5 Quick & Easy Ways To Manage Your Family Calendar
When you’re a mom of multiple children, the family calendar is always full. These 5 quick and easy things to do at the beginning of each month will keep your busy family on track.
Manage Time For Your Busy Family
Plan Your Monthly Family Calendar
If your family is like mine, there’s something to do every day of the week. When you have multiple kids, each involved in their own activities, the family calendar is full all the time. I share five easy steps to follow and plan out your entire month in an hour in this post. The first two are capturing all your activities: the ones you have regularly and the ones that aren’t recurring. Use the month at a glance view of your handwritten planner to identify conflicts, overlaps and days when you need a little extra help to get it all done.
Update Your Shared Calendar App
Now that you know everything that has to be done, it’s time to share it with the people who make up your busy family. The best way to do that is with a shared calendar app. Add events, activities, reminders and tasks for everyone in your family. My favorite shared calendar app is Cozi.
The Cozi Family Organizer is a free shared calendar app. You can access it through mobile or on desktop and it doesn’t require family members to be on the same email platform. Which is a relief since my husband is still using Hotmail. It works on both Android and iOS platforms and did I already say it’s free?
For the moments when your kids’ faces aren’t buried in their phones and devices, a visual reminder of what’s coming up is helpful. A wall calendar is a great way to share activities, messages, and important notes to keep your busy family on track.
Manage Your Busy Family’s Money
When the economy took a down turn in 2008, I was laid off. We had savings, but depleted half that amount while I was out of work. What we didn’t have were good budgeting and spending habits. It took some time, discipline, and learning to get those things under control. the following are two of the most helpful tips we learned and still maintain.
Review Your Family Budget and Spending
If you’re here reading this, you have a busy family. In order to accomplish all those things that your busy family wants to do, you need money. If you’re not using a monthly budget, you should be. It’s not even debatable. It doesn’t matter if you can keep a good schedule of all the things if you can’t afford to do them.
Take the anxiety out of it and use a pre-designed online budget planner like Everydollar.com or Mint.com. Plug and play the amounts you choose, then connect your bank account to track transactions against the budget. It’s pretty easy and quickly shows you if you have enough money for your month.
However, there is a difference between a budget and a spending plan. A spending plan is a bit more complicated than a budget, but equally necessary. A budget reveals an overall glimpse of your finances. A spending plan highlights how your money is spent over the course of the month. I share the process for using a spending plan in the following Facebook Live video.
Pay All Your Bills
Seriously, just get it out of the way at the beginning of the month. Once you populate your allocated spending plan, write the checks or schedule your bill pay through your bank’s website. If your payments are due at different times of the month, set reminders in your online calendar to mail checks when they’re due later in the month. With everything you have to do, resolving late notices is not something you want to add to the list.
Manage Your Communication With Your Busy Family
Host a Family Meeting
Now that you know everything that needs to happen with your family, it’s time to share it with the rest of your family. Set a routine time for your family to review the activities you have scheduled. Align the activities and goals you have for your family to the overall plan you want to achieve. We use the Family Plan from Patrick Lencioni’s The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family. It helps us to hold one another accountable and stay on track to meet our goals as a family, and as individuals.