Family life these days can be hectic, demanding, and stressful. Most parents have to juggle multiple schedules, watch after their children, and still have time to work on their own obligations at the same time. Scheduling with Office 365 Calendar can help you keep all your events straight.

Create a Calendar with Dedicated, Exclusive Family Events

Fortunately, you can avoid missed appointments, drop-offs, and schedule quality time with your family through the strategic use of Office 365 Calendar. By creating a calendar dedicated exclusively to family events, you’ll be able to better plan your weeks ahead and receive notifications that keep you on track.

Juggling family responsibilities can be challenging, but using Office 365 Calendar can make the process significantly easier. Best of all, you can share your calendar with family members to keep them in the loop and help them remember important dates.

In this guide, we’re going to discuss several ways you can use Office 365 Calendar to maintain your family’s schedule and keep everyone organized. Let’s begin!

How to Organize Your Family’s Schedule With Office 365 Calendar

There are several ways to organize your family’s schedule with Office 365 Calendar, including scheduling pickups and drop-offs for your children, planning vacations, organizing playdates, and having dedicated family time to bond over.

By scheduling these events into your calendar, you’ll keep everyone in the loop and instantly boost your family’s organizational abilities.

Schedule Pickups and Drop-Offs

If you have children, scheduling pickups and drop-offs for school are fairly regular and something you get used to over time. When it comes to extracurricular activities, however, that’s when the playing field really changes.

Remembering all of your children’s events multiple months in the future can be exceedingly challenging without a calendar. No matter how good your memory, you always run the risk of being overwhelmed and pushing an important event out of your head, causing you to forget it or miss it.

By scheduling all pickups, drop-offs, and extracurricular activities in a centralized calendar such as Office 365 Calendar, you’ll significantly reduce your chances of missing or forgetting important family events.

Plan Vacations

Vacation planning can be challenging, often involving multiple bookings, purchases, and coordination between various organizations, airlines, and hotels. Using your Office 365 Calendar to strategically plan your vacations is a great way to make the process less stressful and keep everyone on the same page.

One of the first things you should always schedule on your calendar is your outbound and return transportation. Keep time zones in mind, and don’t forget to perform the necessary conversions if you’re scheduling your tasks out of your regular time zone.

Once you have your transportation scheduled, be sure to add any events or excursions that you’ll be participating in on your trip. After those steps are complete, you can also add hotel or travel accommodation check-in and check-out times.

Share your vacation calendar with your family after you’ve finished planning, and let everyone review your itinerary and add any feedback or suggestions.

Organize Playdates

Organizing playdates for children can be an excellent way to make use of your Office 365 Calendar. If you frequently meet up with other parents and want an easy way to schedule your child’s next playdate, Office 365 makes it easy. Why not take advantage of calendar sharing and give the other parents’ calendar access?

By doing so, you’re no longer the single point of contact that has to manually update the information about each playdate. Every parent will be able to note their availability, and you’ll be able to plan and organize playdates with much less hassle.

Have Dedicated Family Time on Office 365

Having dedicated time with your family is absolutely essential for growing your family relationships, getting closer to your children, and discussing important topics related to your family’s affairs.

“What doesn’t get scheduled, doesn’t get done.” You’ve likely heard this phrase in the past, and it rings true when it comes to scheduling events such as dedicated family time. How often have you wanted to have a family night “sometime in the future”, but never actually got around to it?

Using Office 365 Calendar to plan all of your family time, and then sharing this calendar with all of your family members is the best way to keep everyone on the same page and aware of all of your family events.

Schedule Parent Meetings & Events

While we’ve discussed multiple ways you can schedule events related to your children’s activities, scheduling parent meetings and events is equally important.

If you’re involved in a book club that meets on certain days, for example, it can be a great item to put on your calendar. If you like playing your favorite sport or working on your hobby on a regular basis, this can be scheduled on the Office 365 Calendar as well.

By scheduling all of your important events, meetings, and hobbies, you’ll be able to more effectively plan your weeks, months, and years moving forward. When you know when every activity is set to take place related to your kids and your work, the next natural step is to understand your hobbies and personal events.

Parents who schedule time for themselves and their children are on their way to building a stronger family unit and strengthening their relationships. Don’t rely on your mind and memory to guide you through all of your family’s activities. Use a proven tool such as Office 365 Calendar to make sure you never forget an event or activity again.

Socialization Time

Blocking out “socialization time” when you can simply talk freely with your family is a great way to bring everyone closer together. In our fast-paced society, we don’t often talk with each other on a one-to-one basis. This is especially true with modern technology these days, where we can send a text message instead of having a direct conversation.

This can be overcome by scheduling socialization time on your calendar and then sticking to it with your family. If you have a time block dedicated to just talking about your day, what went well, what went wrong, and what’s coming up, you’ll understand how your family is doing day-to-day.

Concluding Thoughts

Keeping your family organized and on track can be a tall order without using an efficient calendar solution such as Office 365. By planning and organizing all of your family events in a singular calendar, you’ll immediately improve communication and keep everyone in the loop.

We discussed how you can use Office 365 Calendar to schedule pickups and drop-offs for your children, plan family vacations, organize playdates with the little ones, and schedule dedicated family time for building family relationships.

A Calendar Schedule Can Help With Better Family Relations

Building a strong, cohesive family unit that gets along is something that a calendar will be able to help with when used correctly. If you schedule all of your most important family tasks and events, you’ll be much less likely to rely on your own memory and miss a critical family event.

Calendars are Indispensable Tools for Success

Calendars are indispensable tools in our modern hectic world, and allow us to plan ahead effectively. By remembering to use your calendar on a consistent basis, you’ll find your planning becoming easier and easier week by week, bringing your family even closer together.

Image Credit: by Josh Willink; Pexels; Thank you!