Simplify the Stress of your Event Calendar

Throughout the year we find ourselves at several different events. Over time, as our calendar fills up, it can start to be a lot. This episode helps give tips on how you can simplify the stress of your event calendar, and give you ways you can automate and make it easier.

Simplify the Stress of Your Event Calendar Transcript

This episode is to hopefully help streamline all of the events that we have. When your social calendars are filling up because of those five kids birthday parties in January that your children are invited to, but then there’s also work outings, and then there’s also friend gatherings and you have just all these things swirling around in your head…how do you keep all the information straight?

But even better than that, how do we take it off of our mental load so that we don’t even have to worry about it anymore?

If you look at the five steps to simplify your to-do list, one of them is automate.

Automate Your Events to Simplify the Stress of Your Event Calendar

For automating, we’re going to take these events and give our phone a task of folding and keeping all the information, but also giving it to us in a really good turnaround time.

So what I want you to do is look at the first event that you have majorly coming up. Type in an event, and then add some details of things that you might need to bring. Every event requires you to bring or prepare something.

Whether you need to buy a certain formal attire. Maybe you need to think of a really thoughtful gift for like an anniversary. Maybe you need to just order a small child’s gift for a birthday party. You need to prep a side dish. You need to remember to bring whatever it might be. There’s always something that we need to remind ourselves of that will simplify the stress of your event calendar.

So add that into the event details while you’re putting it into your phone. Let your phone kind of hold that. But then don’t let it sit there and have your phone remind you 30 minutes before said event that it’s about to happen. Instead, change your reminder notification to be one, two or three weeks even before the event, however long you need to prepare for the details that you listed out.

For something like a potluck, where you just need to bring a side dish, you might only need to remind yourself a few days in advance whenever you typically go to the grocery store. So you have those things purchased.

But for something like an anniversary, I know I like to order personalized things on Etsy. So I might need to start looking a month, maybe even five weeks early, so I can tell my phone to remind me five weeks ahead of time before that event happens. And then I might have details or thoughts of things that I want to get for my husband in the note. And it’s all just provided to me with plenty of time, so I don’t have to rush around.

You can use this from anything big to small.

Chose a Theme to Simplify the Stress of Your Event Calendar

But another thing that I want to suggest, is having a go-to theme for the year when it comes to gifts.

Now this might need to be done by age. So things like my kids birthday parties, where they have five in the month of January. I didn’t want to buy a gift individually for each kid, and that sounds a little rude, but that’s a lot of time, energy and money that I just don’t have to put out there when I know parents don’t also want a whole bunch of toys laying around their house, because I am one of those people.

Then there’s also the gifts that you might have for, you know, some adults where it’s just a, ‘it was great to see you, thanks for inviting me over’ gift.

Maybe even up to adult birthdays or adult celebrations like weddings, pick a theme for each of those different types of gifts that you might have.

When it comes to weddings, maybe it’s a really nice gift card towards somewhere on their registry. Maybe for a housewarming thing, you get a really nice candle, and you can give that to anybody whenever you are unexpectedly going to meet somebody else new.

For kids, we chose this year to do floor puzzles and activity books. And what happens is once you choose a theme, you can kind of stockpile those things when you find them on sale.

You can have a gift closet at your ready, and whenever you have a kid’s birthday party coming up, you can just let your children go shop the gift closet from that theme for a book and a puzzle for their friend. They can still feel special picking out something just for them, but you don’t have to go through all the extra hassle, and honestly, the extra cost. So having gifts ready to go can easily simplify the stress of your event calendar

If your gift closet runs low, you already know the theme that you were purchasing, so you can always see if that gift is available on sale throughout the year to restock.

That’s just a quick fun little tip that has really simplified the gift giving aspect of events and celebrations for us in the last year or so.

I hope between the scheduling, and also the gift giving aspect of all of these events, you might feel that your year is already just a little bit simpler through this one simple step to simplify the stress of your event calendar. Until next time