Tips for Organising a Busy Family Calendar

As the new year rapidly approaches, you may have some thoughts in mind about resolutions you'd like to set for yourself. While your resolutions may focus mostly on personal matters like exercising more or quitting smoking, other resolutions might have a focus on those closest to you. For parents, one positive New Year's resolution to consider is to work towards organising your busy family calendar. Extracurricular and school events for the kids, your busy work schedule, social outings, and holidays can be a lot for any parent to keep track of. If you happened to be divorced or separated, managing a parenting time schedule on top of everything else can complicate an already busy family calendar. Maintaining an organised calendar is something that will take some dedication throughout the entire year, but there are things you can do to make doing so feel almost effortless. Here are five tips for organising a busy family calendar. 

Take Time to Plan Ahead

Organising a busy family calendar starts with some pre-planning. Start by documenting as much as you can at the beginning of the year. For divorced or separated parents, this will include laying out the bones of your parenting time or visitation schedule on the calendar. Knowing when your kids will be with you and when they will be with your co-parent will help you to know more about other events that take place on top of that schedule. It will also help you to plan ahead for potential changes that must be made to that schedule. For example, if you are scheduled to be with your kids over a week that you were asked to go on a business trip, knowing this ahead of time will give you an opportunity to discuss a possible parenting time swap with your co-parent. No matter a family's living situation, it will be important to get down as much information as you can onto a calendar now so that you know what to expect as time goes on. Once you've documented everything you can on your calendar now, you'll be able to see where you have breaks in your schedule for other events that may come up. This will help you to know when you'll be able to say yes to those other events and when you'll have to decline due to another event. 

Have Some Limits

For any family, it's easy to see the calendar quickly become full with numerous events. With so much going on for both you and your kids, it can also be hard to find some downtime to recuperate from it all. Downtime is important for any person to recover from all of the activity going on around them. It provides a time for rest and to reestablish a clear mind. Before saying "yes" to new events that come up, have some limits already set for how often you're willing to agree to attend something. If you're a parent who frequently volunteers at school events, make it part of your New Year's resolution to say "no" to some events. Instead of volunteering at every event, you may decide to only participate in every other event that comes up. For your kids, set limits to the number of activities they participate in and events that they attend. While your child might want to sign up for multiple sports teams and participate in multiple extracurricular activities, limit the number of activities to one or two per season. Talk to your kids about which activities they want to participate in the most, and help the decide which activities can maybe wait until the next season. As events come up, keep an eye on what your kids' schedule has been like lately before you allow them to attend others. For example, your child might be invited to attend a sleepover on a weekend where they've already had multiple sports games during the week and have other plans already scheduled for the weekend. Besides helping to better organise your busy family calendar, limiting the number of events they attend will help keep your kids healthy enough to keep up with everything else that is scheduled. It will also help you to maintain your sanity as you try to keep all of these plans in mind and documented on the calendar. 

Review It Twice Daily

The truth about a busy family calendar is that you won't be able to remember everything on your schedule all the time, but taking some time to look it over on a regular schedule will help you to remember what's coming up over the next few days. To help you stay on top of your busy family schedule, try reviewing your calendar twice daily. Take a few minutes to look over your calendar once in the morning soon after you wake up, and take a few minutes to look it over again before you go to bed. This will help prepare you for what you need to do in the upcoming days, and it will also give you a chance to see if you must reschedule something due to a double booking or simply not feeling up to it. Making these daily calendar check-ins part of your regular routine will help you to mentally prepare for your schedule each day. 

Choose The Right Calendar

A busy family calendar doesn't affect just one person; by definition, if affects the whole family. Therefore, every family member must stay up to date about the various activities and events that everyone is scheduled to attend. A traditional paper calendar or personal organiser is helpful when a schedule is just for one person, but it's not easy to share these calendars without making physical copies of it. Online shared calendars can help resolve this issue by making it easier to share a calendar with multiple people. When sharing a busy family calendar online, make sure that the resource you have chosen to go with is secure and will keep your sensitive family information private. Also, when needing to track a parenting time and visitation schedule on top of other events, you will want to use a calendar that is built to document that kind of information on top of other activities and events. The OurFamilyWizard website offers shared calendaring tools specifically designed to document parenting time on the same family calendar that includes all of your other events. Parenting time is documented using colour coding to help differentiate between who has custody on which days. On the same calendar, events can be posted which document more than just the date and time it takes place. Individual events can document things like who will drop off and pick up the kids to and from the event, who exactly will be attending the event and other important notes about the event itself. Also, recurring settings allow you to easily schedule an entire season of football practices in just a few clicks. Sharing the OurFamilyWizard calendar is simple and secure. Only members of your family on the website can access your calendar, and only parents can add to or edit it. If you would like a paper copy of your calendar, print options let you make a copy to post on the refrigerator in your kitchen.

Keep Information Available

Part of choosing the right calendar for your busy family schedule is selecting one that is easy to read and is easily available. Again on the OurFamilyWizard calendar, mobile apps let you keep your family calendar with you wherever you may go. You can view it and schedule new items to it from anywhere with an internet connecting using the OurFamilyWizard mobile app. If an update is made by your co-parent, notifications keep you up to date about what was posted, when and by whom. You can also set event reminders for yourself about events taking place within the next day so that you won't miss a beat as you go about your day. 

 

 

NOTE: Many state and federal laws use terms like ‘custody’ when referring to arrangements regarding parenting time and decision-making for a child. While this has been the case for many years, these are not the only terms currently used to refer to these topics.

Today, many family law practitioners and even laws within certain states use terms such as ‘parenting arrangements’ or ‘parenting responsibility,’ among others, when referring to matters surrounding legal and physical child custody. You will find these terms as well as custody used on the OurFamilyWizard website.