“Congratulations, Neil!”
I was sitting across from the SVP of HR at Walmart when he offered me his hand and a sheet of paper with all the terms of my new promotion spelled out. I shook his hand and left his office doing mental cartwheels down the hall.
This was it!
The dream job.
More money, bigger team, fancier title, more interesting work.
And more actual work, too.
Because isn’t that how promotions usually work?
A few more meetings. A few more hours. A few more business trips. A bigger job isn’t just a bigger paycheck. It’s got more responsibility, too.
With the job offer in hand I popped my head into the office of one of my mentors at the company and said:
“Guess what! I got the big promotion.”
“Congratulations!” he said. “Are you going to accept it?”
His simple question caught me off guard.
“Well, it feels like a slam dunk,” I replied, with a bit of a confused look in my eyes, wondering what he was getting at. “Everything improves here — salary, benefits, title. Great for future employability, too. If I get turfed I have a nice ‘top line’ on my resumé. A good benchmark for going somewhere else. I feel like I should sign this right now and head straight back to the SVP’s office.”
“Go ahead and sign it,” he said with smile. “But it’s a big job! You’ll be leading a large team and on the road a lot. So, before you hand it back in, make sure you take the contract home, share it with your wife, and write up another contract, too. A family contract. One between you and your partner. The company is changing all your terms, aren’t they? So make sure you revisit all your home terms, too.”
His message rang a bell.
All of us have contracts with our employers.
Very few of us have contracts with our families.
We have detailed sheets of paper spelling out exactly what we’re supposed to do on the job. But we have no similar piece of paper for our families, do we?
That night I went home and sat down with my wife Leslie and we thought writing up a family contract was a good idea. We spent a long time that night discussing and writing out the terms of the contract and it has four bullet points that we still use today.
Number of nights away
It breaks my heart to miss bath time. Combing my son’s wet hair. Reading books under the covers. Goodnight kisses. There are a finite number of these nights in our lives so it should hurt to miss them. The biggest thing for Leslie and I to discuss was how many nights I was going to be away per year. We came up with a number that worked for us and began tracking it. As my work migrated from Walmart over the years into travelling to give speeches we held onto this number. (The number itself is up to you but for us it was 4 overnights per month during the school year and 0 during the summer which also held with it the sum total of 40 nights away per year. Still a lot! And painful in many ways. But, to our mind, about 10% of the total year.) What’s important I think is choosing a number that’s relatively easy to break down per month so if you have a really busy month (say, a big conference out of town or across-the-world trip or something) then you know you have to say no to a business trip next month to make up for it. Can doing this hamper your career? Sure. But can trips away hamper your family? Absolutely. Let’s not pretend you can have everything. Come up with a number that works for your family and stick with it.
Family Day
We decided it was important for us to have one Family Day every week. Normally these are on the weekend but if I’m away during the weekend we’ll get a ‘make up date’ during the week. Anyway: what’s a Family Day? A full day with no cellphones, no extended family, no friends, nothing. Just me, my wife, our little kids and zero interruptions all day. We had so many weekends blurring by in a smear of gymnastics, birthday parties, and extended family dinners. Fun weekends! But no deep family time. Is this tough to do? Of course! Think about how many days you have with a sports practice or somebody’s big birthday. Those are beautiful things. But prioritizing one Family Day a week creates energy, helps you be choosy about what activities you’re signing up for, and helps avoid saying a passive yes to every invitation.
NNO/LNO
This is a fun one. Once a week I get an NNO. Neil’s Night Out. Watch out, town! Seriously though, whatever I want to do that night, I do it. Dinner with a friend, live music by myself, spinning in circles in empty parking lots. It’s my night off. I can do whatever I want. What’s an LNO? That would be Leslie’s Night Out. She gets one a week, too. Energy is the priceless commodity here. It’s too easy to crash into Netflix comas on the couch once the kids are in bed. “Oh, look, we have only three Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts left!” NNO/LNO helps us plan and prioritize ourselves and our other relationships, too. I feel like a great father and husband before and after I go away because I get energy from those nights. Plus, I get my own stories and experiences to bring back into the home while continuing to develop my life as an individual. The best part is there’s no guilt, since my wife has a night off, too. So in a way these two nights “pay for” each other. She can go to a yoga class, work on her pictures in a coffee shop, try my spinning parking lot thing, whatever. The two nights end up feeling like a gift to each other, which helps, though sometimes we do find we need to push each other to take them.
Special time
As our family expanded the number of relationship permutations expanded exponentially. With one partner there were two possible relationship permutations (me solo, me and Leslie), with one kid there were four (me solo, me and Leslie, me and my kid, all of us), with two kids there were suddenly eight (me solo, me and Leslie, me and kid one, me and kid two, me and both kids, me with Leslie and kid one, me with Leslie and kid two, all of us). You get the idea. The point here isn’t to fastidiously ensure we have time with every combination but we do think about every 1 on 1 combination having some ‘special time’ each week. And yes, this includes me and Leslie. Getting a weekly date night in as our family has expanded has been vital to showing up as the partners and parents we want to be.
So: That’s the contract I have with my partner.
We printed it up, signed it (actually signed it!), and keep it in a file.
The goal is to have a contract in a desk at home that creates a healthy tension with the contract you have in a desk at work.
Everybody will have different terms, of course. Maybe you include points about school drop-off and pickup, whether or not you work from home on weekends, or who does the garbage. Again, it’s whatever works for you.
And I will add: I didn’t tell my employer I had this contract. I didn’t wave it in their face and say, “Sorry, I can’t travel next week.” But the home contract helped me articulate my values, which enabled speedier decision-making, and a better acceptance of the decisions I did make later on in my new role. I didn’t sweat every business trip. I simply counted them towards an annual number. Plus, if I cheated on one of the bullet points, I knew I had to make it up. Missed Family Day one week because I was in China? Well that means two the next week.
Now, as you think about a contract that works with you and your partner, let’s make sure we remember that the goal is never to be perfect.
It’s simply to be a little better than before.
I’d love to see your contract if you’re willing to share at neil@globalhappiness.org
Too hardcore? Check out this video on the power of the ‘quarterly relationship meeting’ instead:
An earlier version of this article appeared in Fast Company