Tonight as we drove home from an extended family Christmas gathering, reading aloud and singing, I was reminded of an old article I wrote for our newsletter several years ago—Christmas in the Car. I will post it in its entirety below—gotta sneak in those family times any chance we get as our kids get older!

From 2004:

If your children are growing up as fast as ours are, and if you travel distances to church, piano lessons, grandparents, etc. as we do, you might want to try some of our “Christmas in the Car” tips. Basically, every year I see the holiday time slipping away from us. The girls are taking college classes; off to Spanish or piano; teaching their own guitar, language arts, and piano students; working at their jobs; and more. Every time I think we’re going to have a sing-along/reading time tonight, someone announces that she has a Spanish test tomorrow and has to study all evening! Thus, our “Christmas in the Car” time was born.

We spend a great deal of time in the vehicle each week—driving to lessons, church, grandparents, etc.—all forty-five minutes away from us minimum. Being the efficiency expert that I am (of sorts!), I began utilizing this time in the vehicle to keep some of our holiday traditions alive. Try some of our “Christmas in the Car” ideas—and keep those traditions going strong:

*Sing carols as you drive.

*Listen to Christmas radio dramas (Focus on the Family has good ones), Uncle Dan and Aunt Sue Christmas stories, Christmas books on tape, Adventures in Oddysey Christmas stories, etc. as you are driving.

*Sing your way through the Christmas story. Start with “Mary, Did You Know?” and move on to “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” then move onto anything having to do with the shepherds (“The First Noel,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Angels We Have Heard on High”). Next move into the birth/after the birth with “Silent Night,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Away in a Manger,” and “We Three Kings.” Lastly, sing of the joy of his arrival: “Joy to the World” and “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”

*Tell the Christmas story in one sentence increments as you go around the van, person-by-person. (This gets interesting with the little ones who might have them fleeing Herod’s wrath before Jesus is even born!)

*If a passenger can read without being sick, you might read your way through a favorite (pictureless) holiday book. We enjoy reading Cosmic Christmas by Max Lucado and The Birth by Gene Edwards. Everyone looks forward to reading another chapter the next time we get in the van.

*Likewise, we read “devotional” type books about Christmas while we drive. This year, we are enjoying short chapters in the book Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas (see review). We have also enjoyed Christmas Stories From the Heart, The Christmas Reader, and more in years past.

*Use the driving time to memorize the Christmas story from the book of Luke. (We like to assign one verse to each person and go from person to person.)

*We enjoy memorizing all the verses from a certain Christmas song each year. In years past, we have memorized “Away in a Manger,” “Twelve Days of Christmas,” and “We Three Kings.” We can still sing most of the verses today!

*Drive by Christmas lights on your evening travels.

*Go through a drive-through or walk-through nativity while driving by one.

*Deliver goodies to those in route.

*Play “20 Questions Christmas-Style” or “Name That Christmas Tune.”

*New game: A person picks three things about the Christmas story that are really true or just thought to be true (or embellished, such as the little drummer boy playing for Jesus), and the others try to guess which two things are really in the Bible and which one is not. This is eye-opening.

*Sing whatever Christmas song you are reminded of by the decorations you see—stars, snowmen, angels, etc.

*Make up your own humorous twelve days of Christmas song, with each person getting to add their own items to the list as you sing around the van.

*Play the ABC Christmas game—“What I love about Christmas is A for angel, B for baby, C for candy, etc.” Go around and each person starts with A and tries to remember what was previously said. (This is a spin-off of the “I went to Grandma’s and I took A for applesauce, B for blankets, etc.)

*My personal favorite: Have someone write your holiday cooking and shopping list and holiday menus down for you while you drive and dictate to them. (Be forewarned: No comments about the spelling or penmanship are allowed when the child is done writing for you!)

The post Christmas in the Car {reprint} appeared first on Character Ink.

Earlier I introduced Gregg Harris’ “attachment” principle for doing the many things that are important in our kids’ Christian upbringing. (Read Attaching Important Things To Your Schedule here.)

Today I want to introduce another paradigm that has kept us going in all of the myriad Christian training endeavors: If something is important to you, you will do it more often than you do not.

Simple, really. But it has kept us going when we felt defeated, overwhelmed, or unsuccessful in our parenting. No matter what was happening, we tried to follow that principle. When one of us got discouraged, the other would remind the first that we were, indeed, doing what we were supposed to be doing.

I haven’t done afternoon story time for two days in a row with Kara’s colic. Ray’s answer? All that matters is that you do it more often than you don’t. And I knew that it was true. I am not perfect. Managing a houseful of preschoolers certainly made perfection on a daily basis out of the question!

However, I knew in my heart of hearts what I wanted our home to be. I knew what I wanted my day to look like (and what it needed to look like in order to accomplish all that we wanted to accomplish).

We knew what we wanted in our children’s Christian upbringing. And we knew that as long as we persevered and did those important things “more often than not,” we could make it.

Make that your goal for new disciplines in your family—that if you plan to do devotions every school morning during breakfast, and you make it three of the five—you have done it “more often than not.”

If you want to read aloud to your tweens before bed during the week, and you read three out of the five weeknight bedtimes, you have done it—“more often than not.” And you are well on your way to success in carrying out the things that are important to you in your Christian parenting.

Raising children for the Lord is not a sprint. It is a marathon, or if you are married, a life-long relay. Running fast and hard at the beginning is not what will get you to the finish line. Slow and steady is what will get you there. And reading, praying, singing, talking, choring, playing, teaching, training, etc. “more often than not” will help you cross that finish line someday knowing that have done what you were supposed to do—without regrets for all of the “priorities” that never truly were priorities but just unfulfilled wishes.

How could the “more often than not” principle help you in your parenting? Would it bring freedom? Could it bring more consistency than you get with trying for perfection?

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So now that you are convinced that “delighting in the dailies” will help you accomplish your goals, how do you get them started (and keep them going) during the initial stages—when there isn’t a lot of fruit to show for your efforts, and you are convinced some day that you should just forget making dinner and go play solitaire or buy some sort of farm equipment (on the computer…lol)?

Here are some tips for learning to truly “delight in the dailies” and make those dailies a long-term reality in your home:

1. Start out with a few of the very most important dailies—and make these things happen every day for a couple of weeks.

(See “Delighting in the Dailies—Part I of II” here.)

Don’t make a huge dailies list and wake up on Monday morning assuming that the magic list will all happen on that day. At times, my “dailies” (not including the children’s daily chores) could be thirty tasks long. If you are not used to doing certain things every day, this can be very overwhelming.

There are two ways to start tackling your dailies (which will eventually lead to your delighting in them):

a. Start with the four or five most important dailies for yourself and one or two per child and tackle these. Attach them to something that you already do every day (get up in the morning, eat breakfast, eat lunch, etc.). And start carrying them out over and over again. Once this is going well, add more. See my post about making a change a week or a change a month here.

b. Start with the first thing in the morning—and do your morning dailies only (for everyone in the family). (You might do others, but focus on making sure the morning ones are done consistently.) I often give the advice that when you want to change the way your days are going, start with the first hour of the day. Get this hour looking exactly like you want it to look (constantly!). Then move on to the next hour, etc. I personally like this approach because I love to make my day great by getting my morning started right.

2. Find someone who “delights in her dailies” and get a vision for this way of life from her.

Believe it or not, I actually knew several moms (either in person or through seminars/conventions) who were “delighting in their dailies” as many as thirty years ago! And this prompted me to make this a way of life. I could see the fruit of their daily disciplines, and I wanted that in my home as well. A well-run home is a beautiful thing, and we older moms need to teach and help younger moms learn these vital skills.

3. Believe in the daily approach to life.

Additionally, as an incremental type of teacher, I knew that “precept upon precept” and “line upon line” was the way that my children would master their subjects—and that incremental learning comes through dailies. I also knew from past experience that skipping things that needed done all the time in favor of things that either didn’t HAVE to be done or things that needed done less frequently didn’t work.

I had to believe in this approach in order to really carry it out. If you are waning in your ability to carry this out, make a list of all of the benefits to doing the dailies on your list (i.e. new reader will blossom through daily reading aloud to Mom, no more five o’clock scrambles for dinner, etc.). Pull this list out to help you “believe” when your faith is weak (and, once again, Farmville is calling!).

4. Notice the fruit (the real fruit!).

After a very short while, you will notice that something (or more than one thing) you have developed as a daily in your life is REALLY benefiting your family. Note this! If your struggling mathematician suddenly knows his x8’s because math drill became a daily for him, you have some juicy fruit! If your husband happily puts on his clean dress shirts in the morning (instead of the former morning clothing scramble!), then you have fruit. If you don’t dread four o’clock any more but actually sit down and read online articles for a while until sweet angels wake up from their naps, you have an entire fruit bowl! Notice it. Enjoy it. And realize that this fruit is there because you learned to delight in your dailies.

5. Believe that these dailies are truly the most important parts of your ministry to your family right now.

Anybody can swoop in and be a hero once or do something big here and there—and those have the potential to be ministries to your family too. However, when we understand and truly believe that what we do when we get up first thing in the morning is truly a ministry to our family, we will look at our dalies differently.

I know there are entire books written about the ministry of magic of motherhood. And they are right. But we have to do more than believe it in theory. We have to have it deep within us that when we consistently cook with our ten year old every day for lunch, we are doing God’s work. We have to breathe it in, take it in, and know it at that moment. When we lie down at the end of the day, we have to feel, believe, and KNOW that we have fulfilled an amazing calling on our life that day—because we did our dailies, God’s task list for us at this time in our lives.

6. Realize that you have accomplished a great thing.

Have you ever heard about the research for mastery in life? Some studies show that it takes repeating an action ten thousand times to become accomplished in it. Just look at each time that you do something (plan the next meal, do a reading lesson with a child, reach out to your preteen’s heart) as a step towards mastery. It really works. You will become so good at the things that you do over and over and over again!

It is rare to find a “work-at-home” mom who can juggle really well. How many times have you personally heard someone say that she could never do what you are doing—that she couldn’t spend all day with her kids or that she wouldn’t have the motivation that you have or that she can’t get organized without the structure of employment? What we are trying to do here—manage a home well, educate our children, and spend all day every day with kids—is not easy to do. If you continue to improve yourself as a home manager and a homeschooler, year after year, you will get more and more accomplished—and you will soon realize that you have done something very rare and very great.

7. But don’t get smug! 🙂

After delighting in your dailies for a while, and continuing to add more and more important dailies into your life, you will be amazed at the skills you have. Bask in that. It is such a great feeling to delight in your dailies. Such an awesome peace that comes with knowing that you are doing—day in and day out—what you are supposed to be doing. Actually, this feeling alone is enough to keep you going. (While I don’t advocate in living on feelings, there is a calm and peace that comes with doing what you are supposed to be doing—and THAT is a great feeling!) So enjoy it…but don’t be smug! Soon there will be someone else who wants you to help her learn to “delight in her dailies”—and you will be just the gal to do it!

In the meantime, here are some places to learn more about my beloved “Dailies”:

1) Short blog post: Dishes, Trash, Laundry Twice a Day

2) Short blog post on “after the Dailies”: Timely Tasks & ABC Weeklies

3) Video With Outline: Following Through on the Dailies

4) Video With Outline–How I Found My Dailies

Hope these help! Blessings to you as you seek to prioritize your life, school, and home!

The post Delighting in the Dailies—Part II of II appeared first on Character Ink.

When homeschooling moms hear the word “schedule,” they either cringe or celebrate. It seems that there is a division of camps when it comes to scheduling. While those who “celebrate” the schedule might be guilty of micro-managing their children and maybe even putting undue pressure on them, those who ‘cringe” when confronted with the idea of scheduling might suffer from a lack of productivity due to their disdain for schedules.

I have found that you do not have to have a love-hate relationship with schedules, but rather you have to figure out which type of homeschooler you are—one who loves schedules and wants to follow one to the letter or one who doesn’t care for them and would do better with a looser type of schedule that still provides some sense of structure.

If you love schedules, then you will probably do better with a moment-by-moment, or at least hour-by-hour one to guide your day.

If you are “allergic” to schedules, you might find a block type of schedule in which you do certain things in a certain order during certain time periods to suit your time management style. I used a combination of both—but always had the “block schedule” in mind for even our toddlers all the way through high school. I divided our day up into

Early morning

Morning

Noontime

Early afternoon

Late afternoon

Early evening

Dinner hour

Late evening

While I might not firmly make 10:00-10:30 math for everybody, I always knew (and the kids always knew) what to expect based on the block of time it was.

Regardless of what type of schedule you use, there are a few key things to being successful in homeschool scheduling. I will leave you with a few of these: (a) Change the schedule every few months as needed, based on the ages of your children; (b) Write the schedule out and “advertise” it for everybody in your family to see all the time; and (c) Attach things that are really important to you to things that are already in your schedule.

(a) Change the schedule as needed.

I found especially with little ones that I needed to change the schedule to adjust to their needs and my availability. When I had littles, I actually revised the schedule every season—based on how long the baby was nursing at that time; how long the toddler napped; who could do which chores now; who needed longer blocks of school meetings with me; etc. I wasn’t locked into the exact same schedule for the entire school year, but I changed it as the children changed throughout the year.

(b) Write the schedule and “advertise” it.

I posted our schedules on the refrigerator, in the fronts of the kids’ binders, on their lesson plan/check sheets, etc., so that everybody could always look and see what was supposed to be happening in our day at a certain time. The lunch person always knew what time he or she was supposed to be in the kitchen; the laundry person always knew what time laundry was to be done each day. By “publishing” the schedule for all to see, I made it more official—and I could even get Dad involved in helping me enforce it if I had a true, posted schedule.

(c) Attach important things to things that are already in your schedule.

We learned this trick (along with dozens of others) from Gregg Harris twenty-five years ago—and have used it every year since then. He said that if something is really important to you to do in your family, attach that activity to an existing one. For instance, if reading aloud to your children is something you really want in your schedule, attach it to breakfast, lunch, or bedtime—times that are already established in your home. We did this with many, many things—attaching things to existing things until our attachments had attachments attached to them—and our day was one big attachment! 🙂

Scheduling your homeschool doesn’t have to be drudgery with everybody following thirty minute time boxes and nobody enjoying it. Make your schedule work for you and your family!

OTHER SCHEDULING HELPS:

[Video] Wondering Wednesday: Scheduling Q & A

Using a Block Time Approach to Big Work Days

Podcast Handout For ” How Can I Turn My Day From Chaos to Control? From Rowdy to Routine?”

The post Love-Hate Relationships With Homeschooling Schedules appeared first on Character Ink.

Summer schedules. Those two words do not seem to go together to most kids (and even many parents!). And yet, I want to propose a plan whereby summer can still be somewhat carefree. (After all, that’s what most people love about summer.) Yet, our children can all still be engaged in learning, developing disciplines for their lives, building relationships and memories, and more.

We are night owls here at the Reish family, so I’m not here to put a guilt trip on people who stay up late—and tell them that their entire family should be up at six in the morning year round. For years and years, I fought my and Ray’s tendencies to function better at night. However, we are not ones to pull out isolated Scriptures and make them rules for our lives. The idea that “early I will find thee,” is definitely in the Bible. Then again, so is the fact that God is found in the night watches and “late at night on my pillow I sought thee.” Truly, God can be found late at night AND early in the morning! Thus, saying that one sleep cycle is more righteous than another simply isn’t true.

I’m not advocating a time table in which everybody should be on in order to raise our children for God! I am here advocating patterns and constances that make us successful.

For us, this has meant that for nearly our entire thirty-two years of homeschooling (until we had one in high school only, and he worked and took college classes), we have followed the same PATTERN/schedule year round for our kids upon rising. We got up in the morning and do morning routines, chores, and devotions, regardless of whether it was July or January. Then we usually read aloud together. Then we did whatever was on the agenda—school, work, projects, play together, have free time (especially smaller kids in the summer), etc.

We did this because regardless of whether a person is fifty or five, there are things that we just need to do all the time. These patterns have helped our children grow up with extremely strong self discipline. Our adult kids, at ages seventeen through thirty-three get more done in a day than most adults I know. And they still, as adults, read, grow, learn, and give to others on a daily basis.

How can you apply this principle to your summer? What do you want your kids’ summer to look like? Staying up until three and sleeping until noon? Then hanging out with friends until bed again? Or do you want to help them learn some skills? Spend some quality time with them? Have them read a little? You can determine the kind of summer you and your children have.

What if you had an earlier bedtime (ours is midnight for our teens—they don’t require much sleep!) and had them get up, do a few chores, read with you, and start your day together?

What if you had a chapter-book-a week plan for their reading this summer? What if you taught each child a new recipe or a new cleaning skill? Summer can be fun and profitable!

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“One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.” -Unknown

Summer is here! Whether our children attend preschool, private school, public school, or homeschool, there are things that we can all do during the summer to make it an enjoyable, growing time in our children’s lives.

Summer truly proves the quote above–that one good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters. We have our children home all summer–either with us if we work at home or stay home with younger children or at home while we are working. Either way, we have all summer to be their “schoolmasters.”

I have a variety of topics to share with you concerning summer. Here is a sneak preview of some of them:

1. Scheduling your summer days (A schedule? If you have kids sleeping ‘til noon, you would be surprised how much more time you can have with your kids and how much you can get done, if you just had a semi-scheduled summer!)

2. Helping your struggling reader—this will be multi-posted. From helping your young, struggling “word caller” (with phonics, reading together, and more) to helping your child go from word calling to fluency to helping your children build their comprehension skills this summer so that when they attack various types of materials this fall at school, they will understand and retain better than ever. My master’s work is in reading specialist—and teaching reading, comprehension, writing, and language arts are my true loves!

3. “Losing” academic skills in the summer? Which children really need academics in the summer?

4. Summer “skills” books vs instruction? How do you know what your child really needs this summer?

5. Reading aloud and summer library time—of course!

6. Penmanship helps—improve your child’s penmanship this summer in just a few minutes a day.

7. Math drill—get a simple, no nonsense math drill that will keep your kids’ skills sharp all year long.

8. Relationship building in the summer—especially with those older kids who are home from college for the summer!

9. Implementing those things that you always say you’re going to do and always want to do but that do not happen during the school year!

10. Much more!

I will try to move quickly so that we will be through them all in a few weeks, so you will still have a good six weeks to work on things that are suggested, if you decide you need to. Thanks for joining us!

The post Summer Is Here—Keeping Skills and Gaining New Ones appeared first on Character Ink.

On my recent podcast episode for the last Wednesday of December, I actually talk about the Daily Duties page first. I did that because I truly believe that Daily Duties are what make us the most successful in parenting, homeschooling, home management, and even entrepreneurship.

So where does the Daily Duties page fall in a simple planner? In The Simplified Planner (get it for free here during January 2016 by subscribing to the blog or newsletter or buy it here for five dollars), the Daily Duties page is a template page that you print off and fill in. (I recommend that you print one off and fill it with all of your Daily Duties as described below, then make copies to use each week. This way, any time your Daily Duties change (and they do throughout a year), you can print a clean one off, create a new sheet, and photocopy that.)

That is where it falls in The Simplified Planner, but it should fall every week in your actual calendar/planner. Let me explain:

1) The Daily Duties is a page that you create with all of your daily must do’s on it. These are things that you need to do every single day to be successful in life.

2) This page can be a daily page or a weekly page:

a) Daily just means that you will use a new one every single day (with the same ongoing daily list on it).
b) Weekly means that you will use one a week but each daily task will have five check boxes before it (one for each weekday), and you will check off one box for each task every day as you do it.)

3) Regardless of whether you create a daily sheet or a weekly one, it should have every thing listed on it that you need to do. Again, I work in categories, so my Daily Duties page was always divided by categories. For example, as a homeschooling mama of many, my sheet had these categories on it:

a) Personal Morning Routine
b) Morning Devotions/Reading With the Kids
c) Oversee Morning Routines and Morning Chores
d) Unit Studies (there were always things on here I did every day–Read biography; read character book; sing hymn; other reading for one hour, etc.)
e) Oversee Noon Chores
f) Littles in the Afternoons
g) Food Preps etc.

4) The point is that if you need to do it in order for things to operate smoothly at your house, it should be on this list.

5) Note that the categories may be time periods or categories/types of activities.

6) Once you have it made, you should print it off and insert it (either with a paper clip or in your binder if you use a three-ring binder) just before that week’s Weekly Worksheet. Open your binder or planner up to this page, and use it to work your mama magic in your home.

There are very few homemakers, homeschoolers, or work-at-home mamas who truly conquer the Daily Duties. There are many reasons for this–not really pinpointing what those things are; feeling overwhelmed by bigger things instead of tackling the smaller, day-to-day tasks; lack of motivation; not having kids help enough so the daily list is truly too much for one person, etc.

But the thing about the Daily Duties list is that once you master it, you can accomplish anything! Once you prove to yourself that you can do what needs done every day–before you let weeklies or monthlies or “tyranny of the urgent” overcome you–there will be no stopping you!

Check out my three chore sessions a day and dishes/laundry/trash twice a day for more insight!

Check out this podcast episode about Using Your Planner/Calendar to Get More Done!

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When I used to buy planners completely made up for me from the office supply store, I never really had a good handle on those week-at-glance pages. I found the clock ones, those with half an hour increments of time down the page, to be very unhelpful to me as a homeschooling mom. Now I still find them equally unusable as a work-at-home mom. I simply don’t have those appointments every thirty minutes.

I know some homeschooling moms do like to plan their school day out in thirty minute increments, but you still wouldn’t need one of those every single week. Hopefully you have a master schedule for that whether you use the hour by hour planning method or the block scheduling method that I talk about here.

Likewise, I never even found the week-at-a-glance pages with each day listed in columns to be that helpful. I usually put the things that were happening each day on the monthly calendar. But in recent years I have found great uses for those week-at-a-glance pages. I now call these pages my Weekly Worksheets.

Once again, I categorize. I think as moms we have a tendency to think in categories more than we even do time or date. Thus, my weekly planning pages are set up in categories. For example, I list the category topics at the top of each square or column, and then I have spaces beneath each one to write down the things that I need to do in that category. For me now, as a nearly-empty-nester, I have categories each week as follows: cottage classes, podcast episodes, blog posts, Meaningful Composition, downloadable products, freebies, family, home, meals, recipe/cooking. All of these categories are areas in which I have ongoing to-do lists!

Obviously, those of you with young children would have different categories than mine. Twenty years ago my categories would’ve been very different. But whatever categories of life that you have a lot of things to do in will make up the categories on your Weeklies Worksheet pages.

(Keep in mind that the this worksheet is for a to do list for the week. Thus, I do not put things I automatically do on these pages. When I was homeschooling several children, those types of “repeating activities” were written on my block schedule homeschool plan for each week–and my children’s to do lists were written on their Independent Work Lists.)

So back to the Weeklies Worksheet page. This two-page spread follows each Monthly Memos sheet in my planner and is for one week. Before I made my own Weeklies Worksheet page, I would just use the week-at-a-glance sheets that came with my planner and re-label those with my categories – already to create my to do list or the week.

So each Weeklies Worksheet double page spread has that week’s date and all of my categories listed in boxes or columns. Then I simply fill in under each category what I need to do that week. I add to this throughout the week and even start next week’s pages this week if I have anything to put on next week’s to do list.

The real secret to success on my Weeklies Worksheet is the prioritizing system that I use on it. Every to do item that gets listed under a category gets a letter before it – either A, B, or C. In a perfect world, A means priority one; B means to do after A; and C means to do last of all. In reality, A means that I really need to get to that this week. B means that I would like to get to that. And C usually means to move it to next week! (See my blog post As Easy As ABC…)

This set up for a Weeklies Worksheet has worked best for me for a few reasons. First of all, each weekly page follows the next and they all follow that monthly calendar page. Thus, it is close in proximity to the monthly calendar. Secondly, my to do list is divided by categories. This is really important to me with deadlines etc. Third, by prioritizing each task with letters, I can see at a glance the importance of each one under each category. Finally, by having it all set up ahead of time, I can flip over to future weeks and jot things down.

Oftentimes, we have loose pieces of paper, sticky notes, index cards, and even restaurant napkins with to do lists jotted down here and there. With the Weeklies Worksheet, everything is in one place. If I do not have my planner at any given time, I make a note on the sticky pad that I keep with me at all times or in my Notes section of my phone. If I don’t have time to transfer that all over to my planner, the sticky note gets put in the planner, and the next time I work on my calendar, I transfer the information from the sticky note to wherever it goes in my planner. Having everything in one place is really helpful.

Watch in the next day or two for what is probably the most important part of planning and truly getting things done – the Dailies Duties page. You won’t want to miss it!

Check out our freebie, The Simplified Planner, by subscribing to our blog here.

Listen to detailed instructions on how to set up a simple planner/calendar at my Wondering Wednesday podcast here.

The post Welcome to the New Year: Using Week-at-a Glance Planning Pages appeared first on Character Ink.

In a podcast episode here, I describe in detail about how to use your planner/calendar to get more done in the upcoming year. I thought I would also include some information here at the blog in print format to help you out.

Note that all of this is also available in our freebie Friday on January 1, 2016, to blog or newsletter subscribers (you will still have access to this link for the whole month of January if you subscribe now). That freebie is The Simplified Planner that I described in the wondering Wednesday podcast episode and I will refer to here as well. However, any planner that is broken down into monthly then week-at-a-glance pages—and has the space to add pages to it (The Monthly Memo page described here and the Daily Duties page described in an upcoming blog post) will work fine. The main thing about planners is getting something that you will really use every day—whether that is my freebie, one from the office supply store, these fancy/gorgeous ones available online, or an electronic device.

Most of us use some kind of monthly calendar. Many of us have several calendars scattered around the house and office. Others only use digital or electronic devices keep track of things. I guess you could say this information is for old-school folks – those of us who still use a two-page spread of a monthly calendar/planner (though the prioritizing in upcoming posts will help those with print planners or digital planners).

I like to use a large calendar, much like The Simplified Planner that is available as our Friday Freebie. Most 8.5 x 11 planner pages that you might get at an office supply store are set up in this way as well. I like the larger calendar planners because you can fit more on each square.

I use the top two thirds of each calendar square to put anything that is going on during that day activity-wise – kids’ activities, my tutoring students, appointments, etc. Because I like to keep track of our college and high school kids’ work schedules, the bottom third of each calendar square is reserved for the kids’ work schedules. This way I can see at a glance that Josiah is working 7 AM to 7 PM this Thursday, etc.

In addition to using the monthly calendar page, I follow that page up with a two-page spread I call Monthly Memos. I like to categorize everything in my planner, so I do the same on this Monthly Memos page. This Monthly Memos page has categories such as recipes to try, blog posts to research or write, family things, podcast episodes, personal goals, etc. I use this like a worksheet throughout the month to jot down ideas, things I don’t want to forget, goals, etc. (As a writer, I also have my project planner for big projects, but this two-page spread helps me focus on the upcoming month.) For younger parents, your Monthly Memos page will have completely different categories—maybe books to hold at the library, things to research for homeschooling, parenting goals, meal idea, etc.

I have these Monthly Memos pages inserted throughout my calendar following each month, so I can go up a few months and jot something down for that month if I don’t want to forget something or something is seasonal that I want to remember. Having a place where everything goes for that month is helpful – especially since it is located right before my week at a glance pages. Check out a future blog post for more information about the week-at-a-glance pages and how to really use those pages for weekly goal setting.

The key to getting more done really does lie in the planning; however, if we don’t have a planner or tool that we will readily open and use each day, that is also not helpful. Our planner usually begins with the month, but I prefer to focus on my days (The Daily Duties pages), so stay tuned for those upcoming posts! Your success lies in the completion of Daily Duties! 🙂

Check out our freebie, The Simplified Planner, by subscribing to our blog here.

Listen to detailed instructions on how to set up a simple planner/calendar at my Wondering Wednesday podcast here.

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