My friend Ann Geraghty Sepersky (if that name sounds familiar, both of her parents have appeared on the blog) messaged me the other day to commiserate over our shared appreciation of academic planners (I still use the same style that I did ten years ago and ten years before that) and she revealed that she maintains more than a half-dozen calendars. I was duly impressed: I "only" have three at this time--my academic calendar that I carry with me, my work Outlook calendar, and my husband's and my shared Google calendar. I have so much to look forward to! So here are Ann's calendars:
1. iCal on all electronic devices: The master family calendar, syncs with the husband, there can be no blame about schedule conflicts if it is on the calendar. He doesn't like its functionality, he'd prefer to use a Google product, but I fear change. This works. We keep it.
2. The printed copy of this online calendar: It gets printed on the 1st of the month and posted on the fridge. Day to day changes are noted on the printed calendar, but should also be added to the online version.
3. My DayMinder Monthly (Academic calendar) I've used this since I graduated college. I started with those small ones about the size of a checkbook? But with each kid I moved up a size- from small to medium to extra large. (Currently the 8 ½ x 11 size) This is helpful for me to visualize a full month at a time, especially as I am generally submitting my schedule at work in monthly increments. I will admit that this one is not used as much in recent years since I convinced Chris to commit to the online family calendar. I can't give it up though.
4. Monthly Dry Erase Calendar. This hangs in our laundry room which is also the garage entrance to the house. This is primarily for the kids. There is much excitement on the day we change to the new month. Each gets to choose her color for the month, and their individual events are written in that color. (Mom and Dad events are in brown, the color rejected by my 3 girls.) It serves as a good visual as we race out the door to school. It's also helpful when we are waiting for a big event to come - they can see how many more days until that event.
5. My PTO Calendar. As President of our PTO, I made the executive decision that we needed a large (15x12 inches) monthly calendar to keep track of our events and meetings. I initially bought it to bring to my meeting with our school secretary for planning the calendar of PTO events for the coming year. I took great care in writing all of our events on the Official PTO Calendar. But though I carry it with me to and from events and meetings, I'm not sure if I've really used it since that first meeting.
6 & 7. 2 of my daughters are required to have an assignment notebook for school. They must be the "school" assignment notebooks and are not pre-dated (like my beloved Chandler's from Grade School/High School) but they are still calendars. And buying them at the school store last week was exciting.
During the school year we will have a school lunch calendar on the fridge and also the calendars sent home from classrooms or for sports teams/activities.
https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnGpMo6C5GIgMgQJISvFcw91Y1N3zC4UOw
There are a couple of products that sync outlook calendar and Google calendar. Google's own sync product just reached end-of-support, and so I now use a program called gSyncit to manage this. It works very well. It pushes my office outlook to my Google calendar. Mrs. G has access to that (and I to hers), and we send each other appointments related to kid activities, work, etc.
Paper is fraught with complications. What do you do about conflicts between your paper calendar(s) and your electronic calendar(s)? What do you do if something gets spilled on the paper? What do you do if the paper gets lost?
But hey...if it works for you...