5 min read
The National Working Families Report surveyed more than 6000 Australian parents and carers and has found that nearly two-thirds of them are struggling to look after their own physical and mental well-being as they try to balance professional and parenting responsibilities.
Being in a typical Aussie working family guy, Evan from Digital Team Coach knows the constant juggle of family and career – running his digital coaching business, raising three young kids with his wife, having heavy demands at work and home. Whew! Being a working parent is not easy at all.
But by being highly organised, Evan has been able to maximise his productivity and achieve more with his time at work and still enjoy family life. That is exactly why Evan built Year Glance – to help himself and more people to manage work-family juggle and live a more balanced life. Earlier, we shared some tips to help you achieve a realistic work-life balance. Today, we focus on how to simplify your family life with the help of Year Glance.
Why we need to organise family life
Families are the most fundamental social units in all human communities around the globe. The family is the first and intimate place where a child learns the basic values of life. Strong family bonds significantly benefit the overall wellbeing of both individuals and society. David Mace, a pioneer and leader in the area of marriage and family enrichment, said:
“Nothing in the world could make human life happier than to greatly increase the number of strong families.”
Getting your family life organised is the key to living a healthy and happy life. It is just as important as managing your career. Being organised at home helps reduce your stress and anxiety to maintain your physical and mental health. That leads to increased longevity and quality of life. Meanwhile, organising family life nurtures positive relationships for families. The positivity and happiness that your family generates also improves your work performance and productivity to create more positive impacts. So, it is essential to keep your family organised.
How Year Glance helps simplify your family life
1. See the big picture to make the most beneficial decision
Experts suggest the first step to organising your family life is to visualise the big picture. Year Glance offers you a comprehensive year view to help you and your family see the movements and rhythms of your family. In this way, you can look at the whole situation, balance different needs and goals of your family members and help you make informed decisions to maximise the benefits. For example, while looking at the overview of your year on Year Glance, you can discuss with your family members to make a realistic calendar of activities and spread them properly throughout the year. This can be used as the foundation to understand and establish family rhythms, build your family calendar and then you can decide more specific events and to-do lists for the month, the week, or the day.
2. Integrate with other online calendars and management tools
Jo Burgess, the creator of Life Sorted, shares that one of the effective ways to make your family plans simpler is to use digital calendars and management tools. Year Glance is the perfect and easy-to-use calendar tool to meet all your requirements. Within 30 seconds, you can sync your regular Google/Outlook calendars to your Year Glance. You can also integrate your Plutio system into your Year Glance to create a shared digital space for your family. With that space, it increases transparency among your family members and everyone can overview schedules, progress, chore lists, holiday events, birthday, etc. This results in more effective communication and cooperation at home.
3. Create visual family schedules and prioritise tasks
Keeping a visual family schedule or calendar inspires the whole family to stay more organised. Visualising your family schedules is significant to help you remember, clarify, categorise, and prioritise family activities and to-do lists. Why does the visual work? Research suggests it is due to the “Picture Superiority Effect”. Visual formats can improve your comprehension of detailed information and further increase the chance of accomplishing goals.
Using Year Glance, you can create a beautiful planner with high visibility and clarity. Customise your year with your favourite colours, view in horizontal or vertical mode using any device. For instance, you can ask your children to pick a different colour to colour-code their own calendar and use that colour to organise activities that associate to your specific child. That colour can easily trigger your memory of the related activities… and the whole process is full of fun. You can also design different patterns with different colours and cell sizes to prioritise and delegate tasks around the home.
4. Increase the visibility of your family plans
Keeping your family schedules and plans visible is one of the key strategies to get your family life organised. Research has found that people with a vivid picture of their goals and plans have a higher chance to accomplish their goals. Year Glance can not only visualise your family schedules digitally but gives you a choice to print your customised calendar to any paper size your printer can handle. Then you can place the physical calendar in a highly frequented place in your home such as your kitchen fridge. As a result, you can keep a regular review of your family calendar in digital and physical forms.
Year Glance becomes your visible reminding system to balance your family life.
With big-picture Year Glance, you can get every family member on board and encourage the whole family to stay organised. We hope you find these 4 hacks helpful to manage your family juggle to live a happier life together.
Give Year Glance a try today and start your FREE 14-day trial with full customisation here. Besides, you can keep your free plan forever. If you have any questions and comments about Year Glance, don’t hesitate to hit us up and follow us on the socials. We’re here to help you!