How to organize your calendar - the essentials

Learning how to organize your calendar is one of the first steps to take when you want to get organized, because your calendar is your most important organization tool. If you are are learning how to organize your life, your calendar is the best place to start.

Learn how to organize your calendar! If you’re a busy mom and you want to be organized, you absolutely MUST have a working, accurate calendar. These 3 tips will have you using an organized calendar and bing more in control and aware of your time. Time management is an important skill for both the stay at home mom and the working mom.

These organization tips will boost your productivity and enable better home management. Whether you use a wall calendar, google calendar, or a pocket planner – these 3 calendar organization tips will make the calendar of your choice work for you.

There are three things your calendar must be if it is going to be organized – and the only way to keep it organized is to keep using it, keep updating it, and keep looking at it.

#1. Organize your calendar by putting all appointments on it.

If you’ve made a commitment to someone else to be somewhere or do something at a particular time, it should be on your calendar.

Don’t assume you’ll remember or put any appointment – even sports practices or regular club meetings you think you’ll never forget. Put them all on the calendar. These are not clutter; they are reminders that your time is spoken for.

What is calendar-clutter is non-obligations or anytime-commitments on the calendar. These should be on a to-do list, not on your calendar. Your calendar should be an at-a-glance chart of how much time you have available to you, in what chunks, each day.

#2 Make your calendar easy to see.

Your calendar will do you no good if you don’t look at it.

You can use a large wall calendar, a portable planner with a calendar, or a digital calendar – but the key is that it is easy and convenient to look at it.

And then we must look at it – multiple times a day.

#3 Organize your calendar by color-coding it

If you do have a lot of people or a variety of commitments that make it hard to see at-a-glance what’s on your plate when you look at your calendar, you can use color-coding to make visual distinctions.

Repeating, regular obligations can go in a lighter color so that the one-off appointments stand out more boldly.

Commitments that simply involve you dropping off and picking up your kids can be in a particular color, separate from your own obligations.

Your Calendar Is Your Most Important Organization Tool

When you want to get your life organized, what’s the first step? 

If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know the first step is always a brain dump.

But then, once you have a brain dump that fills an entire notebook, where do you begin? What do you do with all that? Where does it go.

There are 5 important bins you need before you can start sorting and processing that brain dump, but the one you should set up first and the one you should make your priority is your calendar.

Your calendar is your most important organizational tool.

“Good!” you might think, “I already have one!”

But, do you?

Are you using it?



Is it 100% accurate?



Do you look at it?

Yeah, that’s the kicker, isn’t it?

Why you need an organized calendar.

Your calendar is a way of keeping track of your time-sensitive commitments. If you need to be somewhere or do something at a specific time, it needs to be in a spot where you will remember the time of that obligation.

Whether it’s a doctor’s appointment, a coordinated phone call, a lunch date, or a gym class, you need to see the landscape of your day, of your available hours, by looking at your calendar.

Our calendars tell us what time is already spoken for. They show us what we need to prepare for. They give us the hard lines within our days.

Without a trustworthy, accurate calendar, we stare at a day planner or out the window, trying to remember if there was anything else today. We miss appointments or scramble at the last minute. We double-book ourselves or have to bail on a friend because we forgot about the orthodontist appointment.

But when we have a complete calendar, we know our commitments and can make plans confidently.

The calendar is the organizational tool we should begin with. Before we set up apps or elaborate task management systems, we need to have a working calendar.

How to have an organized calendar in 3 easy steps.

1. Have one calendar.
2. Keep it 100% accurate.
3. Look at it daily.

Not hard, right?



But, it is, actually.

You need ONE calendar, not two half-kept calendars, not this one here and that one there for those other things.

You need to put any time-based commitment on that one calendar, without fail, right away.

Then, you need to look at it morning and evening and sometimes even in between.

It’s simple, but it’s difficult.

Organize your calendar by starting at the beginning.

A good place to start if you want to organize your calendar is by examining where time does go and where it needs to go each week. I have a free tool that will help you do just that: a time budget.

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