251 How to Create an Effective Family Communication Center with the Skylight Calendar
Are you ready to lighten the mental load and bring harmony to your household? In today’s episode, we’re diving deep into the concept of Family Communication Centers, featuring the Skylight Calendar, the all-in-one smart family calendar my family and I use. Discover how this innovative tool can revolutionize your home life by keeping everyone on the same page and reducing the constant need for reminders. We'll discuss common mistakes, the benefits of a well-organized system, and how the Skylight Calendar's features like syncing with your digital calendar, meal planning, and chore tracking can make managing family schedules a breeze.
In this episode, I cover:
- How to set up and maintain a Family Communication Center
- Overview of the Skylight Calendar and its features
- Tips for integrating the Skylight Calendar into weekly planning
To get 15% off your own Skylight Calendar go to www.megansumrell.com/skylight and use code HARMONY.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Megan:
All right, friends, today we're talking all things Family Communication Center. So if you're ready to lighten the mental load, let's do it. Welcome to the Work-Life Harmony podcast. Guess what? You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted and stressed out. There is another way. When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony. If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you. Hey there, welcome back to Work-Life Harmony.
Megan:
Today we're going to be taking a deep dive into what I call family communication centers. It's something I teach inside the TOP program. I've shared some tips and strategies over the years, but we are going to do a dedicated episode just to family communication centers. All right, because they are incredibly important and it is one of the ways that I have been able to really transfer ownership of feeling like I need to be the chief operating officer of my household. Feeling like I need to be the chief operating officer of my household All right. So first I'm going to set the stage of what is a family communication center, some of the biggest mistakes that I see people making with it, and then I'm going to introduce you to the tool I use in our home as our family communication center. You may have seen it out and about. It's called the Skylight Calendar. I switched over from my old sticky note system to the Skylight Calendar, oh shoot, maybe a month or two ago, and I'm telling you what. The whole family. We love it, all right. So what is a family communication center? Well, at its heart it is a central place that allows the whole family to see what the heck is going on that impacts them as it relates to our time. All right, I could have just said it's a calendar, but there is subtle differences here.
Megan:
Now, some of the common things that I see people use for family communication centers probably the most common is one of those giant whiteboards, right, and you may have them hanging oftentimes in your kitchen. So first I want to tell you some of the common mistakes. Here is what I see people doing with family communication centers. That usually makes them not work well, because what will happen is, if you don't set it up right, it just becomes background noise, all right. So the first common mistake I see people making is that, again, they use a whole month of a whiteboard. So they get one of those giant whiteboards that filled in an entire, that's for an entire month, which means there's one small square per day. And why I don't recommend these monthly calendars for your family communication center is simply this they get too noisy, right.
Megan:
As a month goes by, you are filling out more and more stuff. It gets harder for the family to see what day are we in, what's relevant to me, and when you're using a month at a view, it usually means it doesn't have the granularity that's easy to see around specific times, right. Whereas if you can take a step back and just have a week set up, then it's going to be a lot easier for you to communicate that. Now. The second common mistake that I see people make is there's too much information on the family communication center. All right, and I'm going to talk in a few minutes here about what does belong on there and what does not. So hang on, we're going to get there. Now.
Megan:
The third most common mistake that I see is if you are like when I call the COO of your household, if you're the one that is typically orchestrating the information of what everybody's doing and when is that, you yourself might be missing from your family communication center. And moms, I'm talking specifically to you. If you have a giant calendar where all the people in your household are seeing what they should be doing and what's important to them and you're not including yourself in there, that's a problem, right? Because it's subtly letting people know that you don't have time blocked for you and you don't have things important that other people need to be aware of. All right, so let's dive into what does belong and what does not belong on a family communication center. Belong on a family communication center.
Megan:
So, in a nutshell, the information that does belong on there usually falls in one of two groups. It is anything that involves multiple people in your household. So, for instance, one of the things on our family communication center is, during the school year, in the morning of when we're actually driving our daughter to school, we have to physically take her to her school. There is a chunk of time there every morning and it is color coded in a way that is signaling who's doing the driving Is it me or is it my husband? So if it's pink, I know I'm driving her to school that day. If it is green, I know my husband is driving her to school that day. And it involves multiple people because it's involving our daughter as well. So that's why that kind of information goes on there.
Megan:
The second type of information typically that belongs on there are things that are out of the ordinary that really need to have a spotlight on them. So, for example, something that I will put on my family communication center I'm not including the details of everything I'm doing during my work time on the family communication center. My family does not need to know I have a meeting at 10 am. They do not need to know I'm recording a podcast at 11 am, right, especially if it's during school year and my daughter's off at school and my husband's at his job. So this is where I see people failing with their communication centers. They're putting too much detail that's not relevant for everybody to see.
Megan:
Now, on the flip side, I typically don't work in the afternoons, from school pickup to dinner. If there was a rare occasion that I had to do something in the afternoon, maybe I was being interviewed for something and that was the only time we could do it. Well, in that case the family communication center would have a block. Let's say it was a Tuesday afternoon and I was being interviewed from 4 to 4.45. Well, I would put that on the family communication center because that's something out of the ordinary. So, ultimately, what we're after here with our family communication centers is the understanding that less is sometimes more. So if you have, like, I have my top planner that I use to do all of my weekly planning.
Megan:
My Google calendar has all sorts of information in it that does not show up on our family communication center. If my husband has a phone call for work with his team from one to two in the afternoon, that's not going to go there, right, because it's not something that multiple members of the household need to be aware of, nor does it involve multiple people. So the type of stuff that does belong on there, right. Or maybe activities, and you can color code them to who's doing the driving, if necessary, or which member of your family it belongs to. So if there is an activity that is maybe something for my daughter, maybe there's a lesson, etc. You can color code it to.
Megan:
The other thing that we love to put on our family communication center is it saves the question of what's for dinner, and that's one of the features I love about the Skylight calendar is the meal planning aspect to it, so we actually have for each day of the week what is for dinner that night. So that way anyone asks what's for dinner, you just say go look at the calendar, and we've been doing that for a very long time. So it has stopped that conversation altogether. So the ultimate point of these family communication centers again is to lighten your load from feeling like you're constantly having to remind people and everyone's coming to you asking because they can't see inside your brain. So this allows them to see all the things that you are remembering and then you get to let go of it. So once it's on the family communication center, now I am no longer responsible for reminding or answering questions.
Megan:
All right, so this leads me to the next point of where this thing should live in your house. This is another mistake. I see people make the real estate location location, location. Another mistake. I see people make the real estate location location, location. It needs to be somewhere that your family is seeing it regularly. You can't go hide it somewhere where people can't access it. I'm not going to put the family communication center in my office. I want it somewhere central that the family can see it.
Megan:
But I recommend you avoid areas that are stress high traffic. What do I mean by that. Let's say you have a mudroom. We do not, but maybe you have a mudroom which is like where everybody comes into the house and dumps their school bags and heads on out or is leaving. Chances are there's probably a lot of stress, hurriedness in that area. That's not the place to put your family communication center, because people are gonna ignore it. They have too much going on. This is why ours is in our kitchen, near the snacks, near the coffee. It's in a place where people are coming to get snacks again, make a cup of coffee. There's not a lot of hurriedness there and it's a very central place that's easy for everyone to see when they're not in a hurried or rushed mode. So you really want to think about where your family communication center lives.
Megan:
So I'm going to now tell you a little bit about the tool we are now using. It is called the Skylight Calendar. You can check it out over at skylightframecom and if you throw in the coupon code harmony, you're going to get yours for 15% off. So all the all the features available on the skylight calendar are amazing. Now we personally are not using all of them and I'll tell you which ones we're not using and why, but I'll recommend who I believe should be using these features.
Megan:
So first is and I think the most important is the calendaring aspect of it. Now you may be wondering how does the data get on here? I don't want to have to have one more place. I'm writing stuff down. Well, guys, this is what makes this tool so amazing. You can actually sync it. It's not required, but you can sync it to your current digital calendar, whether it's an iCal, whether it's a Google calendar, yahoo, they have a bunch of import options available. So if you're currently storing stuff that belongs on your family communication center in an electronic calendar, when you get your Skylight calendar, you can just say sync it to this account and everything's going to show up there for you, and then you can toggle on and off. If there's maybe too much information, you could choose to delete some stuff off the communication center, but it won't delete it off of your digital calendar your personal one. So that's really, really cool.
Megan:
Now there's another new feature that they've just rolled out, called the magic import. I was skeptical, but it's really cool. So maybe you get a flyer in the mail or your kid comes home from school with a piece of paper that lists a bunch of important dates for their soccer team, right, it's like a piece of paper with the list of all of their games. Well, you can actually take a picture of this thing, of the paper, and say import it to my Skylight calendar and, with the use of AI, it's going to be able to pull out all those dates and automatically create those events on your calendar for you Super slick. Now the other thing that you can do to be able to get information onto your calendar and this is the one I'm personally leveraging, and I'll tell you why in a couple seconds here is your calendar will have its own unique email address. So if you have an event like, let's say, I have something on my Google Calendar and I want to invite my Skylight Calendar to it, I can just add that as a guest and it will show up there. All right, again, there's a lot of options. You will 100% be able to find the one that fits your bill.
Megan:
Now, with the calendar view on the Skylight Calendar, I'm going to go ahead and hold it up here for those of you watching the video version. I keep mine in the week-long view, so mine is always a rotating seven days because it aligns with everything I teach. With weekly planning, you can toggle to a month view, you can toggle to a daily view, but I really recommend what they call the schedule view, and ours is seven days out. Now there is, of of course, an app that comes with this, so from your mobile device, you can be adding information to your Skylight calendar. That's what I love the flexibility. I am rarely ever sitting down physically at the calendar itself and putting the data on it there. I'm doing it either from my desktop or my phone, and you can invite your family, so my husband can be adding stuff onto the Skylight calendar and you can choose to allow your children to do so if they're old enough and have their own mobile devices.
Megan:
Now, another great feature with this and this I really we are personally not using it in our family, but I would if my child was younger there's a chore feature and you can set up chores per family member and they're color-coded and they're really fun, so you could set up chores. That or contributions, as I learned from Amy McCready from Positive Parenting Solutions, you could create a series of contributions that different members of your family need to do on different rotating schedules and as they walk by your family communication center, they'll see the color circle with their name and then they'll see how close they are to completing their contributions for the day and they can tap on it and hit done whenever they have completed theirs and it will show their progress. So I would have 100% leveraged this when my daughter was younger to help us all stay in sync with our family contributions. There is a meal planning feature as well. We love this. On Sundays, typically, my husband and I do our meal planning for the week, deciding what are the meals we're going to have. We build our grocery list from there and this allows us to visually capture it on the Skylight calendar. So you no longer have to answer the question what's for dinner. And they have recently enhanced the meal planning where it will store actual recipes for you, so you can just click and drag like oh yeah, we have our standard probably 10 dinners that we eat most of the time, so I don't even have to re-enter those anymore. I just tap the day and tap the dinner and boom, it shows up.
Megan:
Another feature on here that I really love is lists. Now you guys are probably laughing going hey, megan, you always say a task list is not a plan. I don't recommend the lists for task lists, but I'll tell you how we're using it. So we one of the main ways we use it is we have a Costco membership, but that's not a place we're running to regularly, so we typically go about every other month, and so we have a list set up for Costco on our family communication center and so, as myself or my husband or my daughter remembers or notices, we're running low on something that we get when we do that run to Costco. We can add it to the Costco list and you can do it right from your mobile device. So we're adding all along, and then, when the time comes for us to actually make a Costco run, I can just open up my Skylight app on my phone and my Costco list is right there, so it allows the whole family to contribute. We do the same. We have a running list for anyone that needs to make a drugstore run as well. So lots of ways that you can use that.
Megan:
And then the last little feature I'm going to mention you do have to upgrade this when you get everything I've talked about so far. You get when you buy your Skylight calendar. It's just, it's part of the purchase of your calendar. If you want to add a little bonus feature to it, your Skylight calendar can turn into a digital frame when you're not using it. So the way I really like this is we've got a lot of our family info showing on our calendar, but let's say we're having people over for an event on the weekend, or family or friends or whatever. Well, I can, with a simple tap of a button, I can turn our calendar into digital frame mode where it rotates through the photos that I've uploaded to my calendar, and I do that with a click of a button right on the Skylight app. So any photos on my phone, I could say, hey, add them to my Skylight calendar. And that way, if people are over and I don't necessarily want to be sharing calendar information with them our calendar just turns into a really pretty digital photo frame and it just rotates photos through it, which I really, really love.
Megan:
So I'm going to tell you how I go about setting up my communication center. Every week I do this as part of my weekly planning process. So when I sit down to do my weekly planning for the upcoming week, as I am going through the 10-step weekly planning process that I teach inside the top program. I do it in 15 minutes or less. As stuff is going into my detailed weekly plan, I am asking myself does this belong on the family communication center? And if the answer yes, I just open up that event on my Google Calendar and I invite the the Skylight calendar to it. Now again, you don't have to do it that way. You can choose to just sync it directly to your calendar. I personally am doing the invite method because I juggle about nine different Google accounts right now with various calendars for how I run my business and lots of other things, and so for me, this was just the quickest way for me to do it.
Megan:
So, as I'm sitting in my office doing my weekly planning, I'm inviting my skylight calendar to the things I feel are necessary for the family communication center, and then I can toggle what color I want them to be. So, for example, we have a repeat occurring drive to school in the morning. It's a recurring event, and when I'm doing my weekly planning, all I'm doing is changing the color each day depending upon who's doing the driving, if it's me or my husband. So by adding this layer in, it's maybe adding one more minute to my weekly planning and then everything is there, whereas I used to painstakingly rewrite everything onto our weekly sticky note. Now I'm not having to rewrite and get out my highlighters and all of that. It's just happening so easily for me. And then usually Sunday mornings are when my husband and I do meal planning, and we're in the kitchen when we do it and that's where we keep our calendar. So at that point I'm just tapping on what meals we're going to have for dinner. Each week he's updating the grocery list and boom, it's right there on our communication center. So it's incredibly easy for us to use.
Megan:
So I'd say, like, my top favorite features are well, obviously, in fact, I'm not rewriting everything. So outside of the calendar which is the whole point of this will be the dinner planning. Love that. The color coding per person is fantastic. And if you have a really large family, what's nice is across the top there's going to be a little circle of the color for each family member, so your children could just walk by and tap on their color and the calendar will just show the things relevant to them, and that way they don't even have to see all the other stuff, which is incredibly powerful. So that toggle ability is so, so great.
Megan:
Now I will mention where I would have loved this, but I'm out of that stage of life. We did homeschooling for about a year and a half here in our house. If I were still in my homeschooling stages, this tool would have been a game changer for setting up homeschool schedules for each day and having the flexibility of changing them around. It would be an incredible tool for anybody that is actively doing homeschooling. Now, again, this is Wi-Fi enabled, but I think it's important to mention, there's no access to the internet with this. So I've seen people trying to set up iPads with the Google counter like how, whatever view for this reason in there for their family communication center. But my, my hesitation with that for me personally is always. Now I'm opening up like the internet. This is just this one piece of software so you can rest easy knowing your kids aren't going to be able to like hop onto YouTube or start like searching the internet or all sorts of other crazy stuff on the Skylight calendar. It's just those key features that are there and they're not going to be able to leave the calendar to go into other apps as well.
Megan:
Now, if you want to see this in action. I am doing a separate training that is going to be out on my YouTube channel where you're going to visually see exactly how I use my Skylight calendar. Because you're on the podcast I'm talking about it. You can capture a little bit what's going on in your head, but I'm going to break down a step-by-step how I use this. And for those of you that are in the top program already, don't worry, I'm going to add it inside of your course portal if you want to check this out as well. So you can find my YouTube channel Again. Just search Work Life Harmony Same name here as the podcast. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and you'll be able to grab that kind of training as well. So again, I can't recommend this enough.
Megan:
I have had over dozens of tools, apps et cetera that I have tested and tried over the years, looking for a digital solution that I could get behind for a family communication center, and honestly, I've never found one until now. So I happily display our Skylight calendar in our kitchen and it has been a tremendous help in really lightening the mental load aspect of feeling like I am in constant orchestration mode. It gets all of that out of my head and onto our family communication center, which then empowers everybody that I live with to take ownership of their stuff. So, again, if you want to see what they look like they're beautiful you can have them mounted as a frame mode that's what we're doing or you can actually hang them directly on your wall or on the side of your refrigerator, wherever you choose to do it. Just go to skylightframecom. You'll be able to see them there, and if you decide that you are in love with it as much as I am, you can get 15% off using the coupon code HARMONY. So happy. Family Communication Center. Planning center, landing.
Megan:
Getting on top of all things time management, organization and productivity doesn't have to stop just because this episode is over. If you are feeling overwhelmed, your calendar's out of control or you're just running in a race that will never end in terms of your to-do list, I have great news for you. I have an app in both the App Store and Google Play called the Pink Feed, and it is chock full of small but incredibly powerful trainings to help you get out of overwhelm. It includes my signature Ditch the Overwhelm training and introduction to my time management framework, built specifically for women. In addition, you get access to my epic one notebook challenge and some tips and tricks on how to get your phone organized to minimize distractions. All of that is available for you right inside the Pink Bee app. So open up either your app store or Google Play, do a search on the word the Pink Bee all one word and download the app to get started today.
