I came across the below and I STRONGLY advocate this advice — keeping your work and family calendars in one place:
“Unfortunately, it’s often easier to cancel on your child than on a potential client. Scheduling business and family obligations on the same calendar will lessen your chances of forgetting a personal commitment when you’re planning work activities. It will also help you avoid over-scheduling and alert you if your commitments are unbalanced.” Source: CareerBuilder.com
Image source: cincinnatisportsmed.com
Here are some things that have worked really well for me:
- I use Outlook at work. I color code personal appointments as a separate “color” from other appointments such as internal meetings or client meetings. That way when I’m at work, I can quickly scan the week/month and visually see how booked we are as a family.
- If I’m at work using Outlook and a family event becomes scheduled, I send an invitation from my work Outlook account to my personal email account (I add a participant, “myself”, with my personal email address), which then gets sent to my iPhone.
- Likewise, if I create an appointment from my iPhone (typically a personal or child-related appointment), I “invite” myself with my work email address so that my work Outlook is updated.
- As an extra step to make sure everyone is on the same page, consider also adding your spouse to these invitations so their calendar has the same information. I did this in the past and it worked to keep me and co-parent in-sync with what was happening with the kids.
Any other ideas? What do you find works well to help manage your work and your “life” schedules?
Thanks for listening –
– Mama K
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