Plan with Me: Coordinating Your Busy Family

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The past few months, my family has been super busy. It seems like we are all traveling in different directions constantly. My biggest challenge? Keeping everyone’s schedules coordinated. Between school projects, blog deadlines, my husband’s work schedule, and the kids’ sports schedules, not to mention keeping the house together, it can be a dizzying and confusing task.

The key to keeping it all together is simple. Everyone needs to be committed and communicate. Once you do that, the task of creating a combined family schedule is a manageable one for you.

Hold weekly family meetings. Now that the kids are getting older, it’s time to bring them into this conversation and get them involved with the family calendar. Sunday nights seem to make the most sense so at dinner time I open up my planner and we discuss what is going on that week. This also doubles as an opportunity to schedule quality family time together. I know in a few years it will be hard for us all to sit down at the dinner table together on a regular basis. Having this family meeting scheduled will ensure that at least one night we are all together for dinner.

Design a schedule that can be easily accessed by all family members, so that everyone knows where everyone else should be at any given time. I actually have a few things that I use to keep our family scheduled. First, there’s my Google calendar. Everything gets added here first since a lot of planning and scheduling happens on the fly. My husband has access to my calendar and both boys have their own as well. If it’s not on the calendar, it’s not happening.

Next, during our family meeting, the Google calendar is matched up against my Erin Condren Life Planner. I have repurposed the blocks in the planner with the help of washi tape so that they fit my needs. Top block is for appointments, the middle block is for errands and household chores, and the bottom block contains my work tasks.

For the summer, I am working on an updated version of our summer schedule that I created a few years ago. My goal this summer is to put the electronics away (for both the kids and myself) and get doing more. Whether we do more crafts, read more books, go to new places, I really don’t care what it is, as long as we are doing! By creating a weekly schedule (more to come on that one!), I can ensure that we are doing more than just laying around the house all summer. Although there will be some blocks of that relaxation scheduled in here and there.

Again, with a commitment from each family member and open lines of communication, the family schedule can be a useful tool for everyone. By setting these up now, I know this will help me in the years to come as our family gets even busier (I honestly don’t even want to think about it).