46 | Managing the Family Calendar
46 | Managing the Family Calendar
Calendar management is challenging for most of us (especially when multiple people are involved!) In this episode, I discuss insights from The Fair Play Method, and I explain how my husband and I divide calendar responsibilities at home. I invite you to question default gender-based roles around calendar keeping, and reconsider the dynamics in your household too. Sharing the chore load also involves clear communication around the family’s activities.
Additionally, I provide practical tips on building and maintaining an organized family calendar. My hope is that by talking about calendaring, by making the work of organizing time more visible, you’ll feel less frazzled and understand how much you’re in charge of your time.
Tune in to reassess your calendar approach and remember, you’re more organized than you think.
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Intro: Welcome to A Pleasant Solution, Embracing An Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast we'll go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.
Amelia: Welcome to Episode 46, Managing the Family Calendar. Let’s talk about scheduling. For many individuals and families, it’s the source of an ongoing headache. It requires attention to detail, regular communication, and coordination amongst multiple people and multiple calendars. Read incorrectly, folks can end up being late, missing appointments completely, or without the gear or supplies needed for the scheduled activity. Plus, the components on the calendar change seasonally.
As a clutter coach, I’ve noticed that calendar management is a sticking point for many women. Yet, before we take a closer look at today’s topic, I want you to think back to your early elementary or middle school years for a moment. Were you given a planner and given explicit instruction on how to use it? In those foundational years, how did you identify tasks and spread the workload out over the week ahead? No one taught me how to plan my week. I have three school age kids, each of whom were given planners, none of whom were explicitly taught how to use them. My youngest uses hers for doodling in class. All three primarily rely on the digital version of their assignment calendar managed and uploaded by their school.
It's important to recognize your relationship with calendar management because many of you may be suffering where compassion may be in order instead. Designing a central family schedule, then updating, coordinating, and communicating with others around it isn’t an easy task – especially if you’ve been cobbling your own skill set together your entire life. Relaxing your internal judgment around time and calendar management takes practice, yet I’d love you to give yourself permission to do so starting now.
So, on today’s episode I’ll share a bit about managing the family calendar from The Fair Play Method’s perspective, and how my husband and I divide the responsibility in our home. I’ll share three takeaways to shake up your perspective. If you’re not currently parenting, you’ll be able to apply my offerings more broadly to caregiving in general or to situations where two or more calendars need to be integrated. As always, take and apply my suggestions if they’re helpful and make sense to you. If they create confusion or further frustration, skip them. Embracing an organized life is a journey of trial and error. It’s using what resonates and simplifies things for you and letting the rest wash away.
Managing the family calendar is considered a “daily grind” task within The Fair Play Method. Daily grinds are tasks that are repetitive, take time, focus, and attention, and may be considered dull. Yet, they’re essential for every household. Let me pause here and explicitly state that… just because a task is essential, doesn’t mean YOU have to be the default person to do the task. Women have been pigeonholed into being the default calendar keepers because our society sees us as the default caretaker for the children and elders in the household. There’s this mistaken belief that our schedules and time are more flexible, therefore we’re more often available for driving, for taking others to their health appointments, and coordinating social events with family and friends.
I encourage you to get curious about how this default may show up in your household and whether it’s an underlying belief that influences who’s the scheduling manager in your home. You have the power to question this dynamic, to see how it benefits or taxes your mental load, and whether it’s something you’d like to adjust. Another influential, but unspoken factor, may be your desire to control what’s happening when. Managing the family calendar takes an enormous amount of executive functioning which for many translates to the internal dialogue that seems to always be running in the background. There’s identifying a platform, having regular conversations to ensure others are adding or subtracting events, and including other support folks in the conversation. You get to choose how much control you desire over the structure of the week ahead. Note, however, that with an increased desire for control, comes a greater strain on your mental load. Consider swapping the role of calendar management with your partner every so often to give your brain a break.
In our household, I’ve chosen to be the calendar keeper. I’m able to hold complex sets of information and simultaneously simplify them. My sense of time awareness is high. I developed it with regular practice throughout high school, and as an adult now have a firm way of visualizing when the schedule is too full versus just right. During my client coaching sessions, I’ll often work with folks to help them edit and understand their own sense of time so they can shift from feeling busy to certain about the shape of their weeks. It’s a big relief when you’re able to build that skill set. I’ve now reached a point where activities must gain access to our calendar, as well as earn their keep.
But it hasn’t always been that way. When our kids were much younger, I was at home. I considered my working hours to be before school drop off and afternoons onwards. As my son became more and more invested in soccer, my eldest daughter chose ballet. To simplify, we enrolled my youngest daughter in ballet too. My husband and I settled on a “kid split” to manage the driving and the calendar. I was responsible for all things girls – lessons, driving, competitions, auditions, etc. and my husband was responsible for all things my son. As the calendar keeper, I’d created six calendars to help identify each person and their activities. This is still our approach today.
For tech, we use Apple devices. We also use the Apple calendar system. My personal calendar is yellow, my favorite color. I’m the only person who can see my personal calendar, and I use it for fun activities, friends, chores I’m responsible for, and other personal appointments. (I now have a Google calendar that I’ve integrated for A Pleasant Solution.) Each of my three children has their own calendar within Apple. Each kid is marked with a separate color, and they’re shared with my husband. My mom has her own calendar and color too. The sixth calendar is our “family” calendar. This is where events that involve several or all of us land. It’s bright green and is shared with all. My husband also has his work calendar that only he can see and manage.
So, the first takeaway that I want you to have is that creating separate calendars for each person in your family AND associating them with distinct color coding is an extremely helpful tool. Discussing who is responsible for driving and managing which kid and which activity on a weekly basis is also extremely helpful. My husband and I have developed a way of checking in via text or in person at least once per week where we review who’s taking the lead with each activity during the week. We don’t assume. That leads to angst and frustration. Again, when the kids were young, we settled on a kid split. Now that my oldest is driving, she manages herself. Our division of labor regarding the calendar is based on which household we’re in: whomever is parenting in Detroit is responsible for my daughter, and whomever is parenting in Columbus is responsible for my son.
Identifying each family member by color helps the brain to see who needs to be where. It also helps you to see conflicts more clearly. Two people can’t need to be in two different places that are 30 minutes apart. Sure, the schedule can read that way, but in reality, recognize that you are setting yourself up for an anxious and headache filled evening if so. This is the moment I recommend that you have the hard conversations with both the adults and kids in the household to translate what the calendar means for everyone’s mood and energy.
So, the second takeaway that I want you to have about managing the calendar is that it’s a living document that translates to your lived experience. Whomever is the calendar keeper is also the keeper of how rushed or relaxed folks feel as they move throughout the day. To be clear, the calendar keeper isn’t creating the feelings of others – that’s not possible – but the person who’s managing the calendar also holds the responsibility of seeing whether folks can realistically get from place A to B to C in the time frame indicated. Honestly, I see this as one of the components most folks forget to consider when planning. As a living document, the calendar can be changed and adjusted. You’ll want to develop the habit of both blocking off travel and transition time and being compassionate for the you who must complete (or skip) the commitments on the calendar.
When I’m building a calendar, I think from broad to specific. I start with the known activities that take place over the course of the year ahead. For example, I sit down and enter in all of the school dates – beginning and end of the year, school holiday vacations, days off, and conference dates – all in one sitting. If a task like that feels overwhelming to you, break it down. Aim for 10 minutes to enter one portion of the school dates. Then aim for another 10-minute session to enter the next portion of the school dates. For us, school dates are assigned to the family calendar. All five of us need to know when school is off, and when school is on. Because I have 3 kids in three different schools, I’ll put the overall dates on the family calendar, then if there’s a day where only one kid is off, I’ll assign that to their particular calendar.
The same goes for any planned vacations or travel. I start broad, thinking over the entire year, then get more granular. On a weekly basis, I mark off school drop off and school pick up as blocks on the calendar. This is my visual reminder that I can’t schedule work commitments over those time slots when I’m responsible for driving. When entering a seasonal schedule, like a sport or music lesson, I enter the activity on repeat. I enter the location of the activity. I use the location of the activity to then block off the needed time to commute, plus I add at least an additional 15-minute buffer. As the calendar keeper for our family, I do this all within Apple. Each family member is subscribed to their individual calendar, plus the overall family calendar. You could equally do this within Google or your preferred shared family calendar app.
Which brings me to the third and final takeaway for this episode. (And I’m realizing that there’s so much more, so perhaps I’ll do a follow up.) Managing the family calendar is invisible work unless you specifically make it visible. At the beginning of the episode, I invited you to consider how you learned (or didn’t learn) to schedule your time. Part of the emotional labor load of the family calendar is teaching others how to read, edit, communicate, and participate around this topic. You may own the calendar keeper assignment, yet you are not an island. Managing the family calendar takes input and collaboration. Teaching others how to interact with your chosen calendar system is an important component. Again, I want to acknowledge, and encourage you to acknowledge, how much cognitive labor goes into this element of household management. If you’re someone who’s beating yourself up for being chronically late, for always spinning in circles of overwhelm or overcommitment, allow yourself to hear how much work, what skills, and the amount of detailed attention it takes to be “good” at calendaring. Consider being kinder to yourself and determine whether improving your relationship with your calendar is even a priority in this season of your life.
When my kids were given phones in late elementary, part of their tech education involved subscribing to the various calendars. For the first few years, they didn’t add to the calendars, only viewed them. I sat with them and explained the different calendar views and helped them choose how appointments showed up on their device. When they’d ask me a scheduling related question, I’d suggest they check their calendar to see if they could find the answer themselves. In the evenings, I’d say, “Tomorrow is Wednesday. What do you need to pack up and plan for, in terms of belongings?” Then in the mornings, I’d say, “What’s the plan for today?” I’d invite them to take ownership over their time by using their calendars as an anchor for their day. We’re still working on this habit, and I’ll say to them, “I’m going to Columbus on Sunday. This is what you have during the week. I’ll see you again on such and such a date.” I’m intentionally teaching them to mark time for themselves and our family on a broader scale. Your kids are more capable than you may think, and you’re more organized than you think. Daily practice, weekly check-ins, explicit conversations, all these things will work in your family’s favor when it comes to calendar management.
So, to recap today’s takeaways, consider what’s working and what needs adjusting when it comes to managing the family calendar. You can choose to be the calendar keeper in your household, or you can swap it with your partner. Scheduling takes a toll on your cognitive load, so take that into consideration when making these powerful decisions. I encourage you to create separate calendars for family members and use colors to help visually define the differences. Add travel time and transition time to each appointment, including school drop off and pick up. Talk with your family about how the calendar is a living document requiring input and consideration from each person in the household. No one loves to be rushed, so the more everyone is involved, and commitments are transparent for all to see, the more comfortable a daily experience it will be for all. Think of this as a generational skill that evolves with every new family member or season of life. It takes practice for us all. Talk to y’all soon.
Outro: Thanks so much for tuning into this week's episode. If you liked this episode and know of just one other person who'd get value from it too, I invite you to share it with them. I'd be more than grateful. I'd love to stay connected with you too. Make sure to follow this podcast to connect with me on Instagram @apleasantsolution and join my community at www.apleasantsolution.com. Talk to y'all soon and remember, you are more organized than you think.
