(P)lannerGirl Family Events Calendar

In the beginning of the year, I shared #PlannerGirl {Why a Digital Calendar Works Better For Me}. But there is one exception when I fall back unto a non-digtal calendar, and that’s for keeping track of family events.

We use the refrigerator as our personal hub for what’s going on with everyone. On it, is a magnetic dry erase calendar that I picked up at Walmart.

Our system is simple – write in the month at the top and then as events pop up for everyone, we write them in the calendar. I also keep my personal events on my digital calendar, but no one else in my house does this, so this system works perfectly for us.

magnetic dryv erase calendar

Along the left side of the calendar it’s already populated with “mine” “theirs” and “meals”. We don’t use the meals section, but we right in our names and then put each person’s events under each day and on their line (one kiddo is gone for the summer so he’s missing in the pic.).

Combining Digital and Paper Based Calendar Systems

At the end of the month, I take a picture and save it to an Evernote notebook called family events, with the month and year as the title. Since images are searchable in Evernote, if I ever need to find out what month the kids went to the dentist for example, all I have to do is a quick search.

The Drawbacks of Using a Dry-Erase Calendar

The major thing is that the events get wiped away at the end of the month, but that’s easily overcome with saving the image to Evernote as I mentioned above. We used to use printable paper calendars as well, and save each month until the end of the year, which makes it a bit simpler for anyone to search through past events.

There’s no real future planning with this system, as the next month isn’t available until we wipe away this current month. Usually, I just write any future events in an empty space on the bottom of the calendar, or keep it on a magnetic notebook that’s on the other side of the refrigerator.


How do you keep track of your family’s events?

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// Comments //

  1. I had a dry erase calendar but I stopped using it. I just leave my planner where all the boys can see it (but they know not to touch it!) Plus we have it in our Google Family calendar too. Thanks for sharing with Small Victories Sunday Linkup. Pinning to our linkup board and hope you found some great posts to visit this week!

  2. I wish we were this organised in my household but we don’t have a lot of things we have to plan ahead. This is definitely something I could have used at university with my housemates, though. We were continually missing important things which we were happening because we couldn’t remember when things were happening.

    I am definitely a fan of writing things down when planning, though. I think having something like this for blogposts and my social life would really help, though. I’m more of a fan of a paper calendar though.

  3. Kim

    Jul 22

    This is the system we use as well. I keep our dry erase calender by the back door so hubs sees it as he leaves every day (I still have to remind him of stuff though.) I love the idea of keeping a photo in Evernote. We keep a shared Google calender for future events but I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who ever looks at it.

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