Last night, we held the first ever Family Strategic Planning Session. It may have been somewhat prompted by my doing strategic planning for a client, but our purpose was clear: this little family needed to build a life we didn’t have to escape from. And if we were going to do that? Well, we needed to get serious about living differently. All work and no play had made us very dull indeed.
So, we started by listing the things that were important to us: time together, healthy food and healthy activities, being good pet parents, getting our “to do” list completed at pace and time for family and friends. There’s nothing special about the list, really. In fact, I’d wager that our list stacks up to most everyone’s without many differences. Determining what’s important to us genuinely was not hard.
The next part will be aligning our activities with what is important to us. First on the tactics list? No new projects. Honestly, that’s been on the list for awhile and we have generally respected it but yesterday we made a subtle, but substantial change. The main bathroom that needs renovation? It will not happen until we can both semi-retire and my husband can enjoy the project. Good. That’s one pressure valve released. The others? Really not that complicated but also focused on life over duty:
- Make some big meals that we can break down into freezer meals: These can be defrosted and deployed on any busy day so that we don’t have the added pressure of meal prep late in the day. In turn, this will allow us to commit to an hour or so of “couple time” in the evening, which is especially nice in summer. We enjoy grabbing a drink – alcoholic or not – and sitting on the deck or at the kitchen island and just discussing our days. Having that time is special and reducing meal prep time makes that easy.
- Reprioritize our “to do” list to the things that are most time-sensitive and then relaxing about the rest of the list. This one is super subtle but important. My husband has struggled with feeling like everything was a priority and therefore life was on big ole pressure cooker. Recognizing that only 1-2 items are a priority means he can relax a bit about the pace of work. Him relaxing means we can do a weekend away or a simple bike trip on a Saturday afternoon. That makes us both happy.
- Making time for a weekend away this summer and possibly a vacation away this winter: recognizing that we need time together as a couple and time with our friends is key to our building a life we don’t have to escape from. In the past, we just haven’t prioritized this much. I mean, there was work to do so if we could squeeze it in, maybe? Last night, we recognized that it was time to move on from the renovation phase of our life and back into the living phase. And that meant time for fun. Honestly, of all of the changes we discussed, this one will be the most difficult for us and the most rewarding. It will be very hard to persuade my husband to give up a weekend of work for fun, but I’m not about to let him wiggle his way out of this one.
Most importantly, though, we recognized that it was time to make a serious yet subtle change in our approach to our lives. We had been so busy doing and being responsible that we really just let our lives go a bit. Instead, we had comforted ourselves with the idea of “someday”. Life was going to magically slow down after we finished renovations, after we could both semi-retire, after the deck was built, after we had fully funded retirement, after… you get the picture. The truth is that life is what you make it and we were whittling away at some of the best years of our lives simply focused on the grind. That was – and is – no way to really live. Going forward, we need to keep ourselves honest, which may be the biggest challenge for us. Let’s face it, old habits die hard. But the incentive here? Well, it’s staring us right in the face: if we can really take ownership and create a life we don’t have to escape from, then don’t we get to simply enjoy life?
The Yuppie Homesteader 