I had the honor this past weekend of accompanying my son and his high school rugby team as they took part in a team-building exercise with some members of the 5th Marine Division at Camp Pendleton in California. The experience we had along and the lessons he and his team learned really resonated, reinforcing many of the critical skills I’ve worked hard to instill in my son. It also reminded me why I love the culture and toughness of rugby so much.

In the end all parents really want the same thing: well-adjusted kids of strong character and determination (grit) that are resilient enough to handle what life throws at them. In the case of my son I believe my role is to turn him into someone who will eventually become a great father, partner and provider. This past Saturday, the Marines, through their outlook on the world, helped reinforce some of the key lessons my wife and I have worked so hard to instill in our kids.

Talking and writing about morning routines has become an industry. A quick Amazon search for “morning routine” yields fifteen books on the subject, and that’s just the first two pages of results. It’s a popular subject because the gurus are right. I personally have benefited greatly by building a repetitive system around my morning routine. While morning routines draw all the attention, There’s another routine that I think is equally as important, for different reasons.

A big challenge for many of us is the transition from “work time” to “family time”. With modern tech allowing us 24 x 7 access to our jobs plus more and more people working from home, the division between work time and home time is often blurred, resulting in millions of employees taking their work home with them, or not really finishing work in the first place. It’s a major problem that causes great stress in relationships with studies showing that a marriage to a workaholic can double the chance of divorce. With the number of people working from home continuing to grow the stress the lack of divide causes on families will only get bigger.

All of this stress and the expansion of the work window drives home the importance of not only having a good morning routine, but also focusing on your evening routine.

You're Only In a Race Against Yourself and Other Lessons I Learned from the Marines

Advice for Dads: The Important Transition from Work Time to Family Time