Planning on paper for a stress free summer break
The summer holidays are here and it's time for my annual planning reset.
This year we have 6 weeks and 4 days of the kids being at home for the holidays so I need to get our schedule sorted. My husband works shifts, alternating days and nights and I work 5 days a week. Living over 100 miles from family, we have to coordinate our working lives to ensure everyones needs are met. One blessing of the pandemic is that my husband and I now both work from home and with our children being 12 and 10 they are pretty self sufficient when it comes to the day to day tasks.
Each year I print an A4 calendar from Pinterest for the summer months and bring out the highlighters. Everything gets a colour (I'll list mine below but you'll figure out a code that works for you)
First, I mark down the absolutes. Work days, actvities, plans already arranged are highlighted in the box but I don't write anything down (yet!) just highlighting the plans that are definitely happening.
Then, once those boxes have colour it's easy to spot the crossovers where both of us are working the same days we can plan to take annual leave days if necessary. Next, I take the family days colour and highlight all the dates where neither of us are working and we can plan to do something out of the house.
Highlighting paydays really helps with budgeting, we try to do the big days out just after payday saving the picnics and National Trust days for the days we need to rein in the spending a little.
Using this system really helps keep us on track for a stress free summer as I can see where we can schedule in playdates or a pajama day (of which there are lots!)
Keeping the family/work balance is so important and this is one of the best ways I've found to achieve this.
