Finding Balance Managing Activities Involving Your Kids

Are you investing more time in admin tasks for your child’s activities than you’d like? Here are strategies to help you reclaim more time for other things.

With the school year back and many people settling into routines for now (at least until the fall sports season and other fall activities end), many of you may find yourselves being tasked with a variety of volunteer activities related to your kids (i.e., managing a sports team, being a room parent, cub scouts/girl scouts, PTA activities, etc.).  While it is likely that many of you enjoy certain aspects of your involvement in these things that ultimately benefit your kids and their friends/community, not as many of you probably like the time that some of the “administrative items” take.

There are a variety of different tools and strategies that you can use to simplify the organizational aspects of the activities that you help run. Obviously, each activity is slightly different and not everyone approaches organizing tasks in the same manner. Therefore, the items provided below may need to be tweaked to fit your individual needs.

Take a step back and look at the bigger picture in terms of responsibilities, scheduling, etc.
Don’t just jump into each individual activity to start. Take a step back and map out the main activities and responsibilities for the season or school year.

• Create a schedule of the main events you need to be involved with (i.e., practices and games-which likely are preset for you, scouts events, room parent events).
• Identify and write out the main tasks that you need to do or delegate for each of these.
  • For example, with being a room parent, let’s say you have to plan the Halloween and Valentine’s Day parties as well as solicit volunteers for these and a few other events throughout the year.
    • Next, assign a starting date for when you will begin planning each one and an estimated date for sending out emails to solicit volunteers.
  • For coaching or managing a sports team, consider the main tasks such as sending out reminder emails about practices and games, making a practice plan (if applicable), coordinating parents bringing snack, and creating an end of season celebration of some kind (if typical to do).

Take Steps to Automate Reminders and Reduce Time Sending Emails
Depending on the type of activity you are running, it is likely that many of the events will be preplanned to some degree. Therefore, rather than having parents rely solely on email updates about events, consider using the following items as feasible:

• If your sports league is using an app such as TeamSnap or Sports Engine, take advantage of the games already being listed in there and add practices in as well as track availability when needed.
• If your league does not use or you prefer a different sports team management app than they use, take the time to enter games and practices into the app once per season and then other than making changes occasionally if the schedules change, everyone has an up to date record of the schedule for the season. Most of these programs also allow you to sync the calendar to an external Google or Apple Calendar so parents can see the schedule on whatever calendar they use without having to solely rely on the app (most of which also can be accessed from a computer).
• For non-sports activities, some of these apps may still be helpful for keeping everything organized.

Certainly, sending emails can sometimes be easier or the best option based on your needs or in addition to using an app as discussed above. When using email for organizing activities, here are a couple of suggestions:

1. If you always email the same group of parents, consider creating a Google Group to make it easy to send emails to the whole group by simply typing in the group name. Similarly, you could create a contact list in your contacts to quickly pull all email addresses.
2. If you have to send the same type of things over and over again, consider creating an email template. Some email programs such as gmail give you the option to save an email as a template. Then, simply click the “insert template” menu option and tweak the template as needed and send the email.
3. Similarly, you could use preset templates through a program like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp if you are sending emails to a large group of people (i.e., all parents in the PTA).
4. You could consider creating a template of a chart or table with sections that would allow you to communicate a lot of information more visually than simply listing it in an email. This can work well for items such as a sports team (section for games, practice schedule, and reminders), upcoming events for scouts or the pta, or countless other activities as well. When an event has passed, you can simply take that event off the chart.
5. Think about the timing of when you send reminder emails or ones asking for signups or something else specific. Picking times when people may be more likely to be available to respond sooner may result in a higher response rate off the first email sent. You can also take advantage of schedule send options to draft emails whenever and send them automatically at more ideal times.

Think About Simple Ways to Streamline Collaboration
When the activities you run involve coordinating things with other people, consider how best to track information, plan, and contribute to the tasks at hand.

1. At minimum, if you meet to go over things and make a plan, it would be helpful if someone wrote down the plan, listed out what each person was going to do with a tentative due date, and then emailed that out to everyone to refer back to.
2. Depending on how many people are involved, and preferences for sharing info and planning, some people may like using a shared task list program such as Todoist (or even the Reminders app) where everyone can see the tasks and who they are assigned to for quick reference. Some programs (i.e., Google Chat with tasks) give more options for sharing ideas by thread. Similarly, using a chart in a Google Doc can also work well.

I hope that these strategies are helpful in getting you started in thinking about how you can streamline organizational tasks to improve your efficiency, perhaps reduce stress, and free up more time for other things.