More Tips for Working with a Spouse

My husband quit his day job as a school librarian about 4 weeks ago and joined me at home.  I wrote a few tips about working with your spouse after our first week at home together.

Here are a few more tips of the trade that have kept us from murdering each other:

• COMMUNICATE – yes, I mentioned that one before, but it is HUGE and worth mentioning again.  If we didn’t communicate, our business and marriage would fail – it really is that simple.
• Assign Tasks – each of us has our own jobs now.  Mr. BFS checks and replies daily to all of the emails that are forwarded to us by our clients, which is more than 50-100 every day now.  He is also the record keeper and types in all of the info for every deal we close or transaction we make.  Lastly, he sends out the letters to anyone who we have an incomplete deal for to find out if they have been paid or not.  My job is to provide customer service to all of our clients, act as the middle man between the advertisers and our group as a whole to develop ad campaigns, to run those campaigns, and to answer any direct questions anyone sends us about the business.  We each take turns contacting past ad contacts with our most updated client lists.  In short, we each have our own assigned duties so we do not waste time looking over the same stuff or step on each other’s toes.
• Separate Work and Home – even though our day job happens in our home offices, we do stop talking about work and just hang out over the weekends and for most of our evenings.  We talk about our plans with friends and family, the vacations we would like to go on this year, whether or not we should get a puppy, and we just hang out.  We even curl up on the couch together to just veg out on tv if we don’t have plans with anyone.  Overall, we keep ourselves from just talking about work 24/7.

Those three tips above have really helped us.  We’ve only had a couple of crappy days and both of them were because of ignoring one or more of the tips above.  I’ll be sure to let you know what else we learn along the way. 

Any other big tips that I missed in this post or my last one?