Organizing Your Time

We all have busy schedules, and the more kids you have, the older they get, the more activities accumulate. It is a slippery slope to find yourself running here and there and everywhere. With soccer on Monday and Dance on Tuesday, Church on Wednesday, karate on Thursday, and sleep overs on Friday, when do you stop as a family? When do you take time for yourself? When do you have a date night with your spouse? The answer, you don’t.

“If we fail to plan, we plan to fail”. When we fail to plan our time appropriately we allow life to get the best of us, and we forget to schedule the most important things…Us! So how can we avoid letting “life” get the best of us?

The first thing is to create a family calendar. Everyone’s activities, appointments, and meetings should be on one central calendar. This allows for you to not overlap activities. It is especially useful for spouses because I can easily see if he has any appointments or meetings as I am trying to plan things where I will need him to be with the children, and vice-versa. One suggestion is to use different colors for each family members activities. I use a calendar which has a pocket in the back. I can store permission slips, wedding invitations, etc. anything that I may need to keep close to a calendar. It is also a place to store those different colored pens so they are always handy when you are ready to write on the calendar. (We use pencils, so that it can be erased, and changed easily.) Be sure this calendar has large boxes to write in. If you use a pencil as I do you will want the paper calendar not the glossy kind. If you use the glossy kind use a sharpie, it will not smear.

The next step to organizing your time is to evaluate the importance of all that is on that calendar. So many times once we write down everything we do we can actually begin to eliminate some things. Have your child pick their favorite activity, and eliminate their least favorite. If there is not one activity that is the favorite, then eliminate the one that takes the most time from the family. For instance if your child loves both soccer and ballet, realize that soccer has a lot more practices and games than ballet.

When you are scheduling, write in the date nights, the “you” nights, and the family night. Our spouse and our children are the most important things to us, right? Yet we do not think to put them on our list of things to do. Make a point to pick a night for family night. It can be flexible from week to week, but decide what night and write it on the calendar. This is a “keep at all cost” appointment. With it on the calendar, you can honestly say “No, I am sorry we have something planned for that night.” It also reminds you and your family just like any other appointment.

The date night is the same. However often you decide to have a date night, choose the night and write it on the schedule. Don’t assume you will fit it in somewhere. If you do, life will keep that time from happening. Last but not least, write yourself on the calendar. Again, some women need “girls night out” once a week, while others are o.k. with once a month. However often you need it, don’t wait until you are pulling your hair out before you realize how long it has been since you have been by yourself, or with the girls. Make the time!