Late for the Offsite.

We spend a remarkable amount of time managing our lives and surprisingly little time asking where they're headed.

At 10:58 on Monday morning, I was walking quickly across a resort in Rancho Santa Fe with my laptop under one arm and a charger in my hand because I didn’t want to be late.

There wasn’t a client waiting.

There wasn’t a conference room with a basket of Sharpies and a trust exercise.

Alex was waiting by the pool so we could resume our self-imposed offsite.

Wilson was away for a few days at Camp Mani, my mother-in-law’s annual summer tradition. Calling it camp makes it sound rustic. It is not. There are theatre tickets, cooking classes, glass blowing, enough generous treats to require an extra suitcase on the trip home, and this year’s first photo sent from camp: Wilson eating Lucky Charms with a Dr Pepper at three in the afternoon. My father raised me to believe carob chips were a special treat. My mother-in-law has chosen a different path.

We wanted somewhere we could drive, bring Maisy, and disappear for a couple of days without turning the trip itself into a project. Rancho Santa Fe fit the brief. The town is sleepy. Think Truman Show sleepy. On a walk in to town, we found banks, real estate offices, and very little evidence that anyone had ever urgently needed a dry martini with a twist. The hotel has history, a place where time slows down without requiring anyone to say the words “wellness” or “intentional”.

We had planned to arrive a day earlier until Saturday night’s room rate doubled, which I found offensive.

Instead, we stayed home Saturday and got Korean scrubs. A perfect opening ceremony. Nothing says fresh start like a stranger removing the first half of the year from your shins.

During the drive south, we decided to make the weekend legit.

We made an agenda, defined outcomes, mapped working sessions. This is my jam.

We called it the Sinunu Family Operating System, a title so earnest it should be hidden from the internet.

We were not aiming to become one of those Instagram couples standing proudly beside a whiteboard, radiating shared Google Calendar energy. We have also been known to lose an afternoon to spritzes and intend to remain people who understand the value of that choice.

But we had both been carrying too much.

There’s the obvious mental load that gets plenty of airtime. Zoom calls. Birthday presents you should have shipped a month ago. Ordering dog poo bags. Paying bills. Dentist appointments.

Those are the visible tabs. The quieter ones rarely get spoken out loud.

Are we spending this one life well?

Nothing is wrong.

Actually, so much is gratefully right.

Even good lives are surprisingly easy to drift through.

There’s always another work project, another school year, another anniversary or family trip that goes by too fast.

Then one day your child is twelve and 2032 no longer feels like a year from a science fiction film. It’s high school graduation.

It is the edge of the map you used to think was far away.

Close enough to picture.

Far too close to ignore. So we made 2032 one of our anchors.

It isn’t because we feel lost.

We wanted to ask what our life might look like if we made fewer decisions by default.

What kind of marriage do we want in years to come?

What kind of parents do we hope we’ve been?

What work is worth saying yes to?

What traditions do we hope Wilson will remember long after he’s moved out and developed opinions about our fashion choices?

What do we keep insisting matters that our calendars don’t currently reflect?

Monday morning found us in a shaded corner beside the pool while birthday groups floated past with cocktails and, eventually, someone introduced a sound bowl.

And we were in to it let me tell you.

We’d expected the weekend to feel productive. We’re gamers with this stuff.

I hadn’t expected it to be so liberating. The hours flew by. Documents multiplied. Recordings of each other answering questions were transcribed.

Those questions became conversations, conversations became decisions, and decisions found somewhere to live besides the inside of my head and instead in a shared Google doc.

Alex eventually found himself barefoot behind a frozen cocktail cart because it was the only available outlet.

It’s one of my favorite photographs from the weekend.

A barefoot hunk in a white shirt charging his laptop behind a drinks cart while working on a family manifesto.

I spend a lot of my professional life helping organizations answer questions most people rarely stop to ask.

Are our values showing up in how we make decisions?

What deserves our best energy?

What has stopped working but we keep doing?

What does real success feel like?

Companies disappear for days to wrestle with those questions. They book conference rooms, print agendas and hire facilitators.

At home, the biggest conversations usually happen sideways—loading the dishwasher, driving to karate, or after one of us has turned off the light while the other is suddenly wide awake with something that can’t wait until morning (er, that would be me).

The smaller questions get spoken because they’re within reach.

The bigger ones linger. They become weather.

I don’t think it’s the number of tasks that becomes exhausting. It’s the uncertainty underneath them that is clicking away.

The feeling that we’re managing the life in front of us without checking often enough whether it’s still connected to the life we meant to build.

I think most of us are carrying around decisions that need somewhere to live.

Some need to be made while others deserve to be postponed deliberately.

Many have been quietly draining energy for years without ever becoming real.

We opened a bottle of bubbles on the lawn when we finished, partly to celebrate and partly because we are not monsters.

I hadn’t realized how much energy I was spending carrying around a future that had nowhere to sit.

P.S. If you’re now wondering what on earth a Family Operating System looks like, I’m happy to send you the template and prompts. Consider this me enabling your inner strategy consultant.

Mission accomplished.