It can be hard in the moment to think of anything else. You have lunches to make. Practices to get to. Birthday parties to plan. Work to do. Childhoods to survive.

Having kids is so overwhelming that your ability to conceive of two weeks from now, let alone the future, is severely compromised. This isn’t entirely a bad thing—it’s good to be in the moment, to not get too far ahead of yourself.

But at the same time, you do need to make sure that you consider more than just this moment.

The baseball player Anthony Rendon has talked about how he’s needed to balance optimizing not just for his professional career but his goals as a parent. “Even if the season doesn’t work out or the next four years don’t work out,” he said recently, “I’m planning for taking care of my kids when they get older. Hip surgeries, wrist surgeries, ankle surgeries … I want to play with them when they are 10, 12, 15 years old.”

You have to make sure that your short-term decisions—I’m too tired to go to the gym, these pills help me sleep, these are my peak earning years—don’t come at the expense of your long term goals. We’ve talked about how at the end of your life you’ll judge your success based on how much time your kids want to spend with you. Well, amidst the busyness and all you have to get done now, are you making decisions that are conducive to that? Physically—like, are you going to be around for that? And more figuratively, are you making the deposits and building the connections necessary for that to happen?

If Rendon extends his playing career a few years but it comes at the expense of being able to ride bikes with his teenagers or lift up his grandchildren, he’ll likely consider it a bad bargain…even if it increases his net worth. And so it goes for us with our own career and lifestyle choices.