Ep 594: 10 Things You Can Do to Better Manage Your Marriage and Run a Happy House | Casey & Meygan Caston Recap
[00:00:00] Run your house, like you run your business. That’s some of the very best marriage advice that Rory and I got during our newlywed season, and somebody came up to us and said, Hey, listen, you guys. Have figured out how to operationalize and systemize so many things in the business arena. What we encourage you to do as you move forward in this new marriage endeavor, which was now officially 15 years ago as I record this you need to treat your family, your marriage, your household, like you do your business.
So the systems, processes rhythms that you work so hard, tirelessly to create in your business. Put as much energy and effort into that into your household, which I would say our marriage and family follow up under, and you will see success in both now. I got prompted to record this video after a awesome podcast interview that I [00:01:00] did for the influential personal brand with Casey and Megan who are the founders, Casey and Megan Caston, who are the founders of Marriage 365.
And I encourage you if any of being that I share resonates with you, go listen to that full episode. But it, it reminded me of this advice that we were so fortunate, so lucky to receive. In the very early months of getting married all the way back in 2010. And one of the things that hit me is that I have a lot of friends in the entrepreneurial community.
One I. I am one too. I live in Nashville and there’s a huge entrepreneurial community here. But also as a part of the blessing of being a part of this brand builders group is we have a ton of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs and those aspiring to be that. So I get to hear a lot of the things that are working and, and things that are not.
And I’ll tell you something that I have found is an interesting trend. And not I’m not casting anything other than [00:02:00] love and light to everyone that I have learned from. But here’s what I would say. One of the biggest things that I’ve learned from my entrepreneur friends is that I have to create.
A system for running my house like I have for my business because so many of my friends in this arena, they are winning at business, right? Their, their businesses are thriving, their teams are great, their company culture is great. They’re winning at work, and they are struggling at home. It. They go from thriving at business to chaos at home.
And here’s what I know for any of us who live in a dual environment, if there is an area of your life where you’re winning and there is an area of a life where you’re struggling, what are we as human beings naturally prone to do? Right. We’re gonna go to where we’re winning, right? Because that’s where we feel accomplished.
That’s where we get accolades. That’s also where we get paid, right? Versus the place where I’m struggling and I’m not [00:03:00] appreciated and nothing I say works and I come home to chaos. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Right? If, and you don’t have to be an entrepreneur to get this right, but it’s like if you have a tight schedule at work.
Make your tight schedule at home, right? If you run off a, a certain rhythm at work, why can’t you run off that same rhythm at home? Right? If you have onboarding manuals in your company, then why on goodness gracious, do you not have manuals for your house? So with all of that said I really started thinking after this of like, why?
Why? Do. So many of us live in these dual word dual worlds of we’re winning at work and we’re struggling at home when it doesn’t have to be that way. We know how to do it ’cause we do, we do it over here. But how do we transfer this professional feat that we’ve done to the personal one in our marriages and our families and in our households?
So. By no means do I have this. Figured it out, figured out. I most certainly do not. But I have learned 10 healthy [00:04:00] practices that are helping us move more towards the way of having this figured out with a long way to go. But I thought I would share 10 things with you that can help you run a better house and a better marriage.
So, take the best, leave the rest. But here are the 10 things that I have learned over the last 15 years. Of running a house, running a business, and having a marriage that works. Number one, you gotta have a weekly meeting. Rory and I started this a few years ago, and we have a weekly meeting every Monday from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM.
We do our very best to not book over that if, if we have to, we reschedule it. But it’s a three hour meeting and we are married in business together, so a bulk of that meeting is talking about work, but another part of that meeting is running over our families. Weekly schedule, right? Is the nanny working?
Is anyone traveling? Do we have any evening events? Do we have any morning commits? Do we have sporting events, but we do a healthy [00:05:00] review of like what’s happening in our lives this week at work. And at home. Is there something hard coming up? Is there a celebration we wanna be prepared for? Is it gonna be a tough week?
Should it be an easy week? Like we mentally and emotionally prepare on Monday mornings for the week ahead for our family, our house, our kids, ourselves, and our business. A part of that is redefining, like making sure date, night on date night is on, the babysitter is on, here’s what we’re doing. But we have a plan.
Right. And I think that’s the number one thing to take away from here is like, do you have a plan for how you’re running your family? I. Your marriage, your kids, your house. If not, that’s step one. And by simply adding a meeting to, okay, we don’t have a plan, we just need to have a meeting to get a plan.
Start there and then make it a weekly recurrence, right? For us, we do it at the start of the day. Maybe you have to do it after the kids go down. Maybe you have to do it earlier in the morning. Maybe you have to do it on a weekend. Doesn’t matter. It is worth it. So, weekly meeting. Second thing is have [00:06:00] a family shared calendar.
We use Skylight. I’m not an affiliate for Skylight. I get no perks for recommending Skylight. It’s just a tool that really works. It connects with Gmail or Outlook. But I found that having everything into my Outlook calendar was too overwhelming. I needed my Outlook calendar. That was just all the things.
Work And our skylight calendar is a shared calendar that we can share with grandparents. We can share with our childcare support our nanny and it, it has our family schedule. Travel sports schools, spring breaks, vacations. All the things, but it’s a shared family calendar in addition to our work calendars.
Number three is we have a house manual, right? And one of the things that we learned is that we kept. Going over the same exact stuff all the time of like, how do you change this frigging filter in the fridge again? Or, Hey, who, who, who’s the, who’s the kid’s eye doctor that we saw that one time? Or where do we go to get the oil changed?
Or, you know, [00:07:00] who is that vendor? Or, or who’s the, who’s the phone number for the, the lawn maintenance? It was all this chaos. It was chaos. It was just chaos. So years ago, probably seven years ago, probably right around when we were pregnant with our first child somebody gave us the advice of like, y’all need a house manual.
How does your house run? Right? What are the vendors you use? Where like we have a, a little reference for all the manuals, for the refrigerator, the microwave, all the warranties are organized in this house manual. The phone numbers, emergency contacts where we buy certain things. The rhythm for certain things of like, Hey.
April 1st schedule, power washing you know, October 1st schedule, Christmas lights. Here are the vendors. It’s all the things so that somebody else could step in and help support us, or if we were gonna do it, we just go to the manual. We do this at work all the time. It’s called SOPs. We built a family, SOP, we built a house, SOP, and it changed our life.
It made things so much easier. We [00:08:00] put the time in on the front end to save hours, if not dozens, hundreds of hours later on. So a family or a house manual. Okay, number four. Schedule on a recurring basis, all routine things and appointments. We do this on an annual basis, all doctor’s appointments, car appointments vacations when we go get groceries, when we do meal prep how often we get gas to make sure there’s always gas in the tanks all the things, right?
And, and that may seem excessive, but again, it’s like whatever you don’t plan for, you will be reactive to. So this is a proactive measure of going, how do I create peace in my house? How do I create peace in my family? So those are routinely scheduled and on the calendar, they’re on the shared calendar for the family calendar, they’re on my work calendar if it interferes during a work schedule.
Right, or it coincides. Not always interferes that. I think these are really important things of going, no, we have rhythms and routines to [00:09:00] our schedule for our health, for our spirituality, for, you know, maintenance. Like all the things are done, scheduled on a recurring basis. Just follow the schedule, right?
Just look at the calendar and go, and it, again, it’s about peace, right? Number five, a weekly date night. This is one of those routines that’s a non-negotiable for us. We started this in the very early years of our marriage. Again, someone gave us this great advice. We took it. Never looked back. Wednesday night is date night.
And Rory, he’s my husband. He continues to court me and date him to date me. Right? It’s his job to plan the date. So, this is one of those places where as the. You know, type a wife, I have to surrender, control and go, whatever it is you choose, I will do. But it’s, it’s the process of dating, right?
This is how you keep a healthy marriage. It’s connected time and it’s like, it’s a non-negotiable, right? Find the sitter, drop ’em off with friends, figure out a barter arrangement. But we have to have time protected time [00:10:00] for our marriage. Right, and that’s about prioritizing that. So, a weekly date night, we also prioritize our family.
So we do a family date night. We do Friday night family night. And this is where the kids get to pick family activities. We go bowling, we go biking. Sometimes we do movie night. But this is something that we all collectively get to look forward to and so that they don’t get sad when we leave them on Wednesday night.
We’re always talking about what we’re gonna do on Friday night, family night, right? So those are two types of recurring rhythms. That help protect our marriage and bond our family. A weekly, a weekly date night with just me and Rory and a Friday night family night with us and our kids. Number seven we have a family bookkeeper.
I cannot recommend this enough. And now again, that’s has to be within your means and has to be within your budget. But this could be someone that you hire. For just a couple of hours a week. This could be someone you hire for a couple of hours a month. It could be a family office. There’s lots of different things that you could do here, but a [00:11:00] family bookkeeper has saved us so much stress, so many arguments, and so, so, so many hours.
Of work, right? Someone to monitor our budget help us pay our bills, help us keep things in line for taxes. And I can honestly say in the 15 years that I’ve been married and the 18 years that Rory and I have been together, I can honestly and transparently say that I can count on one hand how many disagreements that we’ve had about money.
And that is because we set a budget, we stick to the budget, and we have someone helping us. Hold us accountable. We have someone doing the prep, the plan, the tracking, the review so that we can stay aligned and on the same page. And to me, I would rather forfeit dinners out even vacations in order to have that level of peace in our family and in our life.
So, a family bookkeeper would be on my top 10 list. Number eight, outsource, automate, or delegate. Things that you cannot do. Physically or time [00:12:00] constraints or that you’re just not good at doing or that you simply just don’t want to do. Right? And this, again, this is within your means and within your budget.
But outsource, automate, or delegate, what am I talking about? It’s make sure you’re enrolled in online bill pay. That would be an automate one. Outsource or delegate would be like if you just really. Despise laundry. You know what? Hire a high school student or a college student or find someone on care.com and pay the 20 to $30 a week to have someone come in and do that, to give you that one to two hours back.
Right? And what would you do with that? Right? Could you go on a date night? Could you have an hour to yourself? An hour with your kids? Like, right, maybe it’s my husband does not love. Lawn care that’s not his gifting. And instead of doing something else, we invest the money to have someone else take care of the yard.
’cause it’s not what he wants to do after work or on the weekends. Right. But those are budgetary decisions while we have a family bookkeeper of going, what are the things that just [00:13:00] don’t bring us joy? Like what are the things that create stress are. Chaos or havoc in our families. And we’re, we’re deciding how to use the means and the money we have to create peace to create something that works for our family.
Doesn’t have to work for every family. It just has to work for your family. Number nine. I said this before, but I’m gonna say it again. Prioritize your marriage. Time together. Time away, right? So we have a weekly date night. We also try to do a quarterly getaway. Sometimes those don’t fall exactly once per quarter, but it’s two nights away.
Right. And that’s important. It’s not in your house, right? It’s not with your kids. And honestly, this takes a lot of creativity. We don’t have family who live in our town, so, whether we’re having to coordinate with parents who live out of town we’re asking friends to help, but it’s like. We, we are doing it right.
We are trying to figure out a way to make it work because we know that a happy marriage makes a happy family, a happy, and Rory AJ makes a happy [00:14:00] two little boys, right? And that is a really important part. We also know that anytime that we feel stress in our marriage, stress in our family is a sign of we haven’t had alone time.
In, in a long time, right? So, we have a quarterly rhythm and sometimes it’s a one night staycation. We can’t get away for two nights. We can’t leave town, but you make it work. Prioritize your me your me, your marriage, pursue each other, right? Continue to get to know each other, date each other beyond your wedding date.
One of the things that I would say that you always gonna kill me for sharing this tip with you guys but something that has really helped us in this pursuing is for special gifts throughout the year, and for this is married couples only. I am not advocating for sex outside of marriage. This is.
For within the marriage bed only. This is my recommendation for women or men, depending on, you know, how it all works in your marriage. But I give him for Christmases, Valentine’s and a anniversary [00:15:00] present sex coupons and sex coupon is free reign. For him to use it at potentially inconvenient times, that gives him a hundred percent confidence he’s always gonna get a yes.
And I will tell you what, it’s a mutually agreed upon gift that helps us prioritize our marriage, helps him pursue me, and helps me pursue him. Right? These are the exchanges that you gotta have to decide of like, how do I pursue my spouse? How do I love on my spouse? And I have found that this is the best gift I’ve ever given my husband, ever.
And so find a thing that allows you to have that. Play full time with each other and to do something that gives you free reign to be a married team. Right? And that’s a part of it, right? And then last, but definitely not least, is you have to learn how to make time for yourself. And I say you have to learn because it, it, the time doesn’t just appear.
That doesn’t exist, but you have to learn [00:16:00] how to make time for yourself. You have to prioritize it, right? Everyone in my family knows that a stressed AJ is not good for the family. And I know that for me, my alone time is made up of being outside. Alone time inside is no good for me, right? It’s like I need to exert energy.
I need to be outside and I need my alone time. And for me, I need time with the Lord. I need time to sit and settle and be with the Lord if I’m going to be a healthy, happy, productive human being for our company and for our family, right? And so if I have to get up early, then that’s what’s gonna have to happen.
If I have to delay a meeting, it’s like alone. Time is precious. We don’t get enough of it. And I don’t mean alone time in front of a tv. That is not what I’m talking about. Alone. Time is mean. Actually having time with yourself, you can think, you can pray, you can journal you can be fit, you can do healthy stuff, you can be outside, but find something that actually allows [00:17:00] you just to be.
With yourself. And I know that anytime that I’m stressed, my husband will say, why don’t you just go take a walk? And what he’s really saying is, you need some time alone. So we have to be as the, the managers of our family productive and aware enough to know that I just need to take a step back and have some alone time so I can reset and come back a better person.
Those are my 10 things that can help you run a happy house and better manage your marriage.