How to apply the business planning you do at work to the most important relationship you have — your partner.
Why do we need to plan our life as a couple?
Every six months, Mrs Davidson and I book a hotel for a night and have an away day. When we tell our friends about it, they laugh.
They then stop, think and ask what our agenda is. Once we explain why we spend a day away and what we discuss, others also want to do the same.
I’d say it’s the most critical thing you can do for your relationship, your family and, of course, yourself.
What do you discuss on a relationship away day?
Before discussing the agenda, let’s discuss why it’s essential:
It’s an opportunity for uninterrupted time together without home and family life distractions. You’ll need to leave the children behind.
It’s a structured way to discuss your lives and everything that influences them in a calm and conducive environment.
It’s a way to guarantee focus, with no phones, time limit, or places to be.
And yes, it’s time for a cuddle after!
We have one Relationship Away Day between Christmas and New Year to focus on the year ahead and review the one just gone. We also have another Relationship Away Day in the summer before autumn to check and reset things before winter kicks in.
We pick a nice hotel and ensure a relaxed journey there with plenty of time in the afternoon (5–6 hours). If the idea of five hours together without distraction is scary, that’s an excellent place to start the discussion!
When we started in 2016, we were pleased that some of the significant issues we had to deal with the previous year weren’t so big and no longer featured on our worry list.
They included things like redundancy and significant illness in the previous year. We learned that deciding how to handle them in advance would have made it much easier for them to deal with when they happened.
Therefore, in our first year, we had to learn what topics mattered, which led to the creation of the Identity Wheel. It’s freely usable, provided you link back to it if you use it commercially.
What tools do you need for a Relationship Away Day?
Since we’re both Apple users, we use Shared Notes to record the agenda and minutes and create new notes for our generated plans. You can contribute to the notes and see the edits as they occur.
Examples of the plans we generate include:
Places we want to visit — we categorise as day trips, local trips, 1–3 day trips, 1-week trips and adventures
Priorities for house renovations by room
“big birthday” plans for all the family
Plans for elderly relatives
Financial action plans
Retirement plans
Career plans
Plans for the elderly people we care for
Your plans will be different, but using shared notes makes it easy to maintain as many notes as you need.
What topics should couples discuss together?
We have completed over ten Relationship Away Days, and we’ve never needed to deviate from the nine topics below, but if you have additional ones, please feel free to add them, and please let me know.
For each topic, write bullet points for each item you want to discuss a month before the away day (and don’t forget to book the hotel and make arrangements for the children).
When we discuss each area, we take a dispassionate view, spend time in dialogue, understand each other’s perspectives, make decisions, and record the decisions and actions.
I’ve provided a rough outline of our discussion based on the Identity Wheel. Feel free to use it, improve it, and give feedback on how you’ve remixed it.
1. Health
Review the family’s health, particularly if anyone has long-term conditions, health risk factors, etc.
Review your alcohol intake, smoking, long-term conditions and exercise levels to plan for your next significant milestone.
Unless you’re a keen amateur or have a fitness coach, a helpful general-purpose framework that I use for exercise review is the following:
Heart
Flexibility
Core
Strength
You can read more here.
2. Partner
Next, review your relationship. What’s going well, what’s not, and what can you change? Below are some topics we’ve included over the years.
You must ensure your future alignment on big topics and achieve balance as you develop your relationship. If everything is about one partner and not the other, you’ll create an imbalance and resentment that will grow with time. Does your balance feel right?
What shared interests do you have, or could you have? If you have separate interests, hobbies and lives, how will this play out in the future? Will you drift apart, or does this give you space?
How is your love life? Sex can be difficult to discuss, but often only because you never really put your relationship under the spotlight until it’s too late. Regularly asking questions and being open (which is why you do this away from home) can fix any issues or incompatibilities long before they become problems.
If you don’t have children, agree on “yes”, “no”, “not yet”, or “let nature decide.”
If you have children, how will you deal with the four major pivot points in their childhood — going to school, moving to secondary school, university and the “empty nest”?
If there is a significant age gap, as one of you ages, you’ll need to talk about the day one partner has retired. Income and time are the two primary considerations; whilst there are no right or wrong answers, alignment is essential.
Are you not in a formalised relationship, such as marriage or civil partnership? There are both romantic and practical reasons to discuss whether you should be, especially if you have previous relationships to consider.
3. Career
Review both your careers. Whether you run a business, you’re self-employed or have an employer, review where you are today and where you want to be in five years.
I have a simple structure for your Personal Development Plan for employees or self-employed. Hundreds of people use this in my team every year, and it works well.
If you run your own business, then what’s your exit strategy?
4. Money
There are few topics as contentious as money, so here’s how we approach the conversation:
Review bills and day-to-day spending. Do you need all your regular payments and subscriptions? If not, cancel them and use the money elsewhere.
Have you separated bills and general spending? It’s a necessary discipline to avoid running out of money just as an invoice becomes due.
Review your family spending and whether you need to spend it all.
Review charitable giving and who you want to support next year.
Review your investments and long-term savings and set targets for them.
Review your investments (we have a learning fund, for example) and why you’re making those investments.
Finally, review your significant expenditures that will become due and ensure that you’re putting money away. We have around ten intra-year funds for many different things, but the money is always there when needed.
5. Home
Review where you’re living and what your goals are. If you’re renting, will you buy? If you’ve bought it, is your home still the right one, with suitable facilities for your needs?
Will you want to move house as significant life events happen, and are you preparing for that now?
Whilst you may live near your work when you retire, will you want to live elsewhere? If so, are you planning for that now?
6. Personal Development
Once you have your Personal Development Plan, now is the time to consider the learning you both need to make the next step happen.
You both need to know what you want to be doing in five years and ensure that in such a turbulent world, you have skills that employers need — even if it’s not your current employer.
So, work out the learning you need and carve out the time to do it. Just as we used Shared Notes, we also have a Shared Calendar, which is blocked out for personal development and fitness.
7. Bucket List
We all have them, but have you planned them?
We have three savings accounts — an in-year holiday account and two longer-term holiday accounts for the big adventures (generally on big birthdays). Then, we decide in advance what our big bucket list items are and save for them. That way, we can be confident that we don’t fund holidays with debt.
8. Family & Friends
Are you spending enough time with them? What significant issues do they have coming up, and how can you support them? Are the kids going off to university, for example? Are their grades OK? How are they getting on in their careers? Are friends facing redundancy or career change?
9. Anchors
For us, this is the big question of ‘where will we retire to’ and ‘how will we make that happen? Anchors are the things that root you to a location. They may be friends, your religious community, family, work, love of a place, charity work, etc.
You may have a great plan to retire to California, but what are you doing about it? Your kids may soon produce grandchildren — but will you ever see them? Your anchors are essential — make sure you plan them.
How do you put your plan into action?
Ensure you agree on concrete actions and write them down. Regularly review and work on them together. Plans without actions are, in reality, dreams.
We only use shared Apple Notes with tick lists, but you could be clever and use Trello or another tool. Whatever you choose, please do it.
I know you may be single, but that doesn’t stop you from using the Identity Wheel, having a night away and doing the same thing. You may find that you debate with yourself less, but knowing what the next few years need to bring is no less important.
My final word is that this shouldn’t be a chore but fun. Of all the wise words you read about love and relationships, the skills of planning your future, agreeing on actions and delivering them as a team is still the best sign of a lasting relationship.
Notes:
Last updated: July 2024
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