what each question is actually measuring.

Question one is a calendar audit. Your stated priorities either show up in your schedule or they remain intentions. If the time isn't protected, it gets absorbed by whatever arrives first. Unprotected time doesn't stay yours for long.

Presence debt is what question two surfaces. It's easy to believe you're present because you're in the room. The phone test is more honest. Your children notice where your attention actually goes, even when they don't say anything about it.

Trust is the real subject of question three. Your children aren't consciously keeping a record of broken commitments - but they are keeping one. Small promises that don't land compound quietly into a pattern. The pattern is what they feel, even when they can't name it.

Question four is about investment. Most senior professionals spend serious money getting better at their careers. Leadership programmes. Executive coaching. The thought of applying that same level of deliberate effort to being a parent rarely crosses the radar. Once you notice that gap, it's hard to unsee it.

Question five is about whether the moments that matter actually stick. Most Parent CEOs show up to the occasions. What's rarer is capturing them in a way you'll actually feel again - not just a camera roll full of photos that nobody opens, but something you did together that has a life beyond the day itself. That takes intention. Most of us leave it to chance.

The actual scores matter less than learning which one of them sits most uncomfortably with you. Because that's your first Parent CEO priority.

You probably flinched most at one of them. Or gave yourself the benefit of the doubt when the honest answer was less comfortable. That's worth paying attention to.

The other thing worth knowing: you don't need to fix all of it at once. In fact that's usually the wrong approach. Most of the time, getting one area right starts to shift the others. And once you know where to focus, you can move on it faster than you'd expect. It requires focus and effort. But the changes are stepwise and intuitive. And they work. I’ll be writing more on each of these in the weeks ahead.

What did you find most helpful - or surprising in today’s post? Email me and let me know!