When you’re about to head out on vacation, your calendar can be a great tool to make sure all of your bases are covered before you leave. In a recent post, Your Family Calendar is Your Safety Net, I talked about why you should keep recurring appointments in your calendar. Well, here’s another reason.
We take for granted just how many people we work with every week — the piano teacher, the guitar instructor, the reading tutor, etc. When you are about to head out on vacation, you need to contact all of these folks to cancel those appointments.
My advice: If you’ve already got them in your calendar, as you contact each person, instead of deleting the appointment, update it to say “No Piano Lesson Today” or something to that effect. It will serve as a reminder for you that you DID contact them and cancel for that week. And if you’re constantly being interrupted and can’t contact everyone all at once, when you go back to that task, you’ll know who you’ve already contacted and who you still need to contact.
Here’s an example of what the week may look like, pulling from Cozi Family Calendar:
Looking at the week of our vacation, not only do my kids know what we’re doing each day but I have confidence that I’ve cancelled all of our appointments and that I’m ready to go. Because I can literally see it in my calendar!
I'm a working parent with young adult daughter and son with Autism. I am an independent Product Management Consultant focused exclusively on helping companies who serve children with special needs.
I'm also passionate about my kids, as I would expect any parent to be. I bring my project management skills home and my crazy knowledge about managing schedules home and use them both to manage my family. More importantly, I use these skills from work to manage my son's Autism therapy program.
Over the years, I've wanted to volunteer more with the Autism community. My form of volunteering is mentoring parents of friends who have found themselves in the difficult position of raising a child who has Autism. I have moments where I wonder where we'd be if I wasn't a project manager by trade, especially as I help parents who are struggling as this is new territory for them.
I recently was helping a long time friend who was dating a man who had a child with Autism. As I shared my ideas with her and strategies for how to make life better for this child, she said, "You should write all of this great advice down."
This blog is about capturing those ideas. I also hope it inspires other parents out there to not only be the best parent they can be, but to do that while still pursuing the dreams they have for their careers. I believe you can do both.
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2 thoughts on “Your Calendar is Your Pre-Vacation Checklist”
We travel quite a bit. Thank you for the idea. I believe it will serve us well. 🙂
Organizing Dreen 
We travel quite a bit. Thank you for the idea. I believe it will serve us well. 🙂
Great post, keep it up 😉