Planning your day with your partner
[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? So inevitably when you're an adult, you often are sharing your life with someone else that may be a partner or a really close friend that you keep in sync with or someone else.
[00:00:30] Right? And what do you do when your schedules are really, really different? Let's say that they have a more rigid work structure that affects how they, you know, lead their everyday lives, while you might have a remote job and have a much more blended approach to your work life and your daily life. Now, there are a lot of ways to handle that, I'm sure.
[00:00:58] But here's one that [00:01:00] I've been trying out very intentionally, and it's been working really well. So my spouse has a fairly structured, fairly rigid work life that is very traditional. He has to be in the office on most days and his hours are very traditional. Whereas I work from home, I'm a remote worker, and you know, I have a lot of freedom with my schedule and how I approach my day.
[00:01:28] So we found ourselves in a situation where I was really not taking a blended approach to my life because I was trying to spend time with my partner and making sure that we have time for each other, and that was taking a toll on not just our daily home life in terms of like chores and things we need to do, but it was kind of taking a toll on me because I tend to chafe under a traditional work structure, really.[00:02:00]
[00:02:00] So here's what we've been trying. and it's been working pretty well for us: every single day in the morning after we've done our yoga, we sit down at our dining table with our planners, our actual physical notebook planners – I have one, my spouse has one – and we plan our day together. You know, a lot of us do talk about our day with each other, but this is like almost a real formalized version of that.
[00:02:33] But I actually find that we really enjoy it. I like to write down all the hours of the day on a fresh leaf in my notebook and I'll time block to schedule out basically all the meetings and every non-negotiable item that I have in my work day and my spouse will do the same. And as we do that, we'll sort of update each other on our work life.
[00:02:58] You know, like, here's what's [00:03:00] going on right now. Here's this project I'm working on. Here's this thing that's been bugging me. Here's something I gotta figure out. And it's just a really nice way to debrief each other on what's been going on in our work life in the morning when it's sort of top of mind as well.
[00:03:16] Then inevitably, you know, we'll reach the point in our schedules as we're time blocking, that we reach the end of the workday, and then we'll talk about, Hey, you know, what are we gonna do for dinner? What are the things that we need to do for our home life and our house today? So, for example, we know that we need to schedule an appointment to get the tires switched out on our car for spring when we need to remove the winter tires and put the summer tires on.
[00:03:47] So I might be like, Hey, we need to get this done, you know, when does it make sense to do it? Do you wanna do it? Should I do it and we'll talk it out together and we'll make a plan. This means that [00:04:00] there's a far better balance in terms of who's doing what, and we're both also more acutely aware of the load that
[00:04:09] each person has essentially, right? And so that also means that if I see, hey, my spouse has a really, really busy work life this week, I can take a little bit more on, on the home front. Whereas if I'm really busy, he might take more on and we can balance each other and also keep each other accountable while also, you know, just spending more time together and bonding over the other aspects of our life.
[00:04:36] So that's been a technique that's been kind of working really well for us and I'm really enjoying it. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.