My brain has been very busy lately (At a recent presentation, the speaker said we average 60,000 thoughts in a day!).

At home, we’re adding two sport team schedules to an already busy schedule, plus potential summer activities.  Professionally, I have more clients now than I ever have before.  These are wonderful challenges to face, but they’re a lot to juggle!  So we’re reviewing and re-vamping our schedule management to accommodate.  I recommend periodically reviewing your scheduling practices, at work or at home, to make sure your own process is working as well as possible.

Why? Because

• We’re all are busy people.
• Our brains gets tired sometimes, thinking all those thoughts.
• New tools come out all the time to help with scheduling, and to do tasks better with less hassle.
• We need to make sure that the important (family, school and work) commitments are accounted for before we add anything else to the schedule.

If you could benefit from a scheduling review, too, here’s what to do:

• Get buy in from all concerned parties (we’ll call them stakeholders). Why?  We (children and parents, co-workers, teammates, etc.,) all need to be part of the process.  Giving all the stakeholders a say in the schedule encourages ownership and responsibility, collaboration, creativity – getting lots of brains working on a challenge can be a great way to generate new and better ideas!
• Consider how stakeholders prefer to communicate. In our family and in my business, some people prefer phone calls and others prefer to text.  Facebook is a chosen method for some people, and still others prefer email.  If a client or family member reaches out to me via phone, I try to respond in kind, at least until I can convince them to text me instead (my own personal preference!).
• Have stakeholders commit to the new system and keeping their info up-to-date.
• If you have more than one schedule to manage, use technology.  Why?
  • Technology is portable and pervasive.
  • We all can have access to the most current updates.
  • Technology allows accessibility from many devices.  For example, I can invite my teenagers to events via GoogleCalendar, and they can manage the invitations and their calendars from their IPods or tablets.
  • J.T., try Doodle.com for scheduling those meetings with fellow professionals
• As with any new strategies, allow time to move along the learning curve.  For example, I am learning Google Calendar so my family can use it, but I fumble around sometimes.  Accept that you may have to run two systems – like paper and MS outlook, or MS Outlook and GoogleCalendar – at the same time for a while.
• Sometimes the best way to establish a schedule is still face-to-face.  We just had a family meeting yesterday morning, to check in with upcoming travel, events and school projects.  We used GoogleCalendar and brought our devices to the table, but we still need to actually speak.

So look at your own scheduling strategies, and try one of these if it’s time for a change!