Listen to the Calendar

It’s fall!  Time to get organized, and that definitely means having a well-placed, visual family calendar so that everyone can be responsible for themselves, right?  Maybe.  Or maybe not.

A couple of years ago, I decided to get a giant whiteboard calendar to help my family stay organized and on top of their individual schedules. It was color-coded by each person’s activities. I updated it without fail every single month, which took a good ½ hour each time. It had a corkboard bottom to tack up important papers like the school lunch schedule. It had cute magnets along the side for other materials. It was a thing of beauty.  And no one (except me!) EVER looked at it.

Fast forward to this past summer.  I decided to do an experiment and not update the calendar to see if anyone noticed.  No one noticed.

I left the (blank) calendar on the wall since I still used it to tack up the school lunch schedule.  And secretly, I hoped that my family would have lack-of-calendar remorse and beg me to start filling it out again.  You can probably guess whether that happened or not.

This week, I came home to the calendar lying on our kitchen floor.  It had fallen off the wall and crashed to the ground, scattering my cute magnets and the pushpins that held up the lunch schedule.  I felt like the calendar was speaking to me.  And loudly.

At first, I was upset and immediately thought about what I needed to do to reapply the Velcro that had failed and restore the calendar to the wall.  And then I paused.  I realized I loved the calendar because of its potential…something that would save me time and instill organizational skills in my children (and let’s be honest, my husband too!).  But it didn’t do either of those things, and not for lack of my setting up the system, explaining the system to my family, and the expectations that I had for the system.  

Sometimes the system just doesn’t work.  It’s just not the right fit for the people who are using it.  This happens all the time in my work; clients want the “best” system, but as we explain to them, the “best” system is the one that actually works for them!  So just like I do with my clients, I’m going to patiently (it’s SO much easier to be patient with my clients!) work with my family to find another system that works for them.  I’m going to listen to the calendar.