Ethan Murray
Ethan is a Partner in global management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, where he serves in roles including Global Capabilities Lead and Americas Chief People Officer for the Digital practice, building on a career straddling consulting and engineering roles. He lives in his wife's home country of Costa Rica with wife Shannon and 3 children aged 8 to 13. Shannon and Ethan also manage her parents' family business, the Costa Rican roller skating rink.
What does your normal working day look like?
In short, I do 6 hours with kids, 8.5 hours working, 2-3 hours for self and wife, and 8 hours sleeping. The time with kids has 0.5-1 hour of pure play and snuggle time, while the rest is cooking, eating, homework, etc.
In detail…
4:45am: Wake up for 15 minutes of extra math with 13-year-old (Art of Problem Solving)
5:00am: Cook breakfast for the kids, wake them, get them ready for school, and help ensure they've made and packed lunches. As a team with Shannon, if she's not travelling or working early.
6:30am: Kids get on the bus. Clean the kitchen, shower, etc
7:00am: Start work
3:30pm: Stop work, and meet kids as they get off the bus. Spend the afternoon with kids and household chores: oversee their duties like washing lunch dishes and practicing piano; cook and serve dinner; try to mix in 15+ minutes of just-fun playtime outdoors with kids. Possibly pick up a kid after sports from the late bus dropoff in town.
5:30pm: Feed kids dinner
6:30-7pm: Kids’ bedtime. Ethan and Shannon hang out or do personal "work" (we help run her parents' family business, a roller skating rink, to let them retire)
9:30pm: Sleep
How long have you had this routine?
2-3 years
How has it changed as your children have gotten older or as your family has grown?
For 10 years before that, I worked until 5pm or so, although I would often work on the move from 2-3pm onwards, as I drove kids to afterschool activities and waited for them. Before that, I worked the extreme lifestyle of a management consultant, averaging >70 hours/week in my early years and managing down to 55-60 hours/week later on.
What boundaries have you set around your work, and how did you work with your colleagues to enable them?
When I had saved enough money that I knew I didn’t have to work crazy hours anymore, I wrote a “resignation letter” and discussed it with my boss. It said I would target 45-50 hours/week, along with some other terms that were important to me, and it proposed how I could continue to add value to the company and what compensation and progression tradeoffs I was willing to accept with this. He accepted it. From then on, I was open and proactive with colleagues that I was on a different “deal” than most people. And I stopped checking email at night or committing to more than I could complete in a healthy workday.
On my company-internal wiki page, I have this original letter posted along with my intro story (which I send to new people I'm meeting because I got tired of repeating it out loud).
What systems do you have in place to have a successful day?
In theory, and ideally, I meditate each morning. When I do, it’s a huge help to a joyous and productive day. In reality, I do this 1-2x a week in recent years; but during my years transitioning to this lifestyle, I was better about doing it daily.
I have several habits I use during the workday to make it productive and successful. The ones most relevant to parenting are:
Review my “must do today” list each morning and ensure I have enough blocked time to do it, with zero risk it will spill into the evening. If there’s risk, reset expectations or reschedule my day.
Make fewer promises about what I’ll get done each day.
Block my calendar for the morning and afternoon with the kids, so nobody will schedule into it. Decline or reschedule calls that try to get into this slot. Since most calls are a giant waste of time, it’s good discipline to get rid of them anyway. :)
Switching to weekends, what are the most important things to get right to have an excellent weekend day?
Again, a morning meditation is wonderful. On one weekend day, we do this as a family: read a few inspirational passages from our favorite philosophies, discuss them a bit, and then have 15-30 minutes of silence together. (Edit: Ethan recommends this book for a non-religious philosophical text)
We also start each weekend by making a family plan for the weekend. We write down everything we have to or want to do. The lightweight extreme is a short to-do list. The heaviest extreme had a grid with every 30-minute slot in the weekend and a bunch of slips of paper with the activities we’re trying to fit in - then we collectively made tradeoffs until we could agree on what we would vs. wouldn’t do that weekend. The normal version has a to-do list for each person, and one for the collective family.
And of course plenty of sleep, exercise, and healthy food for everyone. And not doing too much.
How do you "turn off work" and give the kids your full attention?
My phone has all notifications turned off. Calls vibrate, but nothing else grabs my attention (even during the workday). I control when I check it. And after 3:30pm, I don’t.
Work’s not the only thing that distracts us, though. Chores, bills, meals can all make kids feel ignored. Our kids’ favorite thing is “special time”: 15-30 minutes of complete focus and presence by a parent with just one child, doing whatever they want to do. That tiny investment can get them ready for lots of chores or solo time.
What has been the most impactful thing you've done to save time / energy in your family?
Bulk cooking. One weekend day a month, cook and freeze enough food for the month. Simple rotational meal plan.
Don’t drive to kids’ activities; it’s the worst! We did this for years, and we were always driving around. Now our kids do activities at school and take a late bus home, or their teacher comes to the house (which is much cheaper and easier in Costa Rica!).
What principles have served you best in your parenting?
As my parents taught me: “Kids, what’s the most important thing in the world?” (all together) “Being kind!!” Every rule or lesson can be sourced from that as the guiding goal.
We also get huge value from being very organized, clear, and consistent in our systems and processes. We write down expectations and agreements, planned consequences, etc. We have posted in the kitchen checklists for kids getting ready for school (make lunch etc.) and putting things away afterwards; and trackers for piano practice, healthy balanced meal variety over the week, etc.
When you feel overwhelmed as a parent, what do you do?
Walk away before I flip out.
What is your approach to screen time?
Effectively, none. Sometimes (about weekly) 15-30 minutes of a movie, as a family before bedtime. Otherwise, only for educational purposes, usually beside a parent.
Is there a primary parent in your household, or do you split the parenting evenly?
We share the psychological and mental burden of children and household evenly, but I spend more time on it: a 60/40 split.
If there is an even split between parents, how do you divide the work and make sure that it is fair?
Responsibilities fall into three buckets:
Ethan has primary accountability, i.e. it’s my job to proactively think ahead, propose solutions to tricky problems, design structure and oversee successful execution of the activity. Shannon may cover at times and might have supporting roles, but she doesn’t have to be worrying about this.
Shannon has primary accountability (same definition as above)
Shared accountability: We both should worry about it, and we jointly plan who will take care of it
What is your process for updating your parenting model as a child's needs or a parent's needs change?
Notice that an existing system is not working (reactive) or that it’s time to create a new system (proactive).
Reactive is typically because of increasing tension or non-compliance.
Proactive is typically because:
We find our list of important to-dos has run out, either for the family or for one kid, and we decide it’s time to take on fresh goals
Or we think of a good new idea we would like to incorporate into our family. Often from other families we admire (mostly siblings) or from inspirational reading.
Get ‘just-parents’ time to think and talk about it, align on goals and the best way forward
Write down our thoughts and proposal, both review it to finalize and ensure alignment
Get time with ‘just-parents’ and the relevant kid(s) to read and talk through this
Create new tracking systems, reward and consequence schemes, etc. Write and post them somewhere visible.
Track progress, celebrate it, apply consequences. Be very consistent. If it’s not working or someone raises a challenge to it, return to step 1. Sometimes there are a few minor refinement cycles for a new approach.
What is your top trick for making it through flights?
Since our kids’ infancy, we’ve flown 1-2x per year between Costa Rica and Boston, which is two 3-hour flights + layover, or sometimes 5-hour + 1-hour. The keys to success have been:
Top trick: Everyone gets tons of sleep the night before. It’s easy to stay up late packing, but then you’re too tired for the highly active entertainment needed to make a flight great: Your happy imagination.
Other tricks:
Bring a wide variety of small, entertaining objects you will actively play with along with the kids. Bring out one at a time, maximizing its entertainment value before the next one. Most important is to bring your imagination and creativity: storytelling, drawing games, etc.
For kids old enough to follow directions and learn from consequences, but young enough to scream on long flights, design a consequence they’ll care about and that you can actually execute on a plane. Talk to them about it and practice it ahead of time, then apply it consistently.
What is something unusual or unique that you do in your family?
When a pair of kids are bickering, we attach them to each other until they are happy and loving again. Two methods:
The “marriage carpet”: we learned about one culture’s traditional wedding gift of a tiny carpet that a couple is required to stand on together whenever they argue. We do this with the kids, using a carpet small enough that they have to hug each other to stay balanced on top of it.
Rope: we tie two kids together by the wrist, with just a few feet of slack. They have to stay tied until they’ve been kind to each other long enough that we’re confident they’ve fixed the problem. Works shockingly well, even without us giving any other directions or coaching. Typically we leave them tied 10-30 minutes.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
The hardest thing, and one that I don’t feel fabulous at, is to remember that the biggest impact we have on our kids is by our example, so we have to be good examples ourselves. For me, I easily get lost in stress of making kids do the right things, and I behave wrongly while trying to do this - which is a net negative!
Bonus content: The Bank of Dada
Inspired by a Mr. Money Mustache blog, years ago I set up an online spreadsheet as the Bank of Dada, tracking the children's savings. It started simple but has evolved into:
All deposits are split 3 ways:
Help: for helping the world in some way. This money accumulates until every year, or so, the child chooses how to use it to help something in the world. Past uses have ranged from a local animal shelter to helping out-of-work acquaintances through COVID to mosquito bed nets.
Save: to spend from this bucket, you must state your intention at least a week before spending it. The idea is it’s for larger, more valuable things; parents try to exert significant persuasion (and sometimes insistence) to drive good choices here. The biggest and best saved-up expenditure yet has been our 10-year-old daughter flying her cousin to Costa Rica to visit her.
Spend: can be used for immediate spending however the child wants
Interest is paid weekly, at a rate that motivates children to save as they see their “baby money” piling up.
For very young children, 10% weekly interest worked well on their small savings.
As children grow and get better at savings, the interest rate goes down
We evolved to graduated interest rates, declining as your balance increases
This creates a small source of income for the children, similar to the allowance some other parents give. We prefer them to feel like their income is from smart savings and investments rather than a handout from somebody.
This has become our most versatile, commonly used, and effective consequence.
It began logically: I declared that if children left messes around that I had to clean up, they would have to pay me a cleaner’s rates to do the work: $1 per mess. Direct withdrawal from the Bank of Dada.
It worked very well: it motivated them to avoid mistakes, it scales to the size of the crime, has no emotional baggage involved in applying it, and is quick and easy to apply in any context.
When we wanted the kids to build a good habit of putting away their lunchboxes and school clothes on arrival home, we posted a checklist and declared a $5 penalty for anyone who went to play before finishing it.
Extending it further, we now often use it to discourage raised voices, failure to listen etc.
We’re aware of some thoughtful parents who think it’s healthier for kids to not be thinking about money at all at this age. Maybe they’re right. But this works well for us.