Quote Originally Posted by jmarkey


Jpm's suggestions are excellent. I quoted his third point because I think it is particularly useful and something that people may not pick up right away about the hard landscape of the calendar. The commitments you have made to yourself are at least as important as the commitments you have made to others. You need to schedule things like the weekly review, exercise time, down time and family time. Once you develop routines that consistently address these commitments, you may not need to put them on the calendar. In the meantime, feel free to schedule them like any other commitment.
Even though my routines are memorized, I still keep them on the calendar. It may look cluttered at times, but I know I need those reminders. I own my own business and my schedule can be sprinkled with early meetings, late night online meetings and being in the shop when it is convenient for my contractors. I also have 2 young children who thrive on the routine day-to-day schedule. I keep as close to the routine schedule as possible, and having the whole routine in front of me on my palm helps me to make proactive choices when something does come up.

For example, we needed to have a quick meeting at my house one night which interferred with the normal routine of getting my kids baths, lunches packed, teeth brushed and bedtime. I know it takes about a half hour to do this routine (labeled Evening Routine on my calendar and slotted for 8:00 every school night), so I quickly moved it to 6:00pm - before the meeting at 7:00 - so all I had to do was tell them to brush their teeth and tuck them in at 8:30. When the meeting ended at 10:30 I went right to bed because everything else was done. Had I not 'seen' it coming on my calendar, I would have rushed through the routine with the kids at 8:00 with a meeting still in progress in my family room and most likely missed something and had to get up early in the morning to help with baths and pack lunches. I am not a morning person so this kind of rushing around makes for a very stressful sunrise. NOT how I want to start my day!

Here is another example...I have a routine task after immediately school from 3:00 to 3:30 called "homework." This is a daily M-F appointment for my kids to do their homework if they have any. (If they don't then we consider it a gift of time and find something fun to do). Some days I may have to run an emergency errand for the business and we won't make it home at 3:00 to do homework. No problem. The reminder is still visible so I can reschedule it for later that evening and my daughter doesn't have a panic the next morning and realize she forgot to do the homework. The key to this is to avoid filling up the entire day with appointments. The routine stuff I add to my calendar only takes up a few hours each day. I have lots of 'holes' (empty slots) in my day to reschedule/renegotiate the routine if I need to and for getting to next actions and emergencies.

It seems like a minor detail, but it saves so much stress to have the 'little things' out of the way or at least rescheduled instead of rushing around at the last minute trying to do 10 things at once. When my kids are older and can do most of this themselves, I will take it off my calendar. Until then...it is hard landscape because something will eventually "die" if we neglect it...like the peacefulness in our house right now