Playing Tetris

This is not a how-to post, and it’s not about video games. This is purely self-serving and I need your advice. Short of hiring a family secretary, I need to know: how do you manage your family’s calendars?

The busiest season for our family has always been Spring. It seems as though every month feels stretched thinner than the last, but no months feel this way more than April, May and June in our family.

We have two daughters playing softball on two different teams, playing in two different towns every weekday night; on top of our own personal, work and social events, and my husband working over an hour and a half away, not to mention our three-year-old who brings her own personal agenda to the mix, it’s become a bit unwieldy. I’m not complaining, I obviously set myself up for this, I’m just trying to strategically manage the Tetris game that is our calendar and I know that someone out there must have a better way.

I’m a bit desperate to figure out how one of us doesn’t end up leaving a child stranded somewhere.

We each have our own personal Outlook calendars, and we each carry our own planners. We don’t, however, have a logical way to mesh these and our daughters’ games, practices, plays, concerts and the rest of the events in one place. We have tried a dry-erase board, we have tried Cozi, we have tried emailing each other the following week’s agenda so that we can both write them into our planners, but duplicating everything – whether it be digitally or manually or both – meant that we inevitably ended up forgetting to share something. Multiple somethings. Which inevitably led to some finger-pointing and frustration. For instance, I was supposed to have a work event this evening, but only found out yesterday that my husband had scheduled dinner with a client, which he is certain he told me about weeks ago. He likely did tell me, and it’s even more likely that I lost it in the shuffle. Kids’ schedules weren’t even involved at this point yet we still effed it up.

We’re currently trying Google Calendars, but we’re lost somewhere in the sharing process. We ideally need something that effortlessly exports to/from Outlook as that is the default method we are already utilizing that contains more than half of the data that we need.

So, I’m sending out this plea – especially if you’re savvy about this sort of thing, or if you have multiple children going in different directions and have a system that works for you – what do you and your partner/spouse use to keep everything in line?