Go ahead, run my day

As my kids get older and busier (okay fine ... as I get older and shed brain cells) I have come to the grim realization that my method of scribbling a few notes on a wall calendar and hoping for the best is no longer cutting it. I've forgotten important events, double-booked playdates, and missed RSVPs far more times than I really care to admit.

So what do I do? I used to be a devoted handheld PDA kind of girl, but once I started telecommuting my trusty old Palm fell into disuse. It didn't work for my hybrid work-at-home/stay-at-home/run-around-the-'burbs mom lifestyle. And like it or not, my husband relies on me 100% to keep him informed about what we're doing and when. We've tried and failed to get the hang of shared online calendars.

Enter Day Runner's new family matters line of goodies, which parachuted in to save my butt courtesy of the Parent Bloggers Network. The company has taken the standard time management/organization advice chestnut, "Color code your family's events on a central calendar," and blown it out into a suite of organizational tools that will really leave me with no excuses ever again. Every item features the same five colors for coding, so I can assign one shade to each family member (including the dog!) and use them with a variety of different products.

Here's a quick rundown:

• Weekly/monthly family planner: I can see this quickly becoming my Bible. For each month, there is a full-month view on one spread, followed by weekly views on the following spreads. This lets me flip back and forth to see either a big-picture or a detailed view of what's going on. On the weekly pages, each day has 5 colored blocks representing the 5 family members. In the back of the planner, there is a phone directory, tons of room for notes, and even spaces for lists like "gifts to buy," "books to read," etc. (Presumably, Day Runner is promising to save us so much time that we will actually be able to read those books...) This is a large book -- 9" x 11" -- so it's not something you can stuff in your purse and tote everywhere. But it's still more portable than a wall calendar.
  
  
• Door reminders: These cute little kid-shaped dry-erase boards are color-coded like everything else in the collection, and have a built-in hook so you can hang them on a door, a child's kitchen chair or coat hook, or anywhere eye-catching. Of course, if you don't want your eye to catch your toddler decorating the whole house with a dry-erase marker ... do store the marker away from the board!



• Undated wall planner: If you've worked in an office you've seen these -- a large, erasable calendar that you can update from month to month. What's nice here is you can choose between a traditional calendar layout (Sunday to Saturday, left to right, with a color-coded notes column) or a vertical format, with the days of the month running from top to bottom and color-coded columns to the right. I wouldn't use this one -- it's so big it wouldn't fit on my refrigerator or any other relevant wall space, and I don't like only being able to see one month at a time.
  
  
• Monthly wall info center: This works better for me. It contains a multi-year, monthly paper calendar, a slot for holding documents (you can also buy color-coded folders to further organize those papers), an erasable to-do list area, plus hooks for the little reminder guys, keys, etc. And it fits on the fridge. Keeping it there would also cut down on my husband's weekly complaints about "how much crap we have on this fridge"). If you have more papers than you care to store in this center, you can also buy cardboard storage cases -- color-coordinated, of course.

The only challenge may be assigning a color to each family member. "Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?"