Strategies for Getting to 50/50
As part of Two Cents for Charity, a friend wanted to talk about strategies for “getting to 50/50.” The concept comes from a book of the same title. It’s all about finding an equitable split of childcare and household obligations, which enables both partners to achieve their career goals and their family goals.
This post shows the results of a survey and interviews to learn what strategies, tactics, and mindsets other two-career parents are actually doing to find solutions for their families.
Strategies Couples Use to Get to 50/50
Hold a Weekly Planning Meeting
Jess (bank executive): “We attempt Sunday planning for the week — who is home which nights, what coverage has been lined up. …We also are pretty good about Thursday night weekend planning — who wants do to what over nap time, etc.”
Tom (product leader): “We discuss our ‘must haves for the week’ — e.g., wife does her appointment notes each night from 10pm-11pm, husband has to do video calls with Asia from 9pm-10pm, husband exercises for 45 mins Saturday and Sunday mornings.”
Cindy (investment fund COO): “[We] coordinate schedules and talk about the upcoming week. Each parent takes on various kinds of duties…[We] periodically switch so we can properly manage and advocate for children’s needs.”
Alan Mullaly, former CEO of Ford and Boeing, includes a similar practice in his family’s routine:
“So we’d sit down every Sunday morning and everybody would get their schedule out. The kids would have their schedules and we’d have ours and everybody would compare schedules. And if they needed a ride or they had a soccer game or they had ballet or they had a school activity, we’d figure it out.”
Matt, a law firm partner, also does “co-calendaring at least weekly,” but adds caution that diligent execution is important. “Sometimes, we get too tired and rushed to sit down and work through the calendar, and then things get much more reactive.”
Martha (independent strategy consultant) and her husband would do a planning meeting each Sunday, but every other week, they’d give feedback to each other and adjust the split in duties. This enabled them to make adjustments quickly, rather than either person having a simmering dissatisfaction.
My wife and I do a variation of this practice, with a monthly check-in. That Business Lunch is described in another post.
A couple of respondents mentioned miscommunication and under-communication as a disruptor of routines and balance.
Sima (startup executive): “failure to communicate scheduling conflicts”
Rika (startup CFO): “…just planning ahead and raising the topic if things are starting to get really hard so the other person knows there is an issue. Usually the assumed burden falls on one parent or the other, without the other person even knowing.”
A well-executed weekly conversation might also prevent this disruptor from occurring.
Identify Specific Responsibilities for Each Partner
This was an oft-cited strategy. Some examples to show the different flavors of this strategy:
Splitting by Task
Paul (professor, nonprofit CEO): “Distinct, well-defined ownership spheres — e.g., I’m in charge of yard, she’s in charge of home maintenance.”
Lindsey (investment advisor): “We have a set separation of duties so that each chore isn’t a constant negotiation. Only an extreme circumstance allows you to neglect your household assignments.”
Susan (energy company executive): “One of us does more of the ‘thinking’ (e.g., planning childcare, handling nanny payroll, setting up playdates and activities) while the other does more of the ‘doing’ (e.g., food shopping, cooking, cleaning). We spend roughly equal time with our kid.”
Sammantha (tech executive): “Divide and conquer…. We have naturally divided the duties and then make sure to speak up if one of us needs a break or we want to change.”
Splitting by Time of Day/Week
Uju (doctor): “We have a routine/schedule for who is doing what during what days” (e.g., one person comes home early for childcare two days, the other does two days, with shared childcare on Friday)
Dana (lawyer): “Taking turns sleeping in on weekend days and alternating when possible who wakes up with our son so that at least one of us can catch up on sleep.”
Charles: My wife and I split responsibility for the morning and evening childcare routine. That enables each of us to have “unlimited” time — I can leave as early as I want for work, and she can come home as late as she wants.
Martha and her husband used a counselor as an impartial arbiter when they had trouble identifying a “fair” split in responsibilities. For example, she counseled: “Martha, you don’t work downtown, so you have to suck it up and do all of the doctor’s appointments,” which were in the middle of the workday and in the suburbs. “…And then figure out what [your husband] can do to help, so that you’re not mad about it.”
Leaving Early & Leaving On Time from Work
More than half of respondents mentioned leaving “early” from work or at a fixed time as a critical enabler of their family strategy. Most start working again after their kids are in bed. Some examples:
Melissa (startup CEO): “Leaving at 5 to spend a few hours with kids then signing back on at night”
Paul: “Predictable time boundaries — get home by 6pm every day to watch kids.”
Susan: “One of us arrives early and the other stays late. We both work after the baby goes to bed.”
OK, but how do you execute that strategy so that it works as planned?
Setting Expectations
Gary (startup executive): “I set an expectation before taking my current job that I needed to leave at 4:30 at least 2 days/week to meet kids. …I tell all direct new hires when they start, as part of an initial mutual working expectations conversation. …And the hardest part: trying to stick to it as much as possible — e.g., if I’m in a meeting that bumps up against [departure time], I try to tell people what my back end is at the start of the meeting, and give a 10 min warning before I have to go.”
Charles: What I sent to my team when I started a new role recently: “I’ll typically try to leave between 4:30 and 5pm to make sure I’m home to take over child care. In general, 6:15–8:15pm will be completely off limits.” I also made sure to communicate my overall flexibility and the best times to reach me, rather than just leaving it at the constraints.
Being Consistent
Shirley: “Consistency is key. If you let things slide here and there, people will begin to see that whatever you have to leave for (whether it’s pick-up, a workout, to make dinner, etc.) isn’t really that important to you. Even when I know that someone else is handling pick-up, I still leave at the usual time for the sake of consistency.”
Blocking Off Time for Early Departure
Erin (investment advisor): “I have a standing appointment from 5–6pm every day for ‘commute’ which stops people from putting things on my calendar. I’m often still at work after that time, but it’s on my terms.”
Gary: “Block it off in my calendar so people don’t schedule over it, and if they do, reject the invite.”
My work calendar is pre-filled with standing blocks, which helps my admin put the right meetings at the right times. The instruction I gave her for the last block of the day:
“E Block — Commuting (after 4:30): We should try to put calls that don’t require me to be in front of a computer. Many non-work meetings will fall into that category. The team should also feel free to use that time. Ideally, people would call me directly (as opposed to having a dial in) since I’ll be driving.”
Putting calls in the late afternoon creates more departure flexibility. And maybe even more important, shifting shorter calls to commuting time means they don’t chop up my calendar midday when that time could be used more productively on other work.
Leaving a Buffer
Aparna (investor): “I also build in a buffer. It takes 20mins to walk home, but I usually plan to leave work 40mins before my son’s dinner.”
Shirley: “I block off my calendar such that all meetings end 30 mins before I actually have to leave.”
Charles: I leave a 30-minute buffer to tie off loose ends at the end of the day. If I let meetings go until 5pm, I might not leave until 5:20. And with traffic, that leads to a more stressful commute (i.e., risk of being late) and entering the home in a “rushed” mindset, which isn’t how I want to show up.
Reserving Slack in the Workday
A member of my new team said recently: “your schedule is better for the team because we can usually find time with you the same day, as things come up and we need guidance.”
That happens because I purposely avoid having back-to-back-to-back meetings all day. That means that there is room for the unexpected within the structure of the workday, decreasing the likelihood that it will spill over into the evening.
A specific strategy for slack time is “Working Wednesday” — skipping meetings that are focused on updates and process, with a goal of maximizing time for creative work (mine and the team’s). But as a practical matter, it’s the lifeboat for meetings that are hard to schedule elsewhere. You can find more about that practice in this separate post.
Empowering Your Admin
Whenever someone proposes a meeting, I volunteer to drive it from my calendar. This a) allows my admin and I to set the length of the meeting; b) enables us to put the meeting in the ideal time slot (rather than having to ask to move it later); and, c) puts us in the driver’s seat for moving the meeting if we need.
Combined, it gives greater control over my calendar — both for being productive at work and for handling non-work responsibilities.
Having an Essentialist Mindset
Danielle (bank executive): “Ruthless prioritization is the only thing that can maintain work/life balance.”
Paul: “Relentless forward-looking time management to minimize chance of a crisis that forces working late, working weekends, etc.”
Richard (startup executive): “Actively getting out of meetings I’m not necessary for.”
Shirley: “I also let [colleagues] know that if I am not a critical decision-maker in the meeting, it can probably happen without me and I can catch up via the recap.”
Entrepreneurship
Melissa: “Own your own business and be the boss. That’s how I do it.”
Matt (law firm partner): “I essentially work for myself. I have a ton of work to do, but I also I have a lot of flexibility and own how I spend my time.”
Hiring Help
A lot of us have some form of in-home childcare, but some use the nanny to lighten the load in other areas:
do laundry for the kids and/or adults
prepare dinner
visit grocery store, or order groceries online
do early bath time
visit the dry cleaners
Joint Calendars & Integrated Calendars
Rika: “[P]ut things on the calendar so each of us know when the other has something going on and needs coverage. …For example, getting baby’s stuff from pharmacy is just as important as a meeting.”
Tom: “Outline exactly in one Google Calendar the key dates, protected times, etc. for the month”
An integrated calendar is a simple idea — after all, it’s just putting everything on one calendar — but it’s quite powerful. Nearly every executive that I’ve heard talk about their calendars reached the same conclusion — that the only way to be successful across one’s personal and professional priorities is to manage those priorities in a unified way.
Alan Mullaly said this well:
“…I don’t have separate buckets of my life, like my family life or my personal life or my work life. I just have one integrated schedule…”
Cultivating a Community
Getting to 50/50: “The happiest working couples are those who build a community around themselves — one made up of friends, family, colleagues, and other working parents who support what they do.” (page 266)
Several of the respondents agreed:
Shirley: “Becoming comfortable asking for and receiving help from your village/community, especially when you and your spouse live far from family.”
Uju: “It takes a village, but if your family is not around, you need to create a village.”
One of the best examples of leveraging a community I’ve seen is my friend Martha. When we spoke by phone, she shared several specific ideas that she’s seen work (paraphrasing, with specific comments in quotation marks):
Rotating afternoon pickup: Work with 2–3 other families who also have nannies, and rotate who relieves the nannies early (e.g., they drop all of the kids at one house at 4pm, their families pick them up by 6). “They have to be walking distance” or the logistics are harder. It’s good because the kids also become good friends. One person “can do three newborns because they aren’t mobile.” It’s harder with toddlers, unless you can contain them in one area (e.g., a play room, with baby gates). By age 4 or 5, you just need a space in which you can have eyes on them. But in general, “three’s the max.”
Rotating date night. She agreed with another family that every Friday night, one of them would have a date night, with the other family babysitting. They were friends with the couple, so when they were too exhausted to go out, they’d just order takeout and have dinner at one of their houses.
Add other parents to the pick up list at school. “I think they only gave you four slots [to list adults who could pick up your kid]; I added two more.” That adds flexibility for everyone. There was once an emergency, midday school closing. Martha happened to be available that day, so she “called a couple of my friends — ‘do you want me to pick up your kids?’ They said, ‘That’d be great!’”
Create a local directory of service providers, especially babysitters. Before there were other tools to do this online, Martha created a neighborhood directory. It had contact information for service providers (e.g., plumbers, electricians), but it also helped people identify “I have a kid who is available for babysitting.”
Other insights from Martha:
“Once pre-school starts, it all gets better. …You get to know other families. Your kids get to know other kids.” The expanded network also helps with childcare. “One of [the other families’] nanny became our backup babysitter.”
“Invest in being the hub of the neighborhood.”
“People will do stuff for you, because you help others.”
What things most often interrupt your ideal balance? Do you have any strategies to prevent those instances from happening?
Disruptor: Travel & Unexpected Events
This was the most cited disruption to routines:
Brooke (marketing leader): “Work travel — no strategies, as we can’t really avoid it.”
Paul: “Work travel upsets predictable time boundaries and creates need to negotiate offsetting adjustments.”
Albert (doctor): “Unexpected work responsibilities. These are mostly unavoidable due to the nature of our respective occupations.”
Solutions people mentioned here were around calendars, flexible child care, and trading off the burden.
Erin: “Flexibility from our nanny helps in those instances, as she has a willingness to come early or stay late…”
Lindsey: “Can’t keep work travel from happening but we book personal travel well in advance to work through any issues.”
Charles: As soon as I know about a work trip (or even that a trip is possible), I put it on my wife’s personal and work calendar. She does the same.
Susan: “We both go to pediatrician appointments and take turns staying home when the baby is sick so the burden is shared and one of us is not taking a bigger hit with our employer.”
Disruptor: Newborn Routines Never Re-Examined
Susan: “When the baby was a newborn the mom (me) did a lot more across all areas. ”
Charles: My wife still spends more time on food preparation. This is an extension of her having taken care of 100% of the food (milk) at the start, then driving the conversion to formula and solids. But we never really had an explicit discussion about it. We just settled into roles.
Other than having explicit conversations to reset routines and expectations, Susan has one idea: “My husband took paternity leave after I went back to work and had four weeks as the primary parent and I think that changed the trajectory!”
In Getting to 50/50, there were several examples of empathy and understanding built by couples trading roles.
Disruptor: Caring Too Much or Caring about Different Things
Cindy: “One person cares more and wants to go additional lengths — i.e., I want new countertops, so I will take on the extra project. [My husband] cares more about finances, so he does extra budgeting. That starts to become imbalanced over time.”
Charles: My wife spends a few more minutes getting our kid ready for the day. Part of this is taking the time to pick out clothes that match or are fashionable, whereas I basically pick whatever is on top of the clean pile. So while we’ve structurally split responsibility, she sometimes carries more of the weight because of this type of behavior (with clothes and elsewhere).
Final Thoughts
From Respondents
Lindsey, on focusing on the most important things:
“Life’s not fair or perfect. If things are really out of whack and you’re at 90/10, take action. But if you’re within one standard deviation of 50/50, love your spouse and your kids and just let it go. Life’s too short to micromanage everything.”
Matt, on how finances impact 50/50:
“I see a big part of the problem as financial over-commitments, which then require working long hours to sustain. Under financial pressure, a family’s dynamic shifts to encourage the spouse with the higher earning potential to prioritize work.”
Jess, on how getting to 50/50 is part of a larger plan to take control of one’s life:
“I have been trying to make a weekly plan that centers me on the things I actually want to do/accomplish at work + outlines the things I want to do for life/family... [That practice] makes me feel more in control — like I’m choosing to work on the things I care about (for the most part).”
Aparna, on constant change:
“Our son is two and every time we feel like we get things balanced, something new comes up that makes things imbalanced, so this stuff is not easy…”
From the Getting to 50/50 Book
On creating power to do what you want (p130):
“Producing a lot gives you leverage to work differently — so does producing something unique. An employment lawyer we talked to made herself an expert on an obscure part of the federal code. She’s the go-to person for that at her firm, and her partners know it. So she gets latitude to do her work when and where she wants.”
On balance as a journey (p12):
“Some days (or years) are 40/60 or even 90/10. That’s why we talk about getting to 50/50 — it’s a process as much as a destination. A 50/50 marriage isn’t purely based on how you divide the daily tasks of family life — 50/50 is really about a core belief: that satisfying work lives and loving bonds with our children are equally important to men and women.”
From Me
As I analyzed the survey responses and reflected on my practices, there was one insight: many of the time management strategies one uses to be good at work also help one be good as a spouse and parent.
In particular, 95% of my value at work is being creative, problem solving at a high level, and providing energy to the people on my team (who actually do the work). None of those can be done effectively if I’m tired or stressed or in back-to-back meetings each day.
So even if my only goal was to be effective at work, I’d need to take control of my schedule, prioritize aggressively, and find time to mentally get away from work. Fortunately, the routines to deliver upon those objectives pull double duty in facilitating investment in family.
This is intended to be a “living post.” If you have strategies or tactics that would help others, please share them!