A few years ago, my wife and I were arguing over our budget. Once a month we would sit down with the intention to align on how and what we spend money on, but often it would turn into a frustrating conversation. “Why do you get X but I can’t have Y” or “I don’t think we should do X right now – lets do Y now and put X in next month”. I’m a systems thinker so I was looking for a system where Stephanie and I could get on the same page without the frustrations we were running into. I also don’t like to reinvent the wheel – there had to be an answer to this already… this is where the QBR comes in.
If you have been in the corporate world for more than a minute, you’ve certainly run into the QBR. Quarterly Business Reporting is essential to maintaining focus and alignment across many areas of the company. We use it to measure our progress and ensure our future. So I proposed a similar approach to my wife – we would host a QMR (quarterly marriage report) meeting.
We needed to balance the stress with communion, the disagreement with alignment. So I proposed that once a quarter, we leave the kids and the house for a 3 day weekend, even if it’s just a hotel room in our town. We bring our budget, but we also bring our goal setting notebooks, at least one outfit for a fine dining event, and plan to connect with intentionality over our past, present, and future.
This has been one of the best things we have done in our marriage and I recommend it to everyone. We bring our individual work goals, our health goals, our family plans, and of course our budget with us, but we leave the daily distractions, the unfinished projects around the house, the kids, and the pets all at home.