Get Organized with Household Notebook

Holidays and Seasons

Make the holiday season bright with the planning power of a Household Notebook. Our sister site, OrganizedChristmas.Com, offers free printable forms for holiday planning or make your own pages to keep tabs on holiday events. Throughout the year, keep track of important days, gift-giving and holiday décor with pages to record:
-Family birthday calendar
-Birthday party planner
-Holiday gift list
-Seasonal greeting cards list
-Holiday menu planner
-Decor inventory
-Decorations to make list
-“Gifts to make” list
-Gift closet inventory for stored gifts
-Ornament memories journal

Life in View: The Family Calendar

What’s the best way to keep track of hectic family schedules? A family calendar. Choose a large write-on calendar on which you’ll track appointments, outings, kids’ activities, family dinners, and carpool assignments. Use colored pens in a different color for each family member to color-code your entries.

If you can see the family’s commitments at a glance, it will guide household planning. The week of soccer playoffs with every night’s dinner spent away from home at the soccer field isn’t the right time to tackle a new home-improvement project. A bonus: seeing family calendar dates in living color helps you say “No!” to new obligations, when they back up against existing plans.

Create a Family Information Center

The best place to post your family calendar is in a family information center: a designated space in your home to review checklists, take phone messages, add items to a to-do list, and check calendars.

A family information center focuses on information handling and retrieval, so it should be located near a telephone, in a place that permits seating.

Hang the family calendar from the wall and place the Household Notebook near the telephone. Arrange pens and pencils in a pretty mug or wall holder, and add a pad of paper for phone messages.
Alternatively, use a commercial “information center” whiteboard to take phone messages. Colored markers allow color-coding, while the whiteboard eraser makes it easy to change an entry.