In Part 1, I listed many of the activities that I would like to make time for in my life. Here, in part 2, I'll describe one of the ways to make it happen: My calendars.
It starts with a bit of a confession. As hinted in Part 1, I am somewhat of a Flybaby, someone who is trying to use the Flylady strategies to keep my house & life organized. I'm hardly perfect, and I don't try to do everything that she says. But I've adapted some of the tools she suggests to fit my own life.
One of those tools, is the calendar. Now, Flylady would be happy to sell you a paper calendar, but one of my colleagues in the Society of Women Engineers taught me a bit about Google Calendar.
See, Google Calendar allows you to create not one, but many different calendars. These calendars can then be color-coded, for ease of reading. And, depending on what phone you have, you may be able to sync all of those calendars to your mobile device. So here are some of the calendars we have:
1 & 2) My husband and I each have our default calendar that comes from our Gmail accounts. We keep those private, for reminders that don't need to be shared. (Things like my exercise routine.)
3, 4, 5 & 6) We also have four shared calendars: B's Schedule, K's Schedule, DS' Schedule, and Family Activities.
The three "*'s Schedule" calendars have things like Brian's work schedule, Kim's travel, DS' classes, band rehearsals & performances, chorus rehearsals & performances, birthday parties. Events that one person needs to attend, but may require adjustment for the rest of the family.
The Family Activities schedule, then, has events that we all want to know about. We keep holidays on there, birthdays, family holidays and other events we might like to celebrate.
I have several other private calendars.:
7) One for gardening, that I'm working on filling in with planting times, harvest times, reminders of various gardening chores to do in my area. Many of my events are loaded from a book, Month-By-Month Gardening in Tennessee & Kentucky. While I'm actually in Alabama, I'm only a little south of the Tennessee border, and in region 7B like much of southern Tennessee.
8) One for blog events, things that I want to try to write blog posts about. Some of them are "holidays" like Pie Day or International Women's Day. Others are events like Ada Lovelace Day, Alan Turing's birthday, or events in space history that I want to commemorate.
I don't always get posts written for all of these events, but most of them happen annually. So I can work on my blogging habits, and try again next year.
9) Group exercise schedules: I like to keep the gym schedules on hand. Sometimes I've been good at attending regularly. Lately, thought, I've been exercising on my own. Either way, it's useful.
10+) Google makes it easy to subscribe to public calendars, and some organizations have come on board with that. There are also a number of international calendars. So I've found ones that interest me, and subscribe to those. Sometimes they'll be important enough to make it onto one of my calendars, but often these are simply for information.
It starts with a bit of a confession. As hinted in Part 1, I am somewhat of a Flybaby, someone who is trying to use the Flylady strategies to keep my house & life organized. I'm hardly perfect, and I don't try to do everything that she says. But I've adapted some of the tools she suggests to fit my own life.
One of those tools, is the calendar. Now, Flylady would be happy to sell you a paper calendar, but one of my colleagues in the Society of Women Engineers taught me a bit about Google Calendar.
See, Google Calendar allows you to create not one, but many different calendars. These calendars can then be color-coded, for ease of reading. And, depending on what phone you have, you may be able to sync all of those calendars to your mobile device. So here are some of the calendars we have:
1 & 2) My husband and I each have our default calendar that comes from our Gmail accounts. We keep those private, for reminders that don't need to be shared. (Things like my exercise routine.)
3, 4, 5 & 6) We also have four shared calendars: B's Schedule, K's Schedule, DS' Schedule, and Family Activities.
The three "*'s Schedule" calendars have things like Brian's work schedule, Kim's travel, DS' classes, band rehearsals & performances, chorus rehearsals & performances, birthday parties. Events that one person needs to attend, but may require adjustment for the rest of the family.
The Family Activities schedule, then, has events that we all want to know about. We keep holidays on there, birthdays, family holidays and other events we might like to celebrate.
I have several other private calendars.:
7) One for gardening, that I'm working on filling in with planting times, harvest times, reminders of various gardening chores to do in my area. Many of my events are loaded from a book, Month-By-Month Gardening in Tennessee & Kentucky. While I'm actually in Alabama, I'm only a little south of the Tennessee border, and in region 7B like much of southern Tennessee.
8) One for blog events, things that I want to try to write blog posts about. Some of them are "holidays" like Pie Day or International Women's Day. Others are events like Ada Lovelace Day, Alan Turing's birthday, or events in space history that I want to commemorate.
I don't always get posts written for all of these events, but most of them happen annually. So I can work on my blogging habits, and try again next year.
9) Group exercise schedules: I like to keep the gym schedules on hand. Sometimes I've been good at attending regularly. Lately, thought, I've been exercising on my own. Either way, it's useful.
10+) Google makes it easy to subscribe to public calendars, and some organizations have come on board with that. There are also a number of international calendars. So I've found ones that interest me, and subscribe to those. Sometimes they'll be important enough to make it onto one of my calendars, but often these are simply for information.
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