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001: Setting up a shared family calendar
1.2k Plays6 years ago
This episode introduces the first of several foundations to a great life admin system: a shared family calendar.
Mia and Dinah discuss how they previously both used multiple calendars and that there was no single point of truth of what was happening. They describe how they went about setting up a shared family calendar available on all their devices, Mia using Apple iOS and Outlook and Dinah using Google Calendar. They include all family activities and recurring household tasks in this one calendar and share it with their partners, creating a single view of all family events.
The benefits of a shared calendar include:
- creating a single point of truth of what's happening when
- sharing the responsibility of all family activities without separate complicated instructions for your partner or children
- allowing both adults in the household to easily arrange their own social life and events.
LIFE ADMIN HIGHS OF THE WEEK
- Dinah talks about setting rules for her calendar to reinforce the use of it in her family.
- Mia talks about how she efficiently managed the photos from her son’s 5th birthday party to produce a photobook effortlessly within days of the event.
LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK
Mia talks about meeting with her financial planner and the difficulty of preparing a budget based on all the scattered and incomplete information sources for their expenses.
POWER TOOL
Dinah talks about her new printer/scanner which allows documents to be scanned directly to a cloud storage drive and how this is making a transition to a paperless house so much easier.
RESOURCES
Gretchen Rubin's book on habit formation: Better Than Before
David Allen's book on productivity: Getting Things Done
Barry Schwartz's book on decision making: The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less
SHARE
Please head to Life Admin Life Hacks on Facebook to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
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Transcript
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Introduction to 'Life Admin Life Hacks'
00:00:30
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Dinah Roe Roberts, a commercial and finance executive. And I'm Mia Northrop, a user experience designer, researcher and writer.
00:00:51
Speaker
This episode, we'll talk about what we think are the foundations to a great life admin system. And we think that there are three foundations to making sure that you've got the right IT infrastructure. And those include a digital calendar, a shared email account dedicated to admin and bills, and a cloud drive storage. Today, we're going to focus on the shared digital calendar.
Essentials of Life Admin Systems
00:01:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. In her book Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin talks about the pillars of habits. She says, many strategies help us change our habits and four habits tower above the others. Monitoring, foundation, scheduling and accountability. Without getting those habits under control, it's harder to make other good habits stick.
00:01:41
Speaker
So similarly, Diana and I stopped to consider what life admin tasks or habits do we need to get right from the start to make the other tasks and new habits easier. So we started with our calendar. And I guess I used to have three calendars. So a weekly sort of kids schedule on the fridge, which showed all of the different extracurricular activities and which days they had sport and library.
00:02:04
Speaker
I had a wall calendar pinned up on the wall, which had our social life and our volunteering. And then I also had my work calendar, which was stored on my, you know, on my PC and on my phone. And not only that, I also had a birthday book, like a hangover. You know, if you talk about in me or in the last episode, your Filofax, I had this little birthday book with everyone's birthday written by month. And not really that. A dedicated book that just had birthdays in it?
00:02:41
Speaker
And then I was also thinking what else did we have? We also had our fridge and I think lots of families use their fridge as kind of a quasi-calendar and it had birthday party invitations and school notices stuck all over
Centralizing Calendars: Lessons from David Allen
00:02:55
Speaker
it. So it was quite complicated.
00:02:58
Speaker
We've got multiple pinboards. My daughter's got her own pinboard where she puts her party invitations. I've got a pinboard where I stuck other random invitations. Some things are done up on the fridge. We have a wall calendar where I scribble birthdays and things that come up for school. It's one of those calendars that has a column for each member of the family and what we're doing.
00:03:18
Speaker
And then I also had my calendar on my phone and the calendar on my laptop. And there's no single point of truth. And we're always asking each other, my husband and I, when is this happening? What is happening now? And that that constant asking of when do we have to do this or are you free on this night? Crazy making.
00:03:40
Speaker
A lot of this time, my partner's kind of oblivious of what's going on with the kids' lives because I sort of had this false thinking that it was just easier not to include him in the planning, but ultimately, of course, it's better if both of us are across what's happening or at least have one place that we can go to to get the info.
00:03:57
Speaker
And look, we've been doing lots of reading as we've been thinking about life admin and David Allen's book, Getting Things Done. Look, it's really, it's an old kind of book, but it's really a great one when you start to think about organizational systems. And he talks about in his book that you can have this tremendous sense of relief and control by moving everything out of your mind and making sure you put them in a place you can trust and where you'll review them regularly.
00:04:24
Speaker
So having one calendar that you look at all the time is so great because it frees your mind from remembering and allows you to actually just do what you enjoy. And sincerely my memory is not what it used to be so that is excellent advice.
Setting Up a Shared Google Calendar
00:04:40
Speaker
So the way that we sort of approached this was the idea that we'd set up a family calendar and I had to talk to my partner about it
00:04:48
Speaker
about the systems we would use. He's on PC at his work, i.e. Mac at home, and he actually ended up setting it up at work using his Outlook account. So he set up on his Outlook email a separate calendar that we just called, you know, family calendar. And I put the details of that into settings, went into settings in my iPhone, went into accounts,
00:05:14
Speaker
set up the family calendar and put in his password. We just use the calendar functionality. We don't use the mail and the contacts or reminders and notes which hang off those new accounts. It's just the calendar functionality. That means that we can both see now, this is our default calendars, and we can both see each other's non-work commitments. We looked at a few different options too, but we decided to use Google Calendar.
00:05:40
Speaker
because it really integrates so well with Gmail and Google Drive. And so that's going to help as we sort of think about the other foundational elements of our system. And not only that, it's also free. So we've set up our Google Calendar. And I guess to get started, I spent a lot of time just on one intensive session, just moving everything from all of those different calendars to this new account.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah. And I also added in all of the sort of recurring things. So even the basketball training that happens every week and the swimming lessons. So it's all there and there's one single place that you can look.
00:06:19
Speaker
Yeah, we did a similar thing. Any late night work that people do on a regular basis, like exercise commitments, you know, the fact that we want to do monthly gardening sessions or we want the kids' extracurricular stuff, anything recurring, whether it's an activity or a task, I put in there and set up as a recurring event.
00:06:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I've also done a thing that's made it really help the integration between my, our sort of family calendar and our work calendars is that I invite my husband or even my own work calendar to things that, you know, our family life that impacts on our working life. So for example, I sent a meeting invite to my husband's work calendar from our shared family calendar for the nights that I go to exercise class.
00:07:07
Speaker
So he knows that he needs to be home in time for me to be able to go off to that class.
00:07:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good idea. Cause it's, you know, not everything happens outside of nine to five. I have to say when I was doing this, I had real resistance to letting go of the wall calendar. I've had one forever. And for me, it was that instant visual. Oh, let me quickly just look up there as I'm responding to an email about when I can catch up with friends for dinner or go to a workshop or something. And I just look up at the calendar on the wall and quickly see if that date was free.
00:07:41
Speaker
And that, to me, like getting rid of the paper calendar felt like dangerous or risky. And I held off for a long time. I actually thought about getting a digital wall calendar because you can get these wall calendars where you've got feeds from, you know, your Google calendar or your Outlook calendar or your Mac calendars.
00:08:03
Speaker
and it will take all of those separate feeds and put it into a digital walk calendar. And I thought, oh, maybe we need that. And then I just thought, no, it's just another thing to update. It's another thing to maintain. I'm just going to change my habits and get used to looking at the calendar on my computer, which you can see that week view. You can see that month view with enough detail. So I've
Benefits of a Unified Calendar
00:08:25
Speaker
done it. I threw the calendar out after I transcribed everything. And I have to say, I haven't really missed it that much. It's actually been fine.
00:08:34
Speaker
It's funny. And I guess one of the things that my husband was really nervous about was I took all of the notices and invitations off the magnets on the fridge. And I just, if I needed to keep the details on them, if it was more complicated than was, you know, easy to write into the actual calendar invite, I just took a photo or I scanned them and then I attached it to their relevant item. And it's so great. That's next level.
00:09:02
Speaker
Yeah. And then if you're on the road somewhere and you want to check something, it's just there. It's on your phone, the detail of the event, including, you know, if it's a theme party or there's a birthday present or, you know, for some of the extracurricular activities that are different each week of the term, it just means you can easily find that information without having to sort of juggle through all of the notices on the fridge and it doesn't get so easily forgotten.
00:09:28
Speaker
Yeah, so just to summarize why this shared calendar is so important, I think having a single point of truth rather than a variety of sources needs aligning just makes sense so that you know that you're looking at the current information. And it also, as you said, allows you to share responsibility between people in the household of knowing what is when, and you don't have to write complicated instructions and schedules. You can just say, it's all in the calendar, go and have a look at it there. Obviously, you don't have to remember things if you're writing it down.
00:09:57
Speaker
And because you both, if you have a partner, have access to it, you can act independently, not having to wait for someone to get back to you about whether you're free that night. You can just make some decisions about how you're spending your time. Yeah, I do think that it's important to think about, you know, it is a bit of a change management journey, not just for yourself, but for your partner too. And so I actually spent some time sitting down with my husband and talking about why I wanted to do it.
00:10:24
Speaker
and getting him on board with the process. And the other part of it has been no longer letting him ask me those questions he used to ask, which is like, what are we doing this weekend? I just say, look at the calendar. And so because I've been saying, look at the calendar, he can now sort of schedule his own social life so much more easily without having to kind of ask permission like, can I go out on Thursday night? He can just pop it in the calendar and then it's agreed.
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah. In theory, ours is working. There's still, yeah, as you said, a bit of change management going on. We all have our activities in the calendar. It'd be nice to have a few less of those conversations of what's happening when. It's like, oh my God, just, it's all in there. Please just go and look. So that's happening slowly.
Challenges in Digital Calendar Transition
00:11:11
Speaker
But I have to say for me personally, not having to look at multiple sources and feeling confident that it's all in one place has at least made my life easier so far. So baby steps, we'll get there.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, I do think it's important that you also do that transition with kind of a big bang because really you need to change from one system to the new system so that you don't have that same problem of different sources of truth. So it's probably not the same with the other parts of the life admin system, but this one is one where you've got to just get on with it and then move, change overnight.
00:11:46
Speaker
And if you don't have a very hectic social life like me, it didn't take very long at all to put all the new activities into the digital format. And this is incredibly complicated. And actually that was one of the good things out of going through this process is my husband was just like so surprised that all of these things actually happen that he didn't even know happened. So it's been kind of an awareness sort of awakening for him about how complicated the logistics are. And I think that's been great.
00:12:16
Speaker
I think for a lot of families it might be a bit of a wake-up call where they've got lots of extracurricular activities going on and it might be a conversation starter about are we overextending ourselves because this is a ridiculous amount of things to juggle. So I think that wraps up our conversation about the calendar. So should we move on to our Life Admin High of the Week, Mia?
Simplifying Life Choices and Organizing Photos
00:12:37
Speaker
Yes, what was your life admin high of the week? I have been doing lots of reading as I mentioned before and I read this great book called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz and he talks about setting rules and having some discipline to live by the rules
00:12:54
Speaker
eliminating choices in your life and it makes life so much simpler. I guess I was reflecting on that. There's that great story about Barack Obama. He wears the same suit every day because he doesn't want to waste his mental energy on thinking about that as a choice.
00:13:11
Speaker
So I set some rules for the calendar and I said to my husband, I'm no longer going to answer questions about schedule. That's my rule. And it's really sort of transformed the process of that change management journey that I talked about. I do like that work uniform kind of idea or just taking out some of that decision making to make things simpler. And I have the same thing for breakfast every day and pretty much the same thing for lunch every day. So it's one less thing to think about.
00:13:40
Speaker
So my life admin hire of the week was to do with my son's birthday party. He turned five and usually
00:13:49
Speaker
The way that I approach birthday party photos is that I take a bunch on my phone, we get out our good camera, take a bunch of photos on that, and then I canvas my steps into my mom, everyone's taking shots, and I say, I'm gonna create an album, I'm gonna print something out, and it never happens because there are too many photos, and they're all in different places, and I can't be bothered bringing them all together, and I never make the photo book.
00:14:16
Speaker
I've made him one baby book. He's turned five. He doesn't have any photos or any birthdays. I've taken them all. I just haven't put them into albums. So this time I create an album in the photos app on my iPhone ahead of time so that at the end of the day, on the day, I could move all the decent birthday party shots into that album. And similarly, I just decided
00:14:43
Speaker
I'm just going to take photos with my iPhone. I'm not going to care if someone else has the ultimate shot. I'm just using the photos on my phone. And so then I synced my phone with the laptop, pulled in the event into iPhotos, and I could just make the album. And it happened in like two days of his birthday. It's never happened before. I feel such relief. This is the new way forward.
00:15:10
Speaker
That sounds so good, Mira. I really need some tips on digital photos, so thanks for that one.
Budgeting Challenges and Tech Solutions
00:15:16
Speaker
I think we're also going to have a Think About Our Life admin lower of the week, and I think, Mira, you said before you had a really good one.
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah, we met with a financial planner because we're thinking about buying a house and we had to provide an update on our expenses. I'll make a budget essentially so that we can get our finances in order and see what kind of bank loan is possible.
00:15:42
Speaker
and we had a login to an online portal for the financial planner where we had to go and detail all of our expenses and it was absolutely excruciating. We geared up to do it in one night and I had my laptop there with our online banking open. We had all these financial folders out
00:16:06
Speaker
from the filing cabinet trying to work out how much we spend on a weekly, monthly, annual basis on various things. It was just so difficult. The information was all over the place. There was lots of money unaccounted for.
00:16:23
Speaker
We had some difficult conversations about spending patterns and I feel like the information I've given to the financial planner is not really that comprehensive. So obviously there's lots of work for us to do to make that easier in the future to understand how to identify our expenses, where to go to find the actual information and be able to pull that easier.
00:16:46
Speaker
in the future. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Let's see after we go through this life admin journey, if that would have been an easier process, we've got to hope so. It couldn't possibly be any worse. So one of the things we also wanted to do each episode was talk about a power tool or a book review or a tech review. Have you got something for us this week?
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah, so I went out and bought myself a brand new printer and scanner, which is really an investment that's going to make going paperless so much easier. And it's so great because it can scan multi-page, double-sided documents and it saves them directly to Google Drive or to an email account.
00:17:28
Speaker
And, you know, it's pretty cheap. You can get one now for less than $100. And, you know, when you think about it, that's pretty cost effective when you think about all the folders and the time and energy that you might spend on filing. So I'm really loving that scanner. Yeah, I didn't realize you could get ones that just scanned straight to Google Drive. That is so convenient. It's it's really it's sort of revolutionary.
00:17:55
Speaker
Yeah. We're into that revolution happened like five years ago. It's just hanging in there. Let's resent buying cartridges for it. That's the extent of my relationship with the printer.
00:18:08
Speaker
Well, that wraps up us for this episode.
Conclusion and Calendar Reminder
00:18:11
Speaker
Remember to try out this episode's life hack. This week, set yourself up a shared calendar, set it up on all of your devices, phase out your other calendars that you might be using so that you've got that single source of truth, and go in there and put in all the recurring and ad hoc appointments and tasks for all of your family members.
00:18:30
Speaker
Please head to our Facebook group and share your thoughts and experiences on this week's topic and feel free to post any suggestions for us. We look forward to seeing you there. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks.com. If you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend or review us in your podcasting app.