Issue No. 8: Family Meetings and The Sweetness Of Life As A Team

Navigating life things together

Last weekend, Nabeel and I spent an entire Saturday decluttering and sorting through a bunch of things at our place. Between coffee and chai breaks, we fully cleaned out my office closet, organized the section where we keep our bed linen, cleared away some clothes to share with friends or to donate. We got lots done and so this weekend felt immensely gratifying. We’ve been wanting to do a lot of home projects this year and clearing away clutter & reorganizing things has been a big discussion point in our family meetings.

Do you guys have family meetings?

Nabeel and I have a very simple ritual, where most weekends, we’ll find a small window of time anywhere during the day, grab a notebook and a pen, and sit down to talk about & map out things for the week. We’ll often stretch out on the floor of our living room, sip on some coffee together, and have a short, simple family meeting.

I feel like as we keep getting older and times keep getting busier, there’s always so many things to do. For yourself, your relationships, your home, health, fitness, food, hobbies, personal rest. Even while actively trying to do less, I feel like there’s still always lots on your plate. And while a lot of us do each one of these things because they’re meant to bring us joy, not having them sorted or not being able to make enough time for them, can actually create feelings that are quite the opposite. And so really, without healthy home systems, the thing of pleasure can become a thing of pain.

When we got married, Nabeel and I slipped into this general pattern of doing things, where we knew the chores we had to do, what new project we were planning for our home. But between work and personal commitments, much of it would move along slowly, and at times not at all. Which is also fine, moderate procrastination and deprioritization is also a part of life, and much needed at times. But human nature is such that we do thrive on healthy, well-paced gratification. And completing things for yourself, reaching small milestones, does gently nurture and feed the mind, among other things, which I’ll chat about a little further down below.

And what we realized was that even though we understood that things can go off track, the reason it became a pattern for us, was because we’d been doing tasks in adjacency to our life, not in synergy with it. What I mean by that is that we’d work on things as we could, wherever we could fit them in our life. But we didn’t create a system where it synergized with the rest of our life as one of the important parts of it and where we could become accountable to those things as a team.

You know when we say things like, “Oh, we have to paint the bedroom wall” or “We have to fill out that paperwork” – these are desires floating in the air with no real plan. But when you join hands and actively create space for them, like “This month we should paint the bedroom wall and fill out that paperwork. Let’s do the first this coming Saturday, let’s do the other on Tuesday night.” That’s clear action and a joint plan that can help you organize those things and say no to other things while you get them done.

And so, we learnt that what helped us stay on track most of the time (and I say “most of the time” because no one is on track all of the time)… is regular family meetings.

We meet to discuss weekly tasks, the dinner menu, small goals, dreams, frustrations, we’ve-gotten-too-boring-what-do-we-want-to-do-for-fun, things we want to change, stuff like that. Sometimes we’ll have bite-sized sessions where we pick just one thing and have a go at that, and sometimes longer ones where everything is on the table.