As you know, Scott and I both have full time office jobs. They are both jobs that we work more than 40 hours a week and both jobs require us to stare at our computers all day. I work in a cubical with no view. Scott works in an office with a large window. I drive North and Scott drives South. Our house was purchased before he had a job but somehow we managed to split the difference between our two offices nearly perfectly. At different times during the quarter, Scott is busier than I am but there are times in the quarter that I am absolutely slammed and don’t return home from the office until after 10 PM. Right now is one of those times. I will try and come home earlier but I do end up working from home. Friday night, I found myself still sending emails and reports an midnight. Our work schedules could be an area of frustration and discouragement. Instead, we are aware and working together to make it all work out.
We asked around to find out how couples work with each other on their calendars and we’ve discussed if their ideas would work for us. Some couples write everything on a calendar and they are responsible to know that if it is on the calendar than it is set in stone. They also know to consult the calendar before scheduling anything else. Other couples will just fly by the seat of their pants and call whenever something comes up and hope it works out. And other couples will have the wife “own” their calendar. None of those options worked for us. So we came up with another idea.
Every Sunday night, after the girls have gone to bed, we pull-out our laptops and a calendar. We go through our work schedules together, so that we know when the other has meetings and won’t be available. We’ll discuss the time we both need to be at the office each day, or when we have conference calls that we have to take from home. If the girls have a doctor, dentist or school activity, we schedule who will participate or shuttle around. I’ll remind Scott of the girls’ schedules and we’ll determine then who will pick them up each day. During this inventory we will also determine what activities we’re going to aim for during the week, what nights are free to knock items off of our to do list and if either of us have any ideas for fun family outings or a date night. He makes notes on his calendar, I write it down in my notebook that I ALWAYS have with me, plus I write it down on a calendar that we keep next to our bed.
During this time, we will also look ahead and determine if there is anything coming up that we need to schedule time off work for, or if we want to fit in a camping trip with friends, or when we should have friends over for game/movie night. We’ll also come up with our list of “want to do’s” for the summer and determine if we need to make any reservations and who should be in charge of what. This way, the summer doesn’t all of a sudden end and we look back having done NOTHING that we wanted to do.
We allow for change on the schedules. In fact, something changes every single week.
Do you schedule or fly by the seat of your pants?
