As with most in the education field, my life is packed with things to do on a daily basis. I am a full time Spanish Teacher, a football coach (much more goes into this than just showing up for practice 2 hours a day), and a father to an 11 month old little girl who has Down syndrome. As a result of her special needs, this creates various appointments that I need to be at that parents of typical children do not have to go to.

As a way to keep my life and workflow organized, I use a few different tools.

My favorite organization tool that I just recently started using is Google Calendar. What I love about Google Calendar is that it can sync up with my iPhone so that I can add to it that way. You can also combine several calendars into one spot. I have one for home, one that has important deadlines for my graduate courses, one that has important work appointments/deadlines, one for football, and finally one for all of my daughter’s upcoming medical visits and therapy treatments. My favorite feature that Google Calendar offers is that you can share it with other people and they can add events to it as well. Basically my wife knows that if there is something that I need to show up to and she doesn’t put it on the calendar, that she shouldn’t expect me to show up because I’m probably doing something else. It has really streamlined our communication on who needs to be where.

(Courtesy of Google.com)

These are just a few of the tools that I use to manage my life and to keep the workflow moving. It saves me time in having to think about what tasks need to get done when my tools can tell me what I need to do and where I need to be.