Don’t give customers your nicest voice and your family your most tired one. The people at home deserve the good tone too.

Politeness often runs out in the order of who will still be there tomorrow. Strangers get the careful version because the relationship is fragile, and the people at home get whatever is left because you assume they will forgive it. That assumption is usually right, which is what makes it easy to keep spending.

Watch your tone in the first ten minutes after you walk in the door. If it is worse than the one you used at work, that is not tiredness, it is a choice about who gets the effort. Save a little of the good voice for the trip home.