029: Balancing Work and Household Responsibilities

59 minutes
Keeping up with the home can be very stressful, especially when you're working a job, trying to make time for your family, and pursuing a passion on the side. Running a household efficiently is typically lower on the list of priorities, yet when not giving the attention it needs, can cause everything else to feel like it's unraveling.

In this episode, Ben and Rachel talk through some principles that will help you to feel more on top of the household responsibilities, so you can achieve greater focus and attention in the areas of your life that matter most.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/intheboat/intheboat29.mp3Download: MP3 (57.0 MB)

Keeping up with the home can be very stressful, especially when you’re working a job, trying to make time for your family, and pursuing a passion on the side. Running a household efficiently is typically lower on the list of priorities, yet when not giving the attention it needs, can cause everything else to feel like it’s unraveling.

In this episode, Ben and Rachel talk through some principles that will help you to feel more on top of the household responsibilities, so you can achieve greater focus and attention in the areas of your life that matter most.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

The house is like a business—there are a lot of moving parts, and if something doesn’t get taken care of, other things suffer.
If you focus less on whether or not responsibilities are split up fairly, it will be easier for you to not feel frustrated and bitter.
Recognize the feeling of imbalance and make a point to have a conversation about it.
Get into a rhythm of maintaining things and you’re going to experience a lot more focus.
Where you can be more efficient and keep things cleaner more consistently, you’re doing yourself a favor in other areas of your life.
You may be able to produce more value with your time than how much it costs to do a household item.
It’s never too early to give kids some kind of responsibility.
The more stuff you can get out of your brain, the easier it’s going to be for you to focus on other things and be creative about the way you manage your schedule.
We put so much pressure on ourselves to do it all, but we have to realize we can’t do it all.
A lot of our expectations come from past experiences.
The more grace you have with yourself and the more determined you are not to give up, the sooner you’ll be able to get into a routine.

Show Notes

02:12 Ben: I’ve been working on an idea that’s kind of related to what we’re talking about today. Our lives are basically split up into three main categories. Those categories are relationships, like your family and your friends, yourself and taking care of yourself, like getting rest, exercise, and downtime, and then work. Work can be separated out into many different things. It can be your job, something you’re pursuing as a passion like a business you’re trying to build, raising your kids, or taking care of the bills. Work is the parent category for this, but it’s also something separate. In today’s episode, I’m talking about the work that we do building a business or at our job and also the household stuff we have to keep up.

Defining Household Responsibilities

03:24 I want to define what household responsibilities are. For me, it’s things like tidying and cleaning the house, caring for the children—especially in the beginning, that takes a lot of time—laundry, cooking, and bills.
03:46 Rachel: Picking up after the kids who, after you’ve nagged a billion times, still don’t pick up after themselves.
03:55 Ben: Going and getting groceries and all of that stuff falls under the category of household responsibilities. Basically, it’s everything it takes to keep a house running smoothly. It can fall apart so easily.

The house is like a business.

There are a lot of moving parts, and if something doesn’t get taken care of, other things suffer.

04:28 Rachel: If I don’t meal plan and then I go to the grocery store, it’s like having this target and not even hitting the outside rim. You have all of these groceries, but you have nothing to cook for dinner.
04:52 Ben: I got nervous recently when I went to the store. We have a house of six boys, so don’t be alarmed by this one way or the other, but we have a budget of $250 a week. A few days ago, I went to the store and got all the groceries, everything I thought we needed, and I thought I went a little bit overboard. I thought I was getting a little bit more than I needed, and I got to the check out and it ended up being $150. That’s $100 less than we normally spend. I felt nervous. “Oh no.” We shop on Wednesday, so I thought, “We’re going to get to Saturday and we’re going to need something, and I’m going to have to take an emergency trip to the store.”
06:25 Rachel: In our household, there’s only time for one trip a week. All of the produce we buy has to last us the entire week, because there’s no extra time for that kind of stuff.
06:42 Ben: There’s a lot of moving parts. Would you add anything to that list of household responsibilities?
06:49 Rachel: I don’t think so. There are other responsibilities, like grooming the children and having weekly meetings about what’s coming up. That kind of thing.
07:09 Ben: Household responsibilities are not things like having meals together and quality time with your family. Household responsibilities are strictly the nuts and bolts of keeping things running.

Responsibility is Not 50/50

07:24 We’re approaching this from our experience. Everybody’s family is set up differently. From our experience, as spouses, you can’t split it 50/50. It’s impossible. You can try to get it as minute as you possibly can, and there’s no way to split it 50/50.
07:47 Rachel: There are some weeks that Ben does more and some weeks that I do more. There are always different responsibilities that come along.
07:55 Ben: Right, and it’s not just that. Sometimes things go wrong. We had five other kids show up to our house the other day, neighborhood kids, saying, “Can we come over and play?” In our home, we value being a home where people feel welcome. We want to be a place where our kids’ friends feel like they can come over and enjoy themselves. That also makes it more difficult to do anything around the house. You can’t split it 50/50, and it’s better not to think of it in terms of percentages or who has more of the workload. When you think that way and get too focused on how much work my spouse has vs. how much work I have, you can very easily feel like you’re being slighted.
09:15 You can start to feel frustrated and bitter. It’s complex. Sometimes, it has to do with feeling frustrated that we don’t have enough time to do our work, so when we’re doing the household stuff, we feel frustrated because we think, “If I didn’t have to do this, if I didn’t have to pick up his slack, I would have more time to get my work stuff done that I really need to do.”
09:43 Rachel: In the different weeks we have as creative people, there are some weeks where I work really hard to keep the house tidy, but those weeks don’t always line up with the weeks when Ben works really hard to keep the house tidy. The same is true for Ben. There are some weeks when he works really hard and I don’t work as hard. It makes the spouse feel like, “I’m doing all of this stuff on my own, by myself. This sucks.”
10:16 Ben: That’s true. Sometimes moods come into play, and I might not work as hard one week as I do another. That’s translating into not keeping up the household stuff as well.

If you focus less on whether or not responsibilities are split up fairly, it will be easier for you to not feel frustrated and bitter.

10:46 Rachel: It’s so hard, though. Both of us want a clean and tidy house and we want things to run smoothly, and it’s really hard to balance all of the stuff and not feel like we’re taking more of that load on. It might be especially hard for women, because when our kids hurt themselves or they’re sad, they need us. The kids are always coming to me and the baby is always wanting to be held by me. I’ve always got a kid on my hip while I’m picking things up, and that stuff starts to build up. We have to be careful in the way that we think about how much we’re doing.
11:45 Ben: If you haven’t had a really straightforward conversation, sometimes you can assume that your spouse/partner isn’t taking care of their responsibilities just because they’re being lazy. There might be something more going on there that you don’t know. I like to assume first that there’s something going on that I don’t know about before I assume laziness. With Rachel, that’s almost never the case. She doesn’t have that in her personality. Sometimes, she feels overwhelmed, but sometimes it does feel out of balance. It’s okay to recognize the feeling of imbalance and make a point to have a conversation.
12:36 Rachel: We did this recently. I said, “I’m planning all the meals, going to the grocery store, volunteering at the schools, and all of this stuff.” We had to reevaluate all of these things, even if it was just temporary. I was starting to feel really overwhelmed with all of the responsibility. Taking three kids, three and younger, to the store is not exactly fun. Trying to plan a meal with kids running wild in the background is hard stuff.
13:11 Ben: With circumstances sometimes changing on a dime, you often have to renegotiate those things. It’s good to have a regularly scheduled time when you’re going to discuss these things, and it helps to know that there’s a place for that discussion. It’s also good, when you’re feeling like things are out of balance, to say, “Hey, I want to set up a time to meet.”
13:35 Maybe your meeting isn’t until three days later, but it’s something you really want to talk about. See if you can set up a time in the next few days to sit down and have a conversation about this. That way, you can at least get your feelings out and you can be heard and understood. That’s way better than getting to the breaking point and having an argument about it.
14:09 Rachel: Then your tempers flare and you say things you don’t mean.
14:15 Ben: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like this specific topic is the one we’ve fought about the most.
14:22 Rachel: Oh yeah. I’m sure it is. Early on, it’s really helpful to talk about things like, “Who’s going to do the bulk of mowing the lawn?” if you have a lawn. “Who’s going to do the bulk of taking out the trash?” You can share those things, but I prefer vacuuming or doing dishes to taking out gross garbage. It’s not because that’s a man’s job or anything, but it’s because I enjoy washing dishes. It’s weird.
15:05 Ben: I actually enjoy mowing the lawn, when I have time set aside to do that. Open up that conversation, and you might be surprised at what you find. “Oh! You actually enjoy doing that? I’ll let you do it then.” Sometimes, there are going to be things that you or your spouse are better at doing.

Play to your strengths, but be careful not to let things fall out of balance.

15:40 Rachel: When we were first married, Ben and I had a discussion about cleaning stuff. I said, “I’m not cleaning toilets. That’s your territory.” That was before we had all these boys, so it makes sense now. Ben’s a man, so he’s got to teach these boys proper bathroom etiquette.
16:08 Ben: We’ve been talking about the balance when you have a spouse. If you have a family but you’re raising your children on your own, that’s a whole other thing. You’re having to take on a whole lot of that yourself.

Maintenance Creates Focus

16:54 I think about this in a couple of different senses. Pretend that you have a bunch of different plates spinning. If you’re talented enough to get them spinning on that stick in the first place, the worst thing you could do is to sit and wait until you see one of the plates wobbling to try to get it spinning again. The best thing you can do is to go around and have some kind of rhythm to keep them all spinning, whether it looks like it needs it or not. That has to do with procrastination for me. If I wait until something needs to be done, like the plants are dying and look really sad, you may be able to do it in the same amount of time it would have taken to maintain it. You may be able to get it done more quickly.
18:05 When I let a mess build up a little bit and then I clean it all up at once, I think, “I spent less time cleaning up that mess one time than I would have maintaining the tidiness of the house over the course of an entire week.” What’s really true is that that mess, those things that aren’t being taken care of, are working on your subconscious, and they’re keeping you from being as focused and productive in other areas of your life.

Get into a rhythm of maintaining things and you’re going to experience a lot more focus.

It’s not going to distract you as much or nag on your subconscious.

18:47 Rachel: It’s ironic because we just did a photoshoot for some of my website stuff, and our bedroom was out of control messy. We have our office set up in this nook area inside our bedroom, but there was never a good photo opportunity because it was so messy. We were throwing things on the bed and rearranging things, not even cleaning stuff up. We could have saved so much time doing that business session in a clean room as opposed to this room that had built up. I don’t know how long it’s been since we tidied our bedroom.
19:38 Ben: Last night, Rachel went to a book club meeting, and I took the opportunity to clean up the house. There’s something about Rachel being away and me being responsible for the house that makes me feel more productive. You need to take more time away, Rachel. I want to surprise her. I want her to come home and say, “Oh wow!” As I was cleaning the room, I started feeling lighter. I started feeling more motivated toward things that I was dragging my feet on. I was cleaning the room, and I had the unrelated thought, “I really need to work out more consistently.”
20:44 Rachel: When it’s running smoothly, and you have groceries and dinners planned, it releases you from so many things you don’t even know that you worry about.
21:03 Ben: Jason asked, “Anyone else have a drastically different personality than their spouses in regards to tidying as you go?” This also makes me think of another question of preference for tidiness. I would say that Rachel has a much stronger preference for tidiness than I do. That’s probably true for most people, there’s some varying degree. I can tolerate untidiness more than Rachel can. Each of us go about tidying and cleaning things up in a different way, but all of us feel the weight of untidiness. We feel the weight of things not being where they’re supposed to be. It’s not always this really tangible thing, but it does come into play.

Where you can be more efficient and keep things cleaner more consistently, you’re doing yourself a favor in other areas of your life.

22:17 Rachel: There is a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up that I read. It’s a little bit out of reach for parents, because kids make their own mess, but it was an interesting read for me. I’m writing a parody called The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children right now, a humor book. When I was reading it, I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is so impossible in our house.”
22:53 Ben: It had a section about how you put away your clothes. I loved this, and at the same time I thought it was kind of hilarious. It was like she was talking to her things and thanking them. She got to the socks, and she said that you need to flatten your sock out in it’s natural shape, put it down, and put it’s pair on top of it and then fold it over once. You don’t roll them together, because that stretches out the elastic. Her reasoning was that your socks keep your feet warm, they provide padding, and they cover a gross part of your body all day long. They do all this work, and you’re going to thank them by rolling them up in a wad? No. I loved that, and at the same time, I thought, “There’s no way I’m going to sit and fold everybody’s socks this way.”
24:12 Rachel: I do it for the kids now, mainly because some of their socks were so stretched out at the top.

Reset Your Home

24:33 Ben: There’s another practice that we don’t do very much, but I want to put this into practice. We run our house in shifts. I’ve got the morning shift and Rachel has the afternoon shift or visa versa. Even if you don’t have a spouse, you have different sections of your day, like the time before you leave for work and the time when you come home from work. In each of these sections, I like to think about the use of space and the things we do in the same way as when I worked at McDonalds or Golden Chick. At the end of the shift, you try to reset things for the next day or the next group of employees coming in.
25:42 You don’t just leave everything out, because you want to come into a clean workspace, a reset environment, and work from there. I started thinking about the home in that way. It takes some thought ahead of time, but what if I did that for Rachel and she, in turn, did that for me? For example, today, I tidied the entire downstairs. I also tidied upstairs, and I set out dinner. We’re going to have tacos tonight, so I set the items for dinner all out on the counter. That’s going to save Rachel some time. With that savings, she can set aside some time at the end of her shift, given that things don’t go crazy, to pay it forward.
27:01 You can either pay it forward for someone else or pay it forward for yourself by doing stressful tasks, but think about how that feels vs. coming into a workspace that’s not ready, so you have to do those things at the top instead of at the end. It’s a lot more stressful and it takes a lot more mental energy.
27:21 Rachel: There’s nothing harder for me than getting up at 6am and going to fix breakfast for our boys, and there’s a whole sink of dishes because we didn’t get around to it the night before. It’s usually on Ben’s Thursday night shift. It’s really helpful to be able to have things set up for the next shift. I don’t know how many people run their household the way that we do. We tag-team it during regular business hours.

Get Your Kids, Family, or Technology to Help

28:06 Ben: We talked about how running a household is like running a business. With as many moving parts as there are, especially if you have a job and you’re trying to build something on the side and you have kids, it’s almost necessary to get some form of help to manage the household stuff. The first question I like to ask is, “How much is your time worth?” Maybe you’re able to produce more value with your time than how much it costs to do a household item. For example, if I’m mowing the lawn, front and back, with weeding and all that stuff, it probably takes me a good three hours to get it done.
29:05 Let’s say that I have to do that, on average, once every other week. What is that? 25 times a year? We’ll say 25, times three hours, is 75 hours. If my time is worth $100 an hour, that’s $7,500 that I could be making with that time. It’s simple math here. Could I spend less than $7,500 a year and pay somebody else to do that? If the answer is yes and I can afford to do that, then I should. Use that formula with anything that you can delegate, like cleaning, or in our case, some form of childcare so we can do more focused work.
30:18 Rachel: You don’t only have to delegate to people that you’re paying, but also to your children. In a few years, we’re going to have an entire workforce of boys who will probably fight over mowing the lawn. We’ll probably pay them a little bit of money to do that.
30:34 Ben: Could I pay my kids less than $7,500 a year to maintain my lawn? Oh yes.
30:43 Rachel: Some of those things, like doing dishes and stuff like that, they won’t make money off of. They’re responsible for cleaning their toilet, but what if we paid them to clean our bathroom? That’s not their responsibility, but we could have them do it for a little bit of money.
31:07 Ben: We haven’t quite crossed this bridge yet, but we’re starting to incorporate chores for the boys.
31:16 Rachel: Our three year old took out the trash last night.

The family shares this space, so we can all share the responsibility of keeping it running.

31:41 Ben: The idea is that we all live in this house. This is actually a super positive thing for kids. It’s never too early to give kids some kind of responsibility. It does something positive for them to see that they’re already inherently valuable, but they can do things that benefit the household, the community. It creates a deeper sense of security for them. It also helps them feel a sense of purpose. You wouldn’t think so with how much they fight against doing it sometimes. That’s one of the great benefits of having your kids help out. We have the baseline responsibilities, and above and beyond that, it’s all negotiable. Once the kids start making more of their own money, I don’t see anything wrong with encouraging them and saying, “If you want to, you can pay your brother to do that for you so you don’t have to do it. That’s fine with me as long as it gets done to my standards.”
33:02 That’s the difficult thing with kids, too. When they first start out doing something, it’s often not to your standards. It might take longer to help them do it. Almost every time, in the beginning, it takes them longer to do it with your help than it would be just for you to do it yourself. It’s a long term game that pays off really well in the long run. Also, you should reach out to friends and family. Maybe you’re in a situation in the kind of relationship with some of your family where they would be willing to help out indefinitely. If that’s the case, take advantage of that. Don’t kill yourself.
33:59 If Rachel’s parents lived next door to us, I would love that because I think they’re awesome. If they were retired and didn’t have anything to do, you can bet I would say, “Hey, here are the things we need help with.” It takes a lot of work to keep things up and running. Let’s say you’re in a situation where you have a job and you’re trying to build your business on the side, and it feels like things are consistently falling through the cracks. There’s somebody who might be willing to help. Put together something like a business plan where you can approach that person and say, “Here’s what I’m trying to do over the next three months. I believe that, if I do this over the next three months, I can hire somebody to take care of this thing for me, but I can’t do it right now. Would you be willing to help for this time period?” Outside of friends or family, you can employ the help of technology, things like a scheduling system, or some kind of program or app that helps to automate and remind you of things.

The more stuff you can get out of your brain, the easier it’s going to be for you to focus on other things and be creative about the way you manage your schedule.

36:57 Rachel: When you approach projects in your work, if you approach them well, you have a system and a workflow. When you approach the home that way as well, it goes back to what Ben was saying about approaching the home sort of like a business. Things can become much more efficient.
37:21 Ben: Even thinking through our own stuff, there’s a lot of room for improvement, becoming more efficient, and using some systems that are more automated to help us keep up with things. It’s that classic issue of needing to spend time to set that up when you’ve already got a system that kind of works now. You’ve got to weigh that out. Yeah, that works for you, but is the amount of time you could save worth putting in some extra time now and getting something better set up?

Hiring Help

38:03 This comes back to the question of how much your time is worth. In the realm of household responsibilities, there are so many things that, if you have the means, you shouldn’t be doing. I shouldn’t be mowing lawns. It’s not that I’m above mowing lawns, but my time is worth more than that. I shouldn’t be folding my clothes, not that I’m above folding my clothes, but my time is worth more than that. You hire a cleaning person and they come in and clean your toilets.
39:02 Rachel: I don’t care as much about toilets. I feel like clothes are a little more personal. Maybe that’s just for women.

We put so much pressure on ourselves to do it all, but we can’t do it all.

39:29 We can make ourselves feel guilty all day long about how we got all the laundry done but we didn’t put it away. Oh my gosh, we’re such bad parents, because now there’s a stack of laundry that got all messed up again. We have to be able to say that we can’t do it all. It comes down to prioritization, figuring out what needs to be done, and leaving the rest. For us, we need to do laundry, because we have to have clothes. We need to cook dinner, because the kids have to eat. Things like deep cleaning our house or dusting the baseboards just don’t get done right now. It’s more important for us to be able to hang out with our kids and pursue our work.
40:30 Ben: You have to think about where those expectations come from. When I was aware enough to understand what was going on in my house growing up, we were on a very strict cleaning schedule, so stuff was always clean. I was constantly being nagged about not doing my chores on time, but it was getting done. My parents were a big part of that. I could easily translate that experience into an expectation that a house is supposed to always be clean, but that’s not always the case. A lot of our expectations come from past experiences. If we step back and look objectively at the situation, our expectations may be unrealistic for the circumstances we’re currently in.
41:41 It’s important to look at that. When you do and you see both of us trying to build businesses and maintain a house with six boys, there probably isn’t room for the expectation that our baseboards and bookshelves are always going to be dusted. This even includes things like having a vacuumed floor.
42:12 Rachel: As soon as you vacuum, kids are coming inside tracking things in or spilling Legos. What’s the point?
42:22 Ben: If you get a Lego stuck in the vacuum cleaner, those things can destroy it. You’ve got to be careful. Going from being a couple with no children and this steady walk into having a large family, in those early years, I never would have thought that our expectations would be as low as they are today. It gets better. It’s good to let go and lower your expectations where you need to, but it doesn’t mean that stuff isn’t still weighing on you. It’s also good to have a list and prioritize things that, when you get to a place financially where you can afford to hire somebody to do it, what’s the first thing on your wish list?
43:33 Rachel: It’s probably the lawn mowing, because I want to free Ben from that. Very close to that is house cleaning.
43:40 Ben: I would actually put house cleaning first.

Building Routines

43:59 Megan says, “I know having a routine is very helpful for home and self management. Do you have any advice for those of us who struggle getting into a routine? Often the answer is, ‘Just do it,’ but I still find myself forgetting or feeling like I’m stuck.”
44:18 Rachel: I think I thrive more on routine than Ben does, and something I’ve tried to encourage Ben to do is to pick a certain time and start something at that time. From 3pm to 4pm, that is time to set up a little routine for the kids. Once you get used to doing that, once it becomes habit, take it from 2pm until 4pm. Start small. For me, it’s really easy to look at this big block of time that I have with the children, from 6am until 12pm, and know exactly what we’re going to do in that time. That doesn’t come naturally to other people.
45:01 Ben: As a person who has a personality where I don’t naturally fall into a routine, I feel like Rachel sets a routine for herself and then she’s locked into it, but I set a routine for myself and then I just keep doing what I’m in the habit of doing. I’ve learned that it takes time, a lot longer than you would think, but I struggle the most when I give up too soon. I think, “Obviously, this isn’t sticking, so I’m going to abandon it.” That’s a mistake. If it’s really something that you see as a benefit to you, don’t beat yourself up about not sticking with that routine. Don’t feel shame about that, but have it in place as a solid thing that, maybe for the first 30 days, you break almost consistently.
46:03 Eventually, having that in place is going to catch on. It’s going to help you. There are things now that are a part of my routine that feel very natural that, at first, felt like pulling teeth. I would forget so often.

The more grace you have with yourself and the more determined you are not to give up, the sooner you’ll be able to get into a routine.

46:40 Rachel: I think it also helped Ben to write down some of what he had planned to do. From 3pm until 3:30pm, it was going to be silent reading time, because they needed to read for school. That kind of thing.

Weekly Family Meetings

46:57 Ben: Another question Megan had was, “What do you guys talk about in your weekly family meeting? Do you have a separate spouse meeting? Do you have a schedule/agenda?” In our weekly family meeting around the table on Sunday nights, typically, we’ll talk with the kids and ask, “What did we do well? What are some things we can improve on?”
47:23 Rachel: One other question that pulls it all together is, “What are you going to do specifically to help make this next week better?” We also go over schedule stuff, anything that’s coming in the week. We have a couple of kids that don’t like to be surprised by things. We’ll go over things like, “On Wednesday night, we need to do this. This Saturday, we’re having a Christmas party.” That kind of thing.
47:57 Ben: We keep that meeting pretty basic. At our meeting, we talk more about stuff that’s going on with our businesses.
48:06 Rachel: We do a lot of stuff in our meeting. It’s business related, goals for the next week, what we’re working on, anything outside of work that’s coming up that we’re doing personally, the kids’ schedule and anything special coming up. It’s a lot of stuff Ben would find boring, but I find it interesting. It’s weird. I enjoy it.
48:36 Ben: Most of the time, unless there’s something exciting, like one of us getting mad about some change, it’s kind of uninteresting. It’s good though. If you feel like things are out of balance, that’s an opportunity to bring that up and talk about it. That’s a great place for that to happen.

Balancing Before Children

49:01 Kelsey asks, “What can you do to prepare yourself for balancing work and household responsibilities if you don’t yet have kids?” Even without kids, you’re already having to keep those things in balance. Be mindful and purposeful about keeping those things in balance, and recognize that the way things are now and the expectations you have about the way the household runs now are not going to be the same when you have a family.
49:40 Rachel: Open up those conversations before it comes to be a problem. It’s always better to be on top of things, like maintaining and scrambling. A way to maintain is to consider these things before they become a problem.