It can be challenging to design a family schedule that doesn't make your head spin trying to get everyone where they need to go. In this episode, I'm sharing the five steps you can take to design a family schedule that supports your values and helps your family thrive. You can live with intention in a way that supports what is important to you. You got this!
Until next time,
Crystal
P.S. Want to share this episode or see the full post? Head over to the blog: https://www.triumphantlearning.com/family-schedule/
© Triumphant Learning, LLC
It can be challenging to design a family schedule that doesn't make your head spin trying to get everyone where they need to go. In this episode, I'm sharing the five steps you can take to design a family schedule that supports your values and helps your family thrive. You can live with intention in a way that supports what is important to you. You got this!
Until next time,
Crystal
P.S. Want to share this episode or see the full post? Head over to the blog: https://www.triumphantlearning.com/family-schedule/
© Triumphant Learning, LLC
Welcome to the All In A Homeschool Day podcast where we talk about cultivating a thriving home atmosphere by getting control of your day, managing your emotions ,and investing in relationships. On today's episode, we'll be talking about how to design a family schedule that supports your values and helps your whole family thrive. So let's dive in. When you start dealing with the whole family, it really adds some dynamics that can be a challenge to work around. Because everybody has different things that they're interested in. Everybody wants to be involved in different activities. And honestly, it can be a lot to manage. So let's talk about the five steps that will help you to create that family schedule that will help your family thrive. The first step is to identify what's important to your family. Now, there are no right or wrong answers to this. What you value might be different than what our family values, and that's totally fine. The key is to know what's important to you so that you can align your schedule with it. Some things that I like to think about are what do we want to focus on during the week, such as how often do we want to have family dinners together? That actually came up last night in our conversation. As we were considering changing our schedule, one of my daughter's classes needs to change times, and as we talked about that, we considered how often we would now be having dinner together because the activity was going to shift from a Saturday morning to possibly a weeknight. If that's important to you, how often do you want to make that happen? Other things like having a family game night or doing something together as a family. How can you incorporate that. It's looked different for us through the years. There was a time when my daughters were really into rock climbing that my husband and I joined them so that we could have some family time together. It was something fun that everybody could do at the same time. We could join each other and challenge each other as we developed our abilities, albeit somewhat limited, to do rock climbing. There are other times that we have a family game night once a week. That's going to look different for you depending on the stage that you're in, the age of your of your children, and the other activities that you have going on in your life. Maybe you want to make it a point to attend a church event together, or you want to spend time watching a movie on the weekends. Whatever is important, identify how you want to spend that time together. And then two other things that I like to look at are how much time do I want to be at home? Is that important to us? Do we need that time to recharge? Consider the needs of your introverts and your extroverts, because you'll have to find that balance. If you have a very introverted family, you're probably going to want to have more time at home. Whereas if you have some extroverts in your family, you'll want to make sure that you have enough time out of the house with other people to feed that need that they have. And then finally, how much margin do you want to have? I really value having that margin to be able to say yes to unexpected things, whether it's an invitation that we receive to meet with other friends. Maybe it's being able to be available to help a friend or a family member when they're in need. If I have my whole day planned out, the whole week planned out and there's no whitespace, we're not available to do that. So those are some things that I look at when I think about identifying what's important to our family. And honestly, our family mission statement really helps us in this process. We can look at that and say that we know that we value being healthy, that we value that time together. We know what's important to us. And we can use that as we gauge and decide what activities we want to be involved in. If you've not taken the opportunity to write your family's mission statement, I'd encourage you to do that. Even if you just sit down and write out what's important to you and how you want to spend your time, that'll give you a really good start. If you want to take it a step further, I have a work session helping you walk through the process of writing your family's mission statement. You can literally play it as you work on your mission statement, do it together with your spouse, and set aside some time that you can just think about that and talk about it, pray about it. If you're interested in that, you can find that in my online learning portal, which is courses.triumphantlearning.com, and be able to have your family's mission statement as a decision making framework as you go through this process. But at the very least, sit down and think about what is important to your family. Now, the second step is to recognize your limitations. There's only so much that we can do. And we have to know that sometimes there are activities we might want to be involved in, or things we might want to do, that just are not possible in this season. Some things you might consider are How old are your children? Do you have babies that you need to factor in their nap times? Do you have teenagers who tend to be a little busier and they can drive themselves? So that creates a different dynamic as they're managing their own schedule, and you're still trying to maintain your family time together. What are the needs of your children at the stage that they are right now? Consider if you have family in town that can help you with your schedule. We have no family in town, and it's at times been a challenge trying to figure out how do we manage getting one daughter to an activity and the other daughter needs to get somewhere else. My husband's work schedule is pretty busy and somewhat flexible, but not very much where he can just take off and help me ferry them around. So we've had to get creative at times in terms of how he helps out, how we schedule the activities so that we can make sure that we get everybody where they need to be. And consider, do you have one car or two? That's going to factor into how much time you can be out of the house and when you can be out. So just think about the limitations that you have. And there are benefits and drawbacks to each of these limitations. When we can learn to embrace those limitations, it can actually help us as we are looking at what we value and how we design our schedule. It's not a bad thing that there's no family in town for us. It's actually really helped us to be very intentional in how we've scheduled our time. Right now actually is a challenging time that I am really working on embracing this limitation. I am no longer driving at night because of some eye issues that I'm having. Being wintertime, that's a real challenge with my younger daughter who's not driving yet and getting her to activities that she needs to be at. So we're having to really come together as a family and figure out how to make this happen. It's a fairly recent development, so we're still navigating this. And there are going to be times in your life where your situation, your limitations are going to change, and embracing the process and figuring out how to live into that can be a real growing experience for your whole family. Now the third step that you can take is to write down everything you're currently committed to doing. This can be a little overwhelming honestly. Brainstorm a master list of activities and commitments that you are currently involved in, things that take you away from home as well as things that you need to do at home. Some examples might be classes, sports, practices and games, get togethers with friends, any work commitments that you might have, any lesson prep for your homeschool lessons, any volunteer time and the associated prep work that goes along with what whatever you're volunteering for, your exercise and fitness time, time for personal care, any therapy time you might have like physical therapy, vision therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, counseling. Anything that's going to require a commitment from you, write it all down. And in this step, you're just writing it all down. Now, step number four takes it a step further. Take that list that you just brainstormed and put it on a schedule. You could add it to your digital calendar. You could put it into a spreadsheet. You could write it out on a grid, put it on a whiteboard, use sticky notes. Whatever helps you to process what you have, put it all out there. And be sure to include travel time in that so that you factor in the travel time, so you're not really crunching down your margin, you actually have time to get where you need to go. And then the fifth and final step is to evaluate that schedule. This is where it gets hard. Ask some questions like, does it all fit? There have been times that we have laid out our schedule and realized we have overlapping activities; that's not going to work. Ask yourself if you have enough margin. If I am not home enough, I cannot get the laundry done, have meals prepared for us, have time to decompress. I am a pretty big introvert. And I like hanging out with people. I love the energy I get when I'm around them, but I really recharge when I'm at home. So I have to make sure that we have enough margin in our schedule so that we can recharge our fuel tanks ,so that we can be available for the extra things we want to do that we don't want scheduled. Another question I asked when we're evaluating our schedule is, are we spending our time doing what matters most to us? Or are we spending time doing we're scheduled to do? There have been times that we've decided, You know what, when we really stop and evaluate this, we don't want to participate in this activity anymore. We're doing it because we've been doing it, but we don't really want to continue it. And that's okay too! Use this opportunity to really evaluate, do you want to continue what you're doing? And then ask what's missing from the schedule. I realized a couple of years ago, when our daughters started getting older and involved in different activities that we were not involved in as a family, that we didn't have that family dinner time consistently every week. We have always had dinner together as much as possible, but it became more challenging to make sure it happened. So I actually put it on the calendar. I scheduled it; everybody knew when it was and that has really helped us to maintain that which is really important to our family. And finally ask how do you feel at the end of the day or end of the week? Are you drained because of all the things that you've been doing? Or do you feel relaxed and refreshed? I would encourage you to ask your children these answers too, you might be surprised by their answers. Sometimes they've told me that they are completely happy with everything that's going on, they want to continue all is well. At times that they've said you know what, actually, I don't want to continue that activity, but I really want to do this. And so we'd make changes based on their interest, based on what's important to them, and based on how they feel. I want to make sure both in our school lessons and our extracurricular activities, that it's all fitting together as a whole and fueling us and providing what we need to thrive. So based on your answers to these questions and your children's answers, think about what changes you might want to make to your schedule so that you can do what's important to your family, and so that everyone in your family can thrive. And as you think about making these changes, if you aren't sure how to do that, I have a course to walk you through the process step-by-step. You can learn how to get control of your days and see a positive change in your home atmosphere. Your life and responsibilities will no longer control you. Instead, you'll finally be in control of your day. It's only $47 for over three hours of training that's broken up into 37 bite sized lessons. They're short enough that you can listen to one at a time and not worry about how you're goning to fit it into your already busy day. One student said that "It seems there's always fires to put out but using your time management tools and the Flourishing Days So let's recap the five steps to design your family's schedule in Framework has really helped minimize the fires and their a way that supports your values and helps your entire family severity. It's helping me find peaceful moments to feel God's thrive. Step number one is to identify what's important to presence and discern what personal goals he wants me to your family. Step number two, recognize and admit your set for myself." That is amazing that she's able to see through limitations. Step number three, write down everything you're the haze of all the stuff she has to do and actually set currently committed to doing. Number four, put it on a schedule. And number five, evaluate the schedule. You can personal goals for herself as a homeschool mom. If you want to live with intention in a way that supports what is important learn more about that course, you can go to flourishingdays.com. to you. You got this!