How to Organise your Family Calendar

Every year we all start out with the best of intentions, don't we? With new calendars and diaries; hoping to keep our lives as organised and prepared as possible. But now we're in March I’ve realised that things have started to slip, and we’re slowly descending back into a world of chaos.

Even though we still manage to get everything done and we still get to (mostly) everything on time, there are still those heart-stopping moments when I realise we’ve forgotten to something, or the deadline for an important piece of work has passed. So with that in mind, I thought I’d gather together some helpful tips on how you (and I) can finally organise our family calendars.

Make Everyone Responsible for Organising their own Tasks
This isn’t a possibility for really little ones, but it is great to introduce as your children start to get older. Create a calendar where each family member has their own section (weekly calendars are particularly good for this) and use this to assign to-dos and tasks. Then as each person completes their tasks, they tick them off - and perhaps even get a reward for getting to the end of their list. You could even create a calendar in Google so you can set up automated alerts!

Not only does this help you keep on top of everything each week, but it’s also a great tool for helping teach your children organisational skills. The incentive of a reward for achieving everything will also (hopefully) make them keener to do the more dreaded chores too.

Sort out Important Monthly/Yearly Tasks in Advance
One huge downfall for many families is to put things off until a later date. For example, if your yearly dental appointment isn’t due for another month or so you might say to yourself that you’ll sort that out next week. But before you know it, you’re overdue and struggling to get an appointment.

It's best to look at all those important things you need to do over the course of the year, and make sure they’re entered into your calendar well in advance. Need to tax the car in April? Make sure you’ve reminded yourself about this in the last week of March. Equally, I also find it beneficial to have an afternoon of booking and organising things that I can prepare in advance. For instance, you could book your MOT a good month or so before it’s due – and you might even want to look for companies that do remote MOTs so you don’t even have to leave the house!

Sitting down and looking at all of those important things you and your family need to complete each month, will really help you prioritise and organise your tasks. And even though this may feel like a daunting task at first, it will be more than worth it if you want to reduce your stress levels, and the risk of forgetting something, a few months down the line!

This is a collaborative post.