Tips for Creating a Family Calendar That Works

It is essential for a busy family to use a family calendar. These 4 tips will help you set up a family calendar that helps your household run more smoothly

My kids are super busy. It is not uncommon for all three of them to have to be somewhere completely different at the exact same time—often when my husband and I are not even available to get them there. Despite my efforts to make the schedule more sane, I simply don’t have control over the whole world.

Why don’t I have control over the whole world?

Suffice it to say, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to get my kids to and from their various activities and even more time in the car driving them back and forth. I am essentially a taxi driver, though my children have yet to tip me a single penny.

It used to be enough for me—the mom—to keep track of the girls’ schedules in my own planner. My planner keeps me organized, I know where my kids and husband need to be at all times, and I can easily see double-bookings and figure out how to deal with them.

Related: Why Everyone Should Use a Paper Planner

But then my kids started getting busier and busier and I realized that it wasn’t enough for just me to know where they needed to be. They needed to know where they needed to be and they needed to be able to have access to that information whenever they needed it.

In order to restore happiness and sanity to our home, I needed to do something. One choice would be to just make them quit all of their extracurricular activities so my afternoons weren’t spent chauffeuring them all over town. They could sit at home staring at electronics, right? Who cares about the exercise they get while doing sports and the talents they are developing in music and dance lessons? But no, I may be overscheduled as the mother/chauffeur/taxi cab driver, but each individual child is not overscheduled, and it is important to me for my children to develop talents and do worthwhile activities, so quitting isn’t really an option.

Related: Should You Let Your Kid Quit Music Lessons?

I tried to convince my children to use their own planners, but my oldest daughter protested that it was too difficult because she’d have to open it. Same with a Google Calendar. Heaven forbid that she would have to touch an icon on her phone or open a book to find out what was on her schedule for the day! And even though she opens many books and opens even more apps on a daily basis, I bit my tongue and figured out a better way.

I decided to go totally old-school and get a family calendar. I opted for a magnetic whiteboard/corkboard combo (to see the one I purchased, click here: Dry Erase Calendar).

It is hanging in the kitchen, which is the hub of activity in our house, and it has since contributed to the happiness of our home in a big way. We’ve been using it now for about 4 months, and I only wish I would have put it up sooner.

In that four months I’ve learned a thing or two about how to use this calendar for good. Believe it or not, it actually has magical powers for keeping things running smoothly in this household when we use it effectively.

4 Tips for Using Your Family Calendar Effectively

1. Color code everything!

I love color-coding things! I do this in my planner, because it is annoying to have to write the name of the kid who is doing the activity every single time. It is equally as annoying on the calendar, so fine-point dry erase markers are in the kitchen drawer to easily color code the calendar.

Each family member is assigned a color, and their specific activities are written in that color. When they sometimes share activities I write the time in one color and the activity in the other (two of my daughters both run cross country, for instance, and the middle school and high school sometimes do the same meet). If the whole family is involved in an event, it is written in black.

Easy, peasy. And the kids LOVE this color system—bonus!

2. Put your calendar where people will actually SEE it

While I don’t really love the aesthetic appearance of the whiteboard calendar and would much rather hang it in my office, nobody would ever look at it there. Instead, it hangs in the kitchen where the kids practically live when they aren’t at school. They look at it at breakfast time and know what’s coming that afternoon. They look at it at dinner time, just before bed, and every other time they are in the kitchen. They see it. They edit it themselves if necessary. They are aware of their own schedules.

And I am a happier mom.

3. Have a strategy for the events that aren’t happening this month

The one drawback to this type of calendar is that it holds one month and a few days. That’s it. You can’t pencil in the doctor’s appointment you made that is still two months away, so you are going to have to come up with a system to remember these types of things.

My system is three-fold: I mark calendar items in my email, I write upcoming events in my planner, and I put appointment cards on the corkboard under the whiteboard calendar. At the beginning of each month, I go through each source thoroughly and make sure I haven’t missed anything.

This doesn’t mean I never miss anything, but I catch the important stuff, and we are much less frenetic. There’s nothing worse than making a dentist appointment six months in advance, losing the card, and then having to rearrange your schedule entirely when you get the reminder call the day before. Know when those appointments are and have a system for getting them on the family calendar when it’s time.

4. Make the calendar the new household know-it-all

The best thing about the calendar is that I don’t have to dig out my planner (or, worse, memorize the entire schedule) every time my kids want to know when their violin lesson is this week. Now when they ask I simply say, “I don’t know—go look at the magical family calendar in the kitchen!”

And they do.

I may not ever be able to control the entire world, but now I know how to keep the family scheduling crisis in control at the Overstuffed house. It makes me so happy that I guess I can do without controlling the world after all.

This post is part of my 31 Days to a Happier Home series. 

To see all the posts in this series, click here: 31 Days to a Happier Home