How to Manage a Family Calendar

Families today have so many activities it's hard to manage everyone's individual schedules. Instead, set up one master calendar to help you organize the family better, prevent missed activities and possibly save time. Follow these steps to learn how to create and manage a single calendar for the whole family.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• School calendar of activities
• Work schedules
• Birthdays of family and friends
• Practice and game schedules for the kids
• List of doctor appointments
• Calendar to fit all the family activities

1. Decide on what kind of calendar you will use and where you will keep it. Consider a large enough calendar to fit activities for all members of your family. Find a place where everyone can easily see and update it. Kitchens are a good place to hang one as it's a common area of the home.
2. Purchase your family calendar. Look online and in stores for options. There are a variety of choices--calendars large and small, those which hang or can be laid out.
3. Gather everything with dates that have been set for the year so far. Make sure you have school calendars, vacation dates, doctor appointments and lists of any work trips you or your spouse will be taking.
4. Determine how you will organize the calendar--by date or by person. Organizing by person helps you know who needs to be where and at what time. Organizing by date allows you to glance at the schedules for the entire family, but you'll need to remember to write in who is doing what activity on which day.
5. Write in all the activities, dates and times you know of for the year based on the documents you collected in Step 3. Make each one as short as possible so multiple entries can be displayed for each day. Leave space for more things to be added later when they come up.
6. Share with your family how the calendar is set up and most importantly how updates will be made. The calendar will not have value if it is not kept up to date. Encourage them to check it daily as well.
7. View the calendar daily in the morning and at bedtime. Look at the entire week to see what you may need to do earlier to prepare for an event later in the week. Planning ahead will help you manage the calendar successfully.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember to include dates you know for sure such as holidays, birthdays and days when there is no school for the kids.
• Enter new activity dates and times immediately when you know of them, or designate a place to jot down this information where you can transfer it to the calendar later.