Helping Your Child Be On Time

By Susan Heid of The Confident Mom

Do you have one or more children in your home that seems to repeatedly run late?  Perhaps they run around looking for their shoes, coat or homework?  Maybe forgetting where they placed their back pack the afternoon before.  Does it raise the stress level for your entire family?  It isn’t a very good way to start your day, is it?  Think of this…..Do you run late?  Do you often forget where your keys are?  How about finding your purse or shopping list?  Do you see the correlation?  Maybe not if in fact you are a mom who is fairly organized and then it frustrates you even more that you have a child that seems to be in disarray!

If running late is a key component to your mornings it is time for a change.  You can help your child gain tremendous pride in their accomplishment of being prepared for their day and getting out the door on time in the morning.  You have heard it time and time again; learning by example will get someone much further than just being told what to do.

I find that some busy moms I work with find it just plain easier to continue yelling 3 or more times trying to address the issue rather than changing their response.  Why do we fall into those habits?  Because - it is easier to stay the same than change.  Face it, we are creatures of habit, and yet even when a pattern of behavior is NOT producing what we want, we seldom see another method to reach the outcome we desire.  So stop and think about how your morning runs and how you could in fact be enabling your child to continue their pattern of running late and being forgetful.

Helping your child develop new habits starts with YOU.  Plain and simple.  You can certainly be the example he/she needs in order to come up with a plan that works.  As we venture into a new school year, it is the perfect time to develop some new habits, both for your child and for you!  I will focus on how you can help your child, but it doesn’t take a lot of thinking to see how you can adapt these simple tools into your life too.

Being Prepared

What can you do in advance to make things easier?  Thinking ahead can certainly help make a difference and calm things down.  Does your child have an activity the next day?  Is his/her backpack placed in a spot where it is accustomed to being?  You can even lay clothes out for the next day if that is a battle that ends up producing anxiety for anyone!

Remembering Tasks

I started using check lists when my kids were very young.  These are all items that need to be accomplished by a certain time, normally before leaving in the morning. (making their bed, teeth brushed, pajamas put away, etc.). This helped me out because I didn’t have to be the drill sergeant and it also gave my child a great sense of pride as he/she accomplished these tasks on their own!  In addition, once the checklist was finished they can spend the remaining time before leaving doing an activity they enjoy.  I find too many parents let their kids watch TV or play video games before the work is done and then wonder why it is such a battle.  Work before play is a standard principle in our home.

Decide what type of system is going to work for you and your child.

Work on it together and brainstorm about what will help them.  You may be surprised at what they come up with.

Staying on Task

This one can be completely aggravating for many parents - because you have a dilly dallier!  You know, the one who looks up from one task and is completely distracted by something else.  We have used different things at different times, but a few that work well are using a kitchen timer to keep a child on task, having a one task at a time policy - where they cannot move on from one thing until one is completed.  Also having them check in with you during their progress is helpful too.

Listening

Truly making sure your child hears you and understands the instruction can be half of the frustration.  So, have your child repeat back instructions and then verify he understands.  We also found giving too many instructions at once was not a good combination.  Give one task at a time and wait until that is completed.

Set a Schedule

We set up a schedule for one of our boys that helped him use his time in the morning.  He knew what time he was getting up, what time he could be lazy and “wake-up”, what time he had to start eating breakfast, cleaning up, getting dressed, all of that.  It was spelled out for him so he did not lose track of time and then be scrambling 10 minutes before we needed to get out the door  Slowly we began letting him try to use his time his way in the morning, and after a few mis-steps, he has managed to budget his time.  This is much more effective than for us to continue to manage his time, and they way we set the schedule for him also gave him an idea and something to go from to learn how to budget his time.  A great lesson all around.

Celebrate

If getting out the door in the morning has been a thorn in your side, sit everyone down and discuss how different the mornings are when things go smoothly.  How much happier everyone is, how enjoyable the ride to school is or the walk to the bus stop is.  Then think together what you could in fact do on the days that everyone cooperates and takes care of their own business to help the family out.  Have a special after school treat - it doesn’t have to be big, just something little, like a certain favorite cookie or ice cream, or playing a game together or maybe this - you do one of your child’s chores that afternoon since they helped you out?  Get creative, you can have fun finding ways to motivate you child to step up to the plate and be more responsible.

Susan Heid helps moms get the BIG picture on how their home is functioning and then helps them gain relief with a personalized plan of action to give life changing results. Susan’s training as a PCI Certified Parent Coach. a Certified Family Manager Coach and a ScreamFree Certified Leader gives her a unique combination to encourage and support busy moms in the art of Home and Family Management. Empowering Moms and Strengthening Families is her passion. Are you ready to make positive changes that will impact your family for generations? You can start by visiting The Confident Mom and requesting her FREE ebook, “Getting Kids to Cooperate and Become Team Players - 10 Essential Strategies and Solutions“.

Summer Vacation Plans - Plan Them Early

Laura Rolands of My Attention Coach

As an ADHD Coach, I enjoy working with my student clients to develop plans for their summer.  Developing plans for your children and your whole family will help everyone have a fun and productive summer, whether ADHD is present or not.  As you probably already know, we need to keep our kids physically and mentally active over the summer to ensure they do not lose the learning they gained during the last school year.  I am happy to share some strategies below to help keep your summer productive.

Teacher Input
First on the agenda is to meet with or at least email your child’s current teachers and/or guidance counselors.  Especially if you son or daughter is going to a new school next year, it is important to gather feedback before the school year ends.  Before plan what you would like to discuss.  I recommend asking which strategies have worked with your child this school year and asking what the current teachers would like to share with next year’s teachers.  They may already communicate this verbally or in a written report, but this is good information for you to have.  You can also ask what activities they suggest for your child over the summer.  Think about how you will consolidate the information you receive and decide how to communicate with next year’s teachers.

Discuss with your Children
Next on the agenda is to sit and talk with each of your children.  There are a few key questions I recommend asking your child - be sure to actively listen to his or her answers.  Start with areas of pride.  What makes your child the most proud as he or she  reflects on the current school year?  Discuss the strengths behind the pride, and help your child discover strengths that they may not realize they have.  What goals do they have for the summer?  There might be more goals than simple relaxation!  How does your son or daughter envision achieving the goals?  Discuss the feedback you received from his or her teachers.  Do you and your child agree with the feedback?  How can it help with planning for the summer and next school year.  What would they like to make sure that their teachers next year know about him or her?  Discuss your expectations and make a plan for how they will keep their brains and bodies active this summer.

You!
Don’t forget to look at your personal and family goals for the summer.  How can you, your spouse and and your children work together on some family goals?  Plan your calendar as a family.  When are vacations, camps and busy work weeks?  Use my Summer Vacation 2010 calendar as a way to look at your summer-at-a-glance.  This can be a great supplement to all the great calendars and planners available here on Families With Purpose!  Taking some time to plan now, before Summer Vacation can help you have a more productive and relaxing vacation.  How will you prepare for Summer this year?  Leave a comment and let us know!

Laura Rolands is the founder of LSR Coaching and Consulting, LLC. She is a coach whose passion is to support, lead and inspire independence and success for people who have either been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or who are facing other attention-related challenges. Her clients include individuals with attention-related challenges and/or their parents. If you have any questions or more suggestions to add, please visit her website at www.MyAttentionCoach.com.

Snow Happens!

By: Laura Rolands

Planning is important. You already know that, but sometime snow happens, literally. The heavy snow many have experienced over the last couple weeks have caused problems. We have great plans, but for many different reasons, our plans fall apart. Maybe the kids did not have school and you did not have back up day-care, you could not make it to the store, were late for work or had to shovel all weekend. Whatever the reason, heavy snow is likely to cause unexpected changes to our plans.

Don’t despair! Keep the following tips in mind to help you regroup and continue making forward progress.

Kids can help…

…Shovel

Even if your kids are young, get them involved in the shoveling by buying a shovel their size and taking them outside with you. At first it might not seem like much help if they end up playing more than shoveling. Just remember, you will be teaching them responsibility, getting them exercise and maybe getting a little bit of help. As they grow older, you can delegate more of the job directly to them.

…Make Dinner

Use the snow day as a way to get your kids more involved in making dinner. In the morning, hand them some cookbooks to select the night’s menu. During lunch, make the preparation plan and decide if you need to make a grocery store run. Of course When dinner-time arrives, get the kids involved and start cooking!

Prioritize

So you arrived a work late because you had to find alternate day care arrangements and the roads were terrible. You probably have a great planner from Families With Purpose and planned your day yesterday. Now, you don’t feel like you can get it all done with a shortened work day. Look at your to do list and pick your highest priority task. Delay everything else until tomorrow when you have time to regroup and focus on the highest priority - you might make more progress than you think!

Get Organized

If you haven’t had time to make a plan to attack your clutter, today will be the perfect day. Make your plan and start working it today. Getting the kids involved can have the same benefits I mentioned in the shoveling example. The earlier you start, the easier this will be as they get older.

Have Fun

Sometimes we need to relish in the idea of a snow day. It can be a built-in reason to have fun and let all of our other responsibilities slide! There is a reason that kids love them so much (even more than weekends!). Make it your mission to discover what makes it so fun. You will make some great memories with your kids!

No matter what your challenge when your plans get interrupted, take a deep breath and give yourself a chance to re-group. You just might enjoy yourself!

Laura Rolands is the founder of LSR Coaching and Consulting, LLC. She is a coach whose passion is to support, lead and inspire independence and success for people who have either been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or who are facing other attention-related challenges. Her clients include individuals with attention-related challenges and/or their parents. If you have any questions or more suggestions to add, please visit her website at www.MyAttentionCoach.com .

5 Things We Love About the Mom’s Plan It Engagement Calendar

The Mom’s Plan It Engagement Calendar is our best selling mom planner and there are plenty of reasons why.  Here are the top five reasons moms love this planner.

Convenient Storage Pocket - Built right inside the front cover is a handy storage pocket for your loose papers such as birthday invitations, business cards, maps, or directions.  This pocket really helps to keep things in one place and easier to find things in a hurry.

Peel Off Stickers - The Mom’s Plan It Engagement Calendar includes 288 peel off stickers so busy mom’s can quickly note and remember important recurring events such as birthday parties, dance recitals, school vacation days, and doctor’s appointments. Covering 43 different topics, the peel off stickers have something for every mom.

Tear-off Grocery List - We absolutely love this feature because it makes grocery shopping so much easier.  Simply jot down your grocery items and when it comes time to go to the grocery store, tear off the list and take it with you.  No need to carry around a planner through the store.

Meal Planner - Built into each weekly planner page is a convenient meal planner.  Moms can use this to write out their meal plan for the week and then use the tear-off grocery list to jot down everything they need at the grocery store.

Notes -Take your planner with you when you attend meetings or make phone calls and simply jot down the important things you need to remember, so they are readily available for future meetings or reference.  The handy built in note section eliminates the need to bring both notepads and planners with you when attending meetings and makes scheduling follow up meetings a breeze.  Perfect for jotting down phone messages, phone calls, or meeting notes, the note section helps keep everything in one place.

5 Things We Love About the momAgenda Planners

The momAgenda planners are by far the most comprehensive mom planner we carry.  They are jam packed with just about everything a busy mom could need and essentially eliminate the need to carry multiple notebooks, maintain multiple lists, and carry stray papers.  Here are the five top things we love about these planners.

Multiple Calendar Views - Both the momAgenda Desktop and the momAgenda Mini include a full Month at a Glance calendar in addition to the week at a glance calendar (Desktop design) and day at a glance calendar (Mini design) .  This comes in really handy when you need a snapshot of the month rather than the nitty-gritty detail of your weekly and daily schedule.

Provides Separate Planning Spaces for Mom & Kids - The separate planning spaces for mom and up to four kids is a really nice feature especially if you have very busy schedules.  The separate planning spaces help moms focus on the details much quicker and make it harder to overlook something important because the calendar details aren’t all crammed together in one planning space.

Built in Spot for Meal Planning - The momAgenda planners include separate spots to jot down the family dinner plans for the day making family dinner time and grocery shopping much easier.

Party Planning Note Pages - This is an extremely helpful feature especially when it comes to planning birthday parties for your kids.  The party planning pages not only let you keep track of party details (what, where, when, etc) but also the guest list and RSVP notes.  Use them to plan birthday parties for your kids or adult parties for the parents!

Reusable Address Book - Every momAgenda Desktop Planner and momAgenda Mini planner come with a handy reusable address book called momEssentials.  This handy pamphlet keeps track of all your important contact information and simply slides in and out of the back of your planner, making the change to a new planner every year a breeze.  No more re-writing your address book every year!

Four Things We Learned by Slowing Down Our Family Pace

We have done a lot of work these past few years in slowing down the pace and rhythm of our family life.  We haven’t completely gotten our pace to what I would call perfect but it is much better and for the most part much more comfortable and manageable.  And through this slowing down process, there are some things we learned about ourselves and life.  Here are the top four things we learned, there are probably more but these are the most important.

A Slower Pace Means We Spend Less Money

A slower pace for us has meant that we have more time to plan meals, we do a better job of keeping shopping lists, and we stay home more often putting less wear and tear on the car and using less gas.  When our pace was more hectic, I would often shop without a list or menu and would end up buying things we already had or forgetting things we needed.  Also, we have found a lot of enjoyment in staying home and just hanging out playing games (I can’t tell you how many games of Clue we have played), enjoying family movie nights, and taking bike rides.

A Slower Pace Means We Are Less Stressed and Happier

The fast pace I used to keep literally left me exhausted.  By Friday of every week, I was emotionally and physically drained and not much fun to be around.  I literally got tired of being tired and this was a lot of the impetus behind the slowing down of our pace.  I stopped worrying so much about the things we weren’t doing and began concentrating on the things we were doing making sure to emphasize quality over quantity.   Remember, kids want their parents happy, not stressed.

A Slower Pace Means We Are More Connected

By slowing down our pace, we have time to recognize, connect, and appreciate each other more.  Little things that went unnoticed or undone in a hurried pace are now much more apparent in our lives.  From things like hugs, cuddles, and thank you’s, we are definitely more aware and appreciative of each other.  The kids are more likely to come to us with questions and concerns because they know they have our attention.

A Slower Pace Means We Are More Effective

After slowing down our pace, we became much more effective in our lives.  After we stopped trying to do everything, we got a lot better at our schoolwork, our jobs, and our family life because we were less scattered and more focused.  We simply had more time to think, concentrate, and just be.

Conquering the Chaos Part III – Creating a Family Schedule that Works

Conquering the Chaos Part III - Creating a Family Schedule that Works

Congratulations on making it this far in our Conquering the Chaos series.  This is the final installment of our three part series and before getting into the details of making a family schedule let’s recap what we have done so far.

If you have followed along in Part I and Part II in our Conquering the Chaos series you should have the following things completed:

• An inventory of how and where your family spends their time
• A good understanding of the bottlenecks, habits, and patterns that are causing problems
• A list or understanding of things you want to change
• A list or understanding of the things working well
• What areas or activities are causing the most stress in your life as well as which areas are consuming the most time
• What areas of your life need more time
• What areas or buckets of your family life that are the most enjoyable
• A Family Life Vision - A well thought out articulated statement of how you want your family life to look and feel

We will use all of these things to create a solid family schedule, so if you haven’t already go back to Part I and Part II and work through them before continuing on with this segment.

Setting Anchor Points

To finalize your family schedule you need to begin by setting anchor points to your day.  These are the ideal start and end points to your day in which everything fits in between.  Using the family life vision you wrote in Part II as a guide, set an ideal start time of your day and an ideal ending time of your day.  For example, let’s say you would love to start your day no earlier than 6:00am and be in bed everything night with lights out by 10:00pm.  6:00am would be your start time and 10:00pm would be your end time and all the family life bucket activities need to fit within these two times.  These times are the anchors to your day and need to be realistic.  If you are unrealistic in setting these anchors then your family schedule will soon start to fail after implementation, so put some thought into them and be sure to keep in mind whether you are a morning person or a night owl. 

Establishing Priorities

Okay now that you have the anchor points to your day set, it is time to start establishing priorities.  This part may be difficult for a lot of people, but without it you will find yourself and family scattered and overwhelmed. 

Using the family life vision statement you created in Part II as well as questions you answered in the Family Life Bucket exercise, you need to go through all the family life buckets and sort them into three categories - High Priority, Medium Priority, and Low Priority.

High priority buckets are buckets in your life that mean the most to us or are “requirements of living”.  These are the things we do throughout our day that are either necessities for living like eating, showering, homework, or that are intrinsically important to our family.  These are the “must do’s” and “want to do’s” of your day.

The medium priority buckets in your life are the “should do’s” of your day.  These are the things that we may or may not enjoy doing, but have to be done to avoid negative consequences and to function normally in life.  For example, house cleaning for many people may fall into this category.  It isn’t something we must do to survive and isn’t necessarily something we enjoy doing, but if it isn’t done can result in unhealthy living conditions and distractions to the family life.  Other things that may fall into this category are things like laundry, bill paying, lawn work, or visits to the dentist. 

The low priority buckets of your life are things that are not critical to everyday living and you do if you have time or energy.   For some people this may be things like making beds, washing windows, or fixing a squeaky door hinge.   These are the buckets and activities that we will assign the least amount of time in our schedule. 

Creating a Family Schedule that Works

Now that you have all of your family activities and buckets prioritized it is time to put everything into a family schedule.

To do this you will need some type of blank weekly schedule and a pencil.  You can use our family schedule printable or create your own.  Just be sure to have one with all seven days and one in which you have room to write. 

To begin, start with your highest priority items and your anchor times and go through each day assigning a block of time for each high priority item.  Much of how you allocate time for each high priority activity will depend on the hard points in your schedule such as when school starts or when you need to be at work.  To avoid making this step too tedious, start by just blocking off chunks of time (see the weekend example in our printable) for each high priority item rather than trying to assign specific time slots.  Over time you can refine the schedule and make it more detailed by assigning specific time slots if you need them to help you stay on track.  Once you schedule in the high priority items, go through and fill in your schedule for the medium priority items and the low priority items.  When you are done you should have a schedule with time each week or day for each family life bucket on your list. 

Sticking to the Schedule

Now that you have your family schedule created here are some tips to help you stay on track.

• Post the schedule in a central location so that you MUST look at it every day.
• Add reviewing the family schedule to your daily routines.
• Work on anticipating disruptions and managing disruptions so that you can stay on track
• Don’t be afraid to change the schedule if you find something isn’t working. Most if not all families will have to make some changes to the schedule and this is okay!
• Use the family schedule as a guide and learn to be flexible when it comes to making changes and deviating from the schedule from time to time. Letting the kids stay up an hour later occasionally isn’t going to ruin the schedule just as long as you don’t let it become a habit.
• Practice delegating, deleting, and simplifying certain activities so that you can fit everything in at a comfortable pace.

Remember, there will be days where no amount of scheduling and planning will help.  On days like these, just accept the disruptions for the day while being careful not to use the bad days as an excuse to abandon the schedule.  

Good luck!

Conquering the Chaos Part II – Organizing Your Life into Buckets

Now that you have gone through Part I of our Conquering the Chaos segment and have a time inventory of a typical week, it’s time to begin to understand what all that means by sorting the activities and tasks that occupy your days into buckets, so you can more easily understand where you spend your time, where you want to spend more time, and things in your life that are just right.

Begin this exercise by printing off the life bucket printable and begin sorting all the tasks and activities from your family life inventory into one of the appropriate buckets:  School, Extra-Curricular, Household Cleaning, Laundry, Household Maintenance & Repairs, Lawn Work, Volunteer Commitments, Faith Commitments, Administrative, Meal Planning, Household Finances, Fun Stuff, Personal, Auto/Transportation, Family Commitments, and Other.

For example, let’s say you look at your family life inventory for Sunday and found you did the following things (click picture to enlarge):

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You would then go through this list and sort each of these items into the appropriate bucket making sure to include the time as well so that your bucket list looks something like this (click picture to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Go through your family life inventory day by day and add each activity to the bucket list.  For tasks you do every day, for example making dinner, enter it once in the Meal Planning and Prep bucket with an average time from the week it took you to plan and make dinner. 

Once you have gone through your family life inventory and added everything to your bucket list, then go through and add anything you didn’t do the week you took your family life inventory but know you need to do.  For example, you may have done a family life inventory during a week in which you didn’t need to mow the lawn, but you know it is something that is typically done, so go ahead and add it to your bucket list along with a time estimate.  You want to have as complete a list as possible.

Understanding What It All Means

Now that you have your life divided into buckets, it is time to understand and analyze what it all means.  To do this, go through your bucket list and ask yourself these questions:

What buckets or activities are taking the most time?

On what buckets or activities should we be spending more of our time?

What buckets or activities are causing the most stress?

What buckets or activities are the most enjoyable?

What buckets or activities are the least enjoyable?

 

Starting With the End in Mind

Now that you have a good picture of what your current family life looks like, it is time to spend some time on what you WANT your family life to look.  This is a mental image or written expression of what you want your family life to look like most of the time.  The point of this exercise is to articulate how you want your family life to be by asking yourself these questions:

What things do I want to spend less time doing?

What things do I want to spend more time doing?

I want our family life to be less………?

I want our family life to be more…….?

I personally want to be more…..?

Here is an example to help better understand:

I want to stop rushing and having to yell at my kids to hurry up.  I want to have time to exercise a few days a week and to sit down in the evening and spend time reading to my kids, playing games with my kids, and enjoying my family rather than running around getting things done.

I want a clean house, but minimize the amount of time I spend cleaning.  I want to have all the clutter, toys, and stuff picked up every night before bed so that I don’t have to look at it in the morning.

I want to know in advance what I am making for dinner and I want the dinner to be healthy.  I want to spend a maximum of 90 minutes each day making and cleaning up after dinner.

I want to find more time on the weekends just spending time with my family rather than running to soccer games and sports events.  I want to find time to do the things we say we want to do, but never seem to find the time.

I want to stop paying bills late and want to spend a maximum of 60 minutes each week doing bills and financial work.

I want the kids to be in bed by 9 PM every night.

I want to be in bed by 10 PM every night and get up an hour before the kids every morning

I want to find more time for date nights with my husband and nights out with friends

I personally want to be less stressed, less worried, and more fulfilled.

Remember no family or family life is perfect.  We all have good days, bad days, and points in our lives where no amount of planning analyzing, or preparation can make better.  The point of this exercise is to articulate a vision and goal not make yourself perfect.  Sometimes things are out of our control but that shouldn’t be a reason to not try at all.

Once you get through this exercise save all your notes along with the notes from Conquering the Chaos - Part I for next month’s segment - Conquering the Chaos Part III - Creating a Family Schedule that Works. 

Good luck!

Conquering the Chaos Part I – Taking an Inventory of Your Life

With the start of a new school year we thought it fitting to take some time to talk about how to create a family schedule and routine.  Most families start out with good intentions to create a more harmonious family life by vowing to cut back on the running, stress, and general chaos of everyday life, and for a variety of reasons abandon the commitment and plan shortly into the new school year partly out of exhaustion and partly out of an inability to overcome the hiccups along the way. 

With this in mind we are beginning a three part series on Conquering the Chaos.  Over the next three monthly newsletters we will tackle three aspects of creating a sound family schedule - Taking an Inventory of Your Current Family Life, Organizing Your Family Life into Buckets, and Creating a Family Schedule that Works.  By dividing the topic up into three segments we hope families will have a chance to take some time working on each aspect and be ready to move on to the next topic the following month.  So let’s get started!

Taking an Inventory of Your Current Family Life

The secret to any good family schedule is to understand in detail the current situation and being honest about what your family needs and wants to change.  This is the hardest part for many families because it takes the most time and often forces parents and kids to face some of the reasons behind the current craziness of their lives.  Without this step though, you run the risk of not addressing the root causes of your chaotic lives and eventually “fixing” the wrong things. 

Understanding Where You Spend Your Time

Have you ever gotten to the end of a long day and asked yourself, “What did I do all day?”  This happens to many families who have become overwhelmed with the general craziness of life.  Parents know they did something, but their accomplishments and efforts have become overshadowed by the chaos of the day and for the life of them, they can’t remember anything they did throughout the day.  To get a true handle on your schedule and the current state of your family life, you first need to take an inventory of where you spend your time and how long everything takes.  In essence you are doing a mini time study of your family’s habits, schedules, and time so you can better understand where your time goes, the bottlenecks, poor habits, and patterns of your family life. 

To get this step started you will need a copy of the Family Life Time Inventory for both parents, one week of your time, and a little dedication and persistence.  Begin by printing off the family life time inventory for yourself and spouse.  You also may want to print off additional copies to post on your refrigerator or keep in your briefcase or desk at work. 

The time inventory has sections for each day of the week and is further divided by morning, afternoon, and evening sections.   Begin by choosing a week that is fairly typical of your everyday life and then begin making notes each day about the things you do during the morning, afternoon, and evening.  Be sure to keep enough detail so you can actually pinpoint the specific tasks you did as well as how long they took, but not so much detail that it becomes burdensome to keep up.  Also be sure to keep any notes regarding bottlenecks, habits, or patterns you have noticed.  Feel free to expand any notes or thoughts you have on the back of the paper. 

If you work outside the home, it will be your choice as to whether or not to include details on your work activities.  If you just want to keep notes on your family life activities during the day while at work, be sure to have one handy at work.  Some examples of things you may do while at the office are, making doctor’s appointments, picking up birthday presents on your lunch hour, or updating your work calendar with the kids’ activity schedule. 

Understanding the Bottlenecks, Habits, and Patterns

After a week of doing the time inventory you should begin to notice bottlenecks, habits, and patterns to your family life.  For example, are the mornings crazy because too many people are using the bathroom at once?  Is the TV distracting you and the kids in the evening?  Is your toddler having meltdowns every time you try and leave the house?  It is important to understand these because these things are often the culprit of a disruptive family routine and sometimes can easily be changed or fixed with minor tweaks.  So take some time to make notes on these things and experimenting with making some changes.  We will discuss them further in Step III - Creating a Schedule that Works.

Evaluating What You Want to Change and What Works Well

Your last assignment is to sit down as a family and discuss the things you want to change and the things that are working well.  For example, some parents may want to make it possible to get more sleep for themselves and their children.  Another example may be to sit down more often as a family for dinner.  Just as important as noting the things you want to change is making note of the things that are working well.  For example, Friday night family nights may be something that are currently working well and shouldn’t be changed.  Another example may be parents taking time every evening to read to their children.  If it is something you enjoy and something that isn’t causing any current stress to the family then it is probably something you are doing well and shouldn’t be changed.  Use our printable, a notepad, or better yet a table top flip chart (kids LOVE these) to make your notes and document your conversation.  Save everything for use in Parts II and III.

If your kids are old enough it is important to do this step as a family.  Put one of your kids in charge of making the notes and be sure to give everyone a chance to voice their opinions and concerns. 

Good luck!

How to Choose the Right Planning and Scheduling System for Your Family

We get a lot of questions from customers and visitors about how to choose the right style of planner or calendar for their family.  Gone are the days of one style fits all and parents today have a lot of choices when it comes to choosing a planning and calendar system for their family.   But unfortunately, with the many choices also comes the potential for a lot of confusion.  So to better help parents make the right choice for their family here is a quick guide to choosing the right planning and calendar system for your busy family life.

Stationary or Portable Planner?

The first choice parents need to make when considering a planning system for their family is whether they need a stationary or portable planner. 

Stationary planners are primarily family wall calendars or desk pad planners.  These types of planners are stationary in that they tend not to lend themselves to being carried in either a briefcase or purse.  Parents should choose this type of planner if they do most of their planning and scheduling from one central location such as their home or office.

Portable paper planners are typically the note book style planners and are often referred to as day planners or mom planners.  They are designed so they can easily be transported or carried.  Parents should choose this type of planner if they are frequently on the go and do most of their planning and scheduling at a variety of places such as the office, home, meetings, or school.

Note Taking or Not?

The second choice parents need to make when considering a planning system, is whether or not they need or like to take a lot of notes throughout their day. 

Parents who like to write and keep detailed notes of their plans, conversations, and tasks, are best suited for a paper note book planner style because they typically provide more open spaces for writing.

For parents who tend not to take a lot of notes, or like to use files or paperwork folders to keep track of their notes, then a family wall calendar is probably more of what they need.  Wall calendars keep track primarily of schedules and offer only limited space for note taking.

The Best of Both Worlds

For many families, combining the two styles can be helpful.  For example, some parents find having a family wall calendar hanging in a central location helpful for communicating events and schedules with the entire family while also using a portable style planner for keeping track of schedules, notes, and shopping lists while away from home.  The drawback though when combining systems, is that both will require updating to avoid confusion and missed appointments.

So to summarize, choose a wall calendar if you do most of your planning from one central location and you don’t typically take a lot of notes or have an alternative system for note taking.  Choose a planner, if you do a lot of scheduling away from home or the office and you like to take a lot of notes. 

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