Don't over-complicate ✍️
As our children grow, we’ve been using visual planners to help them keep track of upcoming activities. My girlfriend has put together many great monthly planners, manually created in PowerPoint. They look fantastic; however, I can't help but think about the time she’s invested in making each one. Naturally, my “I know an app for that” mindset kicked in, and I began to consider if there was a quicker, easier way to achieve the same result.
The main feature of these calendars is that they show each month with icons, so everyone can see what’s planned for a given day at a glance. Having tested out many apps, calendars, and tools, I thought Notion might be the perfect fit. Notion offers a calendar view where you can use filters to see entries specific to each child, while also showing a visual for each entry. For example, my son could see a football icon next to his soccer practice.
Playing around in Notion to set up these entries was fun—until I ran into a few issues. Notion doesn’t offer real support for recurring tasks, nor does it provide a straightforward way to print each child's calendar.
And that’s exactly what we need:
A printed view of all activities, including recurring ones.
At this point, I thought I'd give Notion Calendar another try. Unfortunately, it still didn’t bring me closer to a practical solution.
All this experimenting got me thinking about our current family scheduling setup. We already add everything to Apple Calendar, so why complicate things by adding extra tools?
In the end, creating a calendar for each child in Apple Calendar and using emojis for each activity was simple and effective. This way, we can filter by each child and print a monthly view if needed.
The takeaway: While I enjoyed exploring Notion and its calendar features, I ultimately lost time discovering that our solution already existed.
Don’t over-complicate things.