Family Meetings and Emails

The primary mission of ParentData is to give parents the tools and data to make their own best decisions. When I talk about data, or decision tools, I try to do it in general. The Family Firm, which this post is very much in the tradition of, is all about using a broad set of workplace tools to make your family life better.

I want to tell you how to think about data and how to solve your own issues. Mostly I don’t want to tell you how I do things, because our families are different, our preferences are different, and I do not want to presume that what works for us will work for you.

Today, though, I’m making an exception, realizing that sometimes it is better to show than to tell.   

In honor of the start of fall, when many of us re-do our routines and rethink our processes, I’m going to describe the various ways our family tries to keep things organized. Maybe you’ll come away thinking this is nuts. But maybe you’ll see something you like and could implement — in your own way — with your family.

There are two core parts of how my husband and I try to keep things happy and structured: emails and meetings. There are also a few tools, and I’ll get to that at the end. 

Component 1: Emails

The cornerstone structure in my family comes down to two weekly emails. This is probably the most important way that we make things work, and avoid conflict. It’s a total of perhaps 30 minutes a week, all in, but delivers enormous value.

The first email is from me. It comes on the weekend, and it goes to everyone — Jesse, the kids, and our nanny, Clare. In this email, I literally list the days of the week and any notes about them.  

An example…

• Monday: 
  • Normal school day for kids. I’ll be home by 5 for veggies [Editor’s note: We try to eat veggies together at 5, so that people eat some vegetables]. Dinner is chicken and rice — Clare, can you set up the rice? I can do the rest. 
• Tuesday
  • Normal school, with sports for Penelope after school. I’ll be home for dinner but not much before — it’s pancakes, I can take care of that. Kids: chocolate chips or plain? Jesse: are you home for dinner or not? 

The rest of the email is the other days. Sometimes there are questions, either for the kids (like the pancakes) or for each other (often I need Jesse to tell me what train he is getting home on and what he wants to do for our Thursday-night date). If one of us is traveling, especially me, the email gets a little more complicated. 

Sometimes it gets really complicated, like the early summer week when one day involved picking up one kid early from camp, going to the doctor, bringing them back, getting the other kid, taking them to a dance performance where everyone else would meet us, etc.  

The expectation with this email is that everyone will read it and reply with questions, answers to my questions, or other edits. 

Why is this so important?  

Many weeks, it actually is not. The schedule is often predictable, and in many cases it wouldn’t be hard to, say, text about setting up dinner. When this really matters is when it saves us from conflict in the moment. 

Case in point: Generally our kids walk together to camp. One week this summer, the older one was away, and I had forgotten this would mean someone needed to get the younger one to camp in the morning. Because of the timing of camp and our work schedules, this was possible but required moving some things around. By noting this on the weekend and working through the details, it was easy to figure out the solution. However, if we had gotten up Monday morning and realized that one of us had to reschedule something important at the last minute to accommodate this, at least one of us (probably both) would have been upset. 

Basically, this is a small-scale version of my general advice that people bring forward conflict on purpose. If we deal with things in a cool moment when there is time to plan, it is just much better.

The second cornerstone email is about the weekend. Jesse does this one — he boomerangs it for himself on Wednesday mornings. Here, he proposes a weekend schedule and we go back and forth a bit until we settle. The value here is in part making sure that we hit all the things we want for the weekend: he gets some alone time one morning, I get my run time, we get some time all together with the kids, etc.  We try to spend Sunday mornings together as a family doing something (usually, hiking) so this is an opportunity to figure that out.

Again: it’s a deliberate way to make sure we craft a schedule that makes everyone happy and avoids, say, the conflict that would come if I woke up and announced without warning that I’d be leaving for three hours Sunday morning to do my long run. 

(When I mentioned to Jesse I was writing about this, he wanted to make sure I noted that he also creates detailed calendar invites for all weekend activities, including links to Google map directions. Honestly, I think this is insane, but it does prove that there are people in the world – and, apparently, in my house – more neurotic than I am.) 

Component 2: Agendas

There is some data pointing to the importance of family meetings — or relationship “check-ins” — in improving marital satisfaction. One of my central pieces of advice for new parents (one that we did not implement when we had a baby) is to schedule check-in meetings early on. When you are not sleeping, not eating well, and panicked about every little thing, it is difficult to make the time to actually connect on what would make life easier. If you schedule the meetings in advance, you’re more likely to have them.

My kids are much older now, and we have a fair amount of time to talk to each other, including weekly date nights and many car trips where the children are listening to audiobooks. So we do not do much detailed meeting scheduling. What we do use are agendas.  

Basically, when something comes up that needs more than a simple yes or no, we add it to the agenda for an upcoming date, or car trip, or something else. I just took a look at the agenda for tonight’s date. It includes evaluating an activity for an upcoming trip and talking about Chris Pepper’s recent ParentData piece on discussing porn with children (parenting older kids: a delight). 

What this saves us from is the thing where one person decides to bring up a conversation at a time when the other person is just trying to, say, scroll their phone or watch Netflix before bed. That’s not the moment I want to start in on the right time to discuss online pornography. 

Our kids are also, at times, involved with the agendas. This is not always welcome. On a recent car trip, a child was heard to scream, “I’m not carsick! I just don’t want to talk about any more agendas!!”  

Tools: Not the most important thing

There are many (often tongue-in-cheek) articles written about families who use business tools in their household. I myself have talked about using Asana for task management, and about the value of shared Google calendars. These have value! The shared calendars in particular solve a lot of problems by giving visibility. We have a meal planning app, Paprika, that we use to coordinate menus.

Just like at work, though, the tools only go so far. For us, the emails and agendas — the active, rather than passive, visibility — are the more valuable parts. 

Maybe this seems crazy! As I’m writing it, it does seem a little bananas. But I couldn’t (and wouldn’t want to) live without it. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, there is a weekly email to write.

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