Family and Life Scheduling

“Home” also needs to be structured and organized with the other people and family you share the same roof with.  For me, life is very hectic with 3 kids and a husband- balancing everyone’s schedules, activities, academics, sports, personal and work travel commitments is a juggle and shuffle every day! Finding the right balance between work and play and making sure everyone is at the right place at the right time can feel like a part time job. Here are some tips that can help make it a little easier for you and your family.

Family Shared Calendar

Believe it or not, and don’t laugh, my husband and I in just the past couple years got ourselves synced on a family shared calendar on our phones. For years we used paper calendars (I think it’s the teacher in me that couldn’t let the paper go) and tried to incorporate our iphone calendars, but just couldn’t get it going. Once we finally committed to plugging in each of our own personal and work appointments and the kids, scheduling became much more simplified. And, now that the kids are older and they have their own accounts/phones we are able to create shared calendars with both of them too. Most families/couples most likely already utilize these features, but wanted to highlight since it took us some time to hop on board and get with the program!

Sports

Most of the kids sports teams are run through apps that you can then include and invite family members (the participant themself and the parents/caretakers) to subscribe to and then sync the practice and game schedule to your phone/calendar automatically. (We used to paper print the schedules then manually enter all the practices/games into our calendars). Most leagues do this by default nowadays, but if you participate in a program that does not use an app (such as Teamsnap, TeamLinkt, Game Changer)  for scheduling/communicating- I would highly recommend you advocating they upgrade- it has made our lives 100 times easier. 

Academics and School

The amount of schoolwork ebbs and flows with age and grades, but will always be a constant. Most schools have online access to see the kids assignments/tests/homework a week in advance. We carve out time on Sunday’s to look at the week ahead at a glance and map out blocks of time (based on the kids upcoming calendar) for each after school day to get their work done. We do use a paper agenda/calendar to schedule daily blocks of time to get studying/homework done based on other after school commitments.