A new month has begun and, in most places, kids are back in school.  That makes it an excellent time to do some long-range planning.

You'll need a big calendar — big enough to keep track of everyinging in your world.  You may want something you can hang on a wall.  I use a book I can carry with me.  THere are tons of techie options for those who want to plan electronically.

Whatever you use, here are some things you should enter — preferably this week:

• Go over school calendars sent home with the students and add all important events (student programs, parent-teacher conferences, etc.)
• Sports schedules (practices, games, and end-of-season banquets).
• Business trips and major work projects.
• Social events.
• Family birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
• Appointments (doctor, dentist, vet, personal trainer, hair stylist, etc.).
• Community service (meetings, volunteering, etc.)
• Schedule out some days for relaxation and family time.

Once you have the skeleton built in, you can use the calendar to plan ahead.  For example,

• Schedule in your crafting time — and the trips to buy supplies.
• Plan dinners (or school lunches) a week at a time and use that plan to grocery shop. (This solves the problem of coming up with ideas on the way home from workand allows you to plan to use leftovers well.)
• Plan weekly chores, assigning each chore to a person and a day.  (You can even color code for excitement.)
• Plan weekly outfits (you'll want to have a weather forecast handy) and make sure everything you plan to wear to work is in a wearable state (clean, in good repair, and ironed).  I personally find it very pleasant to iron while watching football.

Spending an hour a week planning can free up several hours each week since you save the time it would take you to make up your mind.  Also, there are economies of scale.  It takes less time to set the ironing board up once and iron a week's worth of outfits than to set up and take down the ironing board every day.  Putting dinner right into microwavable containers to use for lunch saves time as well.  Having a chores list for each day lets you just get started. 

Give it a try for a month and let me know how it goes for you.