Daily Dose 51: Evaluations

Evaluating what we do as home executives is a best practice. We are accountable to the Lord, and the home is still very much a private institution. We don’t clock in and out (well, we do clock in, but are never clocked out), we don’t submit quarterly reports to anyone, and we don’t document how we spent our day.

The Two Sides to Privacy

This freedom works two ways: it gives flexibility to arrange tasks and events, or lets us slouch along in an endless stupor, accomplishing nothing significant. Formal and informal evaluations are a way to check up on ourselves. Since we should be harder on ourselves than anyone else would be on us, evaluating our home work and our personal lives is a crucial challenge.

We can tie evaluation times to many of the recurring life event flagpoles, though, of course, you can select any time you would like to attend to evaluations.

How Self-Evaluation Works

The executive-you compiles lists of hard, uncomfortable, squirm-in-your-seat questions for the operational-you to answer. The operational honest-before-God you answers, remorsefully, the questions. The spiritual you does whatever confession, repentance, and making right is needed. Then executive-you steps back in and reviews the answers and plans new ways to be more effective or to correct failings.

When Self-Evaluation Can Happen

Here are some intuitive flagpole-evaluation time connections that make sense for most people. Select an Executive Oversight meeting time or two close to the special date to perform these evaluations:

Personal Life: birthday

Marriage Relationship: anniversary

Family Goals: New Year/Christmas break, anniversary, or family vacation time

Finances: 1-2 months before a new contract begins, late December or early January before tax time

New Habits, Home Processes or Chore Routines:

Use weekly evaluations during your EO meeting whenever you institute a new project or process. Then after a couple of months, select a specific week of the month (3^rd EO of every month, for example) to re-evaluate for a few more months. Finally, once the new habit, process, or routine is “entrenched”, assign it an annual evaluation time.

Children’s development: their birthday

Apprentice work:

Though school work should not change basic living responsibilites for children, training new skills and evaluating and correcting prior skills usually happens best during the summer months, to allow time to solidify corrections and new assignments before school starts.

But you are the overseer. . .

It should go without saying that if Christmas week, your birthday, anniversary, and year-end finances all happen in one week, you’d better think about some alternative evaluation times. Sometimes a half-birthday works well. Or scheduling a vacation day to provide a long weekend every year to use for an evaluation time might work. Whatever times you select, put them on the calendar, and treat them as business appointments.

How to develop your questions

What kind of questions to ask? Think about interviewing yourself for the position of home overseer in your home: what would you want to know? Or think about being charged with someone to speak about such and such a topic: what life success would you want that person to have? What questions would help you determine if they were the genuine article, or a faker? The tougher the questions to yourself, the more you can change—think of it this way: when you make up the test, you should be able to figure out the answers!