001: Setting up a shared family calendar

This episode introduces the first of several foundations to a great life admin system: a shared family calendar.

Mia and Dinah discuss how they previously both used multiple calendars and that there was no single point of truth of what was happening. They describe how they went about setting up a shared family calendar available on all their devices, Mia using Apple iOS and Outlook and Dinah using Google Calendar. They include all family activities and recurring household tasks in this one calendar and share it with their partners, creating a single view of all family events.

The benefits of a shared calendar include:

• creating a single point of truth of what's happening when
• sharing the responsibility of all family activities without separate complicated instructions for your partner or children
• allowing both adults in the household to easily arrange their own social life and events.

 LIFE ADMIN HIGHS OF THE WEEK 

• Dinah talks about setting rules for her calendar to reinforce the use of it in her family.
• Mia talks about how she efficiently managed the photos from her son’s 5th birthday party to produce a photobook effortlessly within days of the event.

 LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK 

Mia talks about meeting with her financial planner and the difficulty of preparing a budget based on all the scattered and incomplete information sources for their expenses.

 POWER TOOL 

Dinah talks about her new printer/scanner which allows documents to be scanned directly to a cloud storage drive and how this is making a transition to a paperless house so much easier.

 RESOURCES 

Gretchen Rubin's book on habit formation:  Better Than Before

David Allen's book on productivity: Getting Things Done

Barry Schwartz's book on decision making: The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less

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