Someday Never Comes
When was the last time you left work behind? Truly logged off. And if you have children, when did you last spend quality time with them? “Time with purpose. Time with focused attention. Time where you shift your focus away from yourself and your worries and placed it, with intention, on your child.”
That definition of quality time comes from a book by Jim Sheils, “The Family Board Meeting.”
“There is no replacement for quality time. Not your success. Not the trust fund you create. Not your hard work, or the gifts you buy, or the neighbourhood you live in. What your kids need is true connection, and to achieve this, you need not just time, but quality time.”
Jim asks the question, “when was the last time you spent a whole day alone with your child, with no electronic distractions, while enjoying a fun activity and meaningful conversation?”
Answering that question hurt.
I am around for my children – I wake them up every morning, I take them to school, and I am home almost every evening. I am there at the weekends. I don’t travel for work.
But I am frequently (mostly) distracted.
I am always thinking about what needs to be done.
I justify sitting at my computer at the weekend because, well, surely that’s better than not being there at all? I give them time, and we spend quality family time together doing the things we love but quality one-on-one time? I’m not sure.
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If I am honest with myself, I can’t remember the last time (did I ever?) I spent a whole day alone with one of my children, with no distractions. I am strangely comforted to know I am not alone.
Jim writes, “it sounds simple, but if you’re like most busy parents, you will answer that you can’t remember a single time. Yes, you read that right – a single time.”
It is simple – it’s so simple! And obvious. So why don’t we do it? Why don’t we all spend quality one-on-one time with each of our children?
I think somewhere along the line we made work our priority. We told ourselves ‘we’re doing it for our children’. We’re working hard so we can provide for them, so we can give them head-start, so we can find our own freedom to spend more time with them.
Only it backfired, because in 2020 it’s almost impossible to switch off and if we never switch off we never truly focus on our children. And ultimately, we deprive them of the only thing that really matters.
I also thought happy hours together as a family was not only more important than one-on-one time, but enough. I thought I was doing enough.
Jim’s book made me question my priorities.
His solution to the ‘disconnection epidemic’ is The Family Board Meeting; AKA the quality time revolution.
Take what you know about successful meetings in business and apply them at home. “Take the best parts of effective, consistent, focused, face-to-face meetings and use them to connect with your children. We must treat our kids with the same level of respect that we do our work colleagues and business associates.”
Once a quarter, have a Board Meeting with your child. It must be a minimum of four uninterrupted hours, and you must:
1. Be one-on-one with your child
2. Have no electronics
3. Do a fun (you absolutely must have fun) activity of the child’s choosing, followed by focused reflection.
They are the rules. Here are the principles:
1. Scheduling – only the things we schedule get done. We all know this. Make the scheduling part of the Board Meeting process. His word of warning: talking about a Board Meeting and then not doing it is bad (really bad).
2. Repetition – one every 90 days, with each child.
3. Anticipation – it’s half the fun!
4. Reflection – this goes hand-in-hand with the anticipation. Having memories to look back on is powerful. Ask your child, ‘what was your favourite part of the day?’ The answer may surprise you.
5. Decompression – four hours seems to be the perfect number. It’s a long enough time to decompress and slow-down, but not so long that the time commitment is harder to make.
6. Magnification – by increasing the intensity of quality time you prove to your child that they are your top priority.
7. Simplicity – the best ideas are always simple.
“Board Meetings are simple and powerful. But if you’re not prepared to execute them with consistency, love and passion, they become meaningless, like any other empty ritual”
Tim Urban wrote a blog in which he calculated that when he had graduated from high school he had already used up 93% of his in-person parent time. Flip that around to your children. If he is right it means that by the time your children leave for university you will have already spent the vast majority of the time with them that you ever will.
That thought was enough to have me block out three Friday afternoons in my diary this quarter. I can’t wait for my first Board Meeting.
My advice is do it now, because someday never comes.
Georgie
I probably haven’t done the book justice here, so I highly recommend you get it and read it yourself. You will read it in one sitting. Here is it on Amazon.