day 15: managing your schedule...

Welcome to my ongoing series of 31 days to more order.  To view the complete list of posts, click here.

Do you manage your schedule or does your schedule manage you?

Over the next several days, I'm going to be covering ways for you to take control of and manage your schedule.   Ways to evaluate what you (or your children or spouse) are involved in, whether to stay involved or add new activities and how to protect your time.

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My husband works every other weekend for his job.  Since that means we only have two weekends a month for family time, I am very protective of our calendar.  One way that I do this is by annually reviewing all the activities that our family is involved in.  Once a year, my husband and I sit down and review what our family is involved in or committed our time to.

I do a total review of everything at the start of the school year.  It seems like a natural time for us because many things we are involved in restart in September.  I take a piece of paper and write every family members name on it and under their name I write what they are involved in or what commitments they have and the day or week.  I do not write down school because my kids go every day.  But I do write down my husband's work schedule because in addition to weekends, he works shift work and has to work nights.  Mark being gone two or three nights a week impacts our family and what we can be involved in activity wise.

Everything that we are involved in and or committed to goes on the list.  Here's a peak at some of things on our list right now:

sports
bible study
mentoring
classroom aide
teaching sunday school
leadership team meetings
elder team meetings
small group

It is amazing once you've written everything down with the days and times, how much we are truly committed too these days.  I'm a visual person, so I love to see it all written down.

So, that is step one to managing your schedule.  I encourage you, take some time and write out everything that you and your family have on the schedule right now.  If you are single, that's okay.  It's a great exercise to do no matter how many people you are managing.  Write everything down on paper with the days and times.

Tomorrow we are going to look at evaluating these commitments.  But for right now, just get everything down on paper so you can visualize what it is your family is committed to doing.