[campbellmorgan]

If you are an essential part of your startup as, for example CTOs are in very early stage startups, you may find it difficult to completely detach for more than a few weeks especially if the business is negotiating a complicated part of its development.

There is much good advice here but I would add a few things that I have not seen in other comments. My advice is not for people who are employees as I believe they should take at a minimum their entire statutory allowance, but for founders with a greater stake in the success of the business:

- although the first few weeks are certainly the most challenging especially if you end up staying on in hospital for a few days, there will be many challenges over the entire first year unless you have excellent family (ie grandmother) help - so pace yourself and your team's expectation of your involvement.

- Plan to be completely absent for the first few weeks and adjust your team's expectations accordingly, but then optimise asynchronous communication of all but the most pressing issues from that point on. This helps if your business is remote because it's likely you will already be successfully using asynchronous communication through tickets / slack / email.

- While it would have been great to spend my downtime watching series, early infancy tends to give you a lot of time at unexpected hours and it can actually end up being quite painless to put in 2-3 hours of problem solving or pull request reviews. These can make the difference between a team heading radically off path and staying on track.

- If you can (ie if you're not the one breastfeeding -- that's totally consuming and you won't be able to do anything) try and distribute some of your leave later because babies get more engaging every extra day they are out of the womb!

Good luck!