In my last post about Work Life IMbalance, I discussed the fact that I finally have come to grips that I need to work at odd times, and sometimes in odd places. Over that week and the following week, I really came to the realization that this was OK. I think I’m finally comfortable with this…it’s only taken my 51 years to get there, but no one ever said life was about rushing to conclusions, did they?

I took the better part of this past week thinking about the tools that I use to make this type of work life possible. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t have called this blog Hectic-Dad if I wasn’t running around all the time. And when I say that, I don’t mean just a couple hours a day. I don’t mean a couple days a week. I don’t mean just one weekdays. Like most of you, I run from activity to activity, site to site, and from task to task seven days a week, and what seems like 24 hours a day. Sure, I get some sleep in there (that’s for a future blog post), but even then I have to tailor that schedule around things to do, places to go, and people to meet.

I started the week looking at my calendar. It’s the longest running tool that I’ve been using, and it’s evolved quite a long way over time. Once upon a time, I had a simple paper calendar that I kept in my pocket. As we started having kids, that evolved into a whiteboard calendar we kept at home to accompany the pocket calendar. As times got more complicated so did my solutions, eventually growing into a daytimer, Outlook calendar, and finally our system of multiple Google calendars. Today, each of the family members has a personal Google calendar. We share events and activities with other members of the family from that calendar. We also have a dedicated calendars for Sports, Sports’ Practice, Birthdays, Family Events, Driving, and Work. For a while, when we were sharing three cars between six drivers, we had a dedicated calendar for each car and who had it signed-out. The whole thing sounds complicated, but it works well for us…when we put in the information. Over the years, we’ve managed to get the sports calendar linked to the school calendars, so sporting events are fed directly to the calendar. When weather changes a sporting event, we all know right away. That may not sound like a big deal, but when you drive at least an hour (and up to four) for sports in Kansas, it’s nice to know as early as possible that you’ve got a snow-related postponement.

I mentioned that the system works well “when we put in the information”. I’ve told the kids “if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist in my world”. Some of the kids are better than others at their data entry. Honestly, most of them keep pretty good calendars, but they don’t all share the information with all the required parties. When the kids are younger, they need to be driven everywhere. We’re down to two who fall into that category. It’s really important to know when practices, school events, and other activities are happening so that we can allocate driving and make an attempt at avoiding the “three-cars-in-the-same-parking-lot” syndrome. We’ve actually had five of us coming and going from the same place and have made hundreds (if not thousands) of unnecessary trips because of weak communications. As you can tell, our scheduling is still a work in progress.

As the kids get older, and are driving, an entirely different set of problems ensues. I can’t count the number of times that somebody would say “Where’s the _________ (one of our cars), I have to be ________ (somewhere) now”. Over time, this prompted several of the kids to buy their own cars so they wouldn’t have to continue to share. The bigger problem is just knowing where the kids are. I try really hard not to be a helicopter parent, but there have been many days when the kids leave at 6:30am and I don’t see them again until well after dark, sometimes as late as midnight. That’s a lot of time for them to be roaming about without me knowing where they are. I also hate nagging them with texts, so we use the calendar to sort some of that out.

Over the past week I’ve worked really hard at getting everything I can put into the calendar. As items arrived at the house, I reminded the kids to enter it into their calendars and share those events. I then made a note in my reminder system (more in a minute) and if it wasn’t there within a reasonable amount of time (two days, in most cases), I entered it into the calendar. We had a couple of duplicate events pop up, but for the most part the system worked. As a first line of defense against the usual nightmare of where-am-I-supposed-to-be-and-who-is-supposed-to-be-there, this worked pretty well.

At the very least, I like the idea of a shared family calendar along with personal calendars. There are some things that nobody else needs to know about, and there are lots of things that the whole family could benefit from knowing. Our solution has been Google calendar, but there are lots of options out there. With the advent of the new shared calendars in Apple’s iOS8, that may be a viable solution, especially for Apple-centric families. It’s definitely something that I’m considering for the future, but for right now Google Calendar works for us.

The bigger question that I’ve been considering is how to manage all the stuff I have to do, especially those things that I have to do today. I really like the concepts in Getting Things Done, especially on the level of knowing all the things that are out there needing my attention. Where I’ve really struggled is in incorporating the concepts into my daily schedule. I keep trying to use a variety of tools to help me figure out what needs to be done, but I simply haven’t found the right mix for use on my devices. Mind you, I have a Mac, Windows PC, iPad, and iPhone. I’m pretty much connected to all my scheduling/task management tools all the time. I’m also a nerd, and tend to get caught up in the details of those tools. The tendency to get caught in the brambles of the tools is what causes me to fail almost every time.

Starting last week, and over the next few weeks, I’m making a very concerted effort to consider how best to use the various tools that I’ve identified to help me on my quest to make sure I’m doing the right things when they need to be done. I plan on writing about each of the tools individually. For today, I’m going to leave you with the question that I’ve been wrestling with in great detail over the last week, and in general over the last year or two:

What do I need to do to keep track of all the things that I need to do, and what tools can I use to make sure nothing falls through the cracks?

Think about it while you make it a great week!