“Plan Your Month Like a Pro: Family Calendar Strategies for Parents” is a collaborative post.
Having and raising a family is one of the most rewarding experiences in your life, but family life can also get hectic and stressful as obligations pile up. With work, school, extracurricular activities, homework, and meal prepping all in the mix, finding ways to organise your family’s time is so necessary that it’s a way of life.
Having a well-organised calendar is a proactive way to get ahead of the chaos that can easily ensue when something falls through the cracks. Your family calendar practise doesn’t need to be perfect but tailored to your family’s needs and schedules, no matter how busy they get. If you’re just learning how to create and keep one, here are some effective strategies to help you plan your month like a pro and keep your family calendar on track.
Start with Choosing the Right Calendar Format
Finding the right family calendar format is the foundation for building and encouraging good organisational habits in everyone. This may take some trial and error, as every family has unique preferences, but the search will be worth it.
Some people use digital calendars, which they can easily sync for every family member. In contrast, others prefer classic wall (or fridge) calendars hanging in the kitchen or the dining room for everyone to see. A beautiful wall calendar like the best-selling family organization calendar from Erin Condren can be an excellent choice for visual planners who prefer seeing everyone’s schedules in one place. You can colour-code each family member’s schedules, chores, and appointments to make the calendar easy to follow.
For tech-savvy families, digital calendars are a game changer, especially if the kids are in their preteen and teen years. You can use options like Apple Calendar or Google Calendar, which are free and widely available, or go for a specific planner app that can sync across devices. This is a great solution if your kids already have phones, so you all have your family calendar available to you at a click.
Turn Calendar Planning into Quality Family Time
While organising and allotting time on the calendar may not be everyone’s idea of fun, you can turn it into a family quest you all embark together on once a month. Set a day at the end of each month and dedicate a couple of hours to going through your upcoming obligations. It can be the first or last day of the month, just ensure that everyone is on board and will show up for it.
You can even turn it into a family routine with homemade snacks and drinks to bring the whole family together. This will be helpful because you get to spend time together and talk through upcoming obligations and potential schedule clashes. Use this time to set reminders for appointments, plan family outings, and create space for downtime to prevent burnout.
This approach will not only allow you to enjoy with your kids and spouse, but it will also teach your little ones about the importance of clear communication, prioritisation, and organisation.
Include Your Long-Term Goals in the Family Calendar
It’s surprisingly easy to get stuck in planning things on a day-to-day basis and lose sight of long-term goals. A good way to prevent this from happening is to include your long-term plans in your family calendar so that you can always keep them in mind.
Dedicate a part of your family calendar to your values and aspirations, be it family vacations, traditions, or personal goals like competitions and future achievements. This way, you’ll have all the daily tasks accounted for but also go beyond them and keep the bigger picture in mind. Doing this also allows you to keep the priorities straight and allot time for family game nights, weekend hikes, decorating the house for the holidays, and anything else.
Leave Room for Flexibility
While it may sound counter-intuitive to plan with flexibility, doing this will make your life much easier in the long run. No matter how good of a planner you are, life is unpredictable, even more so with kids and their varying needs. The best thing you can do for your mental health is to block out daily increments of free time in your monthly calendar to allow for some flexibility.
Doing this will give you space to handle any unexpected delays without stressing out too much and also wedge in an unexpected event or a situation that needs to be handled. Whether it’s a birthday party, a medical emergency, or being stuck at work, flexible planning will make it much easier to adjust on the go and still get everything done.
Carve Out Time for Self-Care
This final suggestion is the one with which parents often struggle the most. While the simple adage of “help yourself to help others” rings true, carving out time for self-care is easier said than done for working parents with a packed family calendar. However, you need to find time for yourself, your well-being, and your hobbies, as well as enable your spouse to do the same.
Self-care can take any form that suits you, be it a quiet night in with a good book, catching up with friends, or heading to the gym a couple of times a week. You’re leading by example here – you take good care of yourself so you can take care of your loved ones, plus your kids learn from your example and understand from an early age that prioritizing self-care is a must.
Final thoughts
If done well and updated regularly, your family calendar can become the guiding star in organising different aspects of everyone’s lives. It may take a bit of time to get it right, but when you choose the right format, stay flexible, and teach the whole family to use the calendar, with time, you’ll notice that there’s less stress around planning and overall organisation will improve, and that’s the final goal!
