Visible Schedules Cut Conflict

If you and your family are busy as bees these days, maybe some organizing tactics will take the sting out of your hectic schedules.

While it’s true that too many calendars, planners and schedules may actually decrease your level of organization, your bag of organizing tools should include a family planner/ calendar.

Some families prefer a large dry-erase wall calendar in a monthly format. Using a different color pen for each family member, they record the basic schedule for regularly occurring practices, meetings, etc. Each month, the dates and activities are refreshed to reflect current schedules. One of the benefits of this arrangement is that everyone’s schedule is visible at a glance so it’s easier to spot time conflicts.

One rule about organizing tools - to be effective, they must be easy to use. This is true for calendars as well, so if you use this idea, post the calendar in a busy spot in your home. You may choose the kitchen or a location visible from the dinner table. If you don’t want it in a public area, how about a bedroom hallway that’s common to all the family? Make your calendar visible with as little effort as possible. If you have to walk into another room to check it, you’ll have limited success with the tool.

If there are more than a few busy people in your family who need help, you May need something larger. In that case, you could try separate 8-by-11 pages for each person. Make a master weekly page with the basic schedule of regularly occurring events and have each family member add school assignments and activities that are special to each week. You could even have the master pages laminated onto one large backing sheet and use dry marker pens to make the entries.

Another technique that has worked well consists of brightly colored sheets of paper, each listing the schedule for a different day of the week.

These pages can be put in a ring binder and, using a clear plastic stand (sold for use with cookbooks), stood on a prominent counter top. Or they could be posted in a high traffic area like the inside of the family entrance to your home. Each night, flip the page to plan the activities for the following day.

Do the kids (and adults) in your family bring home calendars and schedule lists from every school and outside activity they’re involved in? Are you constantly scrambling to find the soccer schedule? Do you know what day and time those music practice changes are for? Gather and keep them together with this idea: Either make a section in your master household organizer or designate a special pocket folder with prongs to secure the pages. Keep all activity schedules, calendars, supply lists and newsletters in this file or folder. Use tabbed dividers to separate activities or keep all calendars together, all newsletters, etc.

My experience has been that using too many time-management methods becomes burdensome and inefficient. The additional effort of keeping several calendars current causes information to become scattered and fragmented - and forgotten.

Our family relies on one master wall calendar, my personal organizer and a household organizer. The wall calendar functions as a quick reference for which activities occur for each person each day, and my personal organizer carries the specifics of things to do, meal plans and special projects. The household organizer contains important information that is needed frequently to run our family but is too easily lost, like phone numbers and messages, activity calendars, business cards and master lists.

While it would be ideal if everyone could take charge of their own schedule, most of the time that duty falls to one person. For busy families, it takes a coordinator to be sure transportation is available, that Dad doesn’t have a civic meeting during Susie’s piano recital and that the whole family is available for a weekend camp-out with Junior’s Cub Scout pack.

For today’s busy family, organization is essential. Off the Presses is a weekly column featuring information from national newsletters. Dale Jarrett is editor of The Get Organized! News and author of “The Perpetual Calendar of Organizing Tips.” To order the calendar ($12.45 including shipping & handling) or subscribe to the monthly newsletter ($14 for one year), send check or money order to TGON, P.O. Box 144, Gotha, FL 34734.