Gig tips: Calendaring

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