Every August, the school sends home a calendar. I look at just carefully enough to convince myself I will remember it.
I check the first day of school, winter break, and maybe a couple of the obvious days off. Then I save the calendar somewhere and go back to work.
For years, that was basically my system.
Work would keep filling in. I would agree to a Thursday afternoon meeting because Thursday afternoon looked free, only to realize weeks later that school got out at 1:30 that day. Or there was no school. Or there was some half day I had absolutely seen before and somehow managed to forget.
I kept treating these as scheduling surprises even though, technically, almost none of them were surprises. The information had been sitting there the whole time. I just had one calendar telling me about work and another telling me about school, and I was relying on my own brain to catch the collision.
I do it differently now.
I keep school on its own calendar, alongside work, and I use AI to help me compare the two. At the beginning of the school year, I give it the school calendar and have it pull out the days that are likely to affect a normal workday. Then I have it look for conflicts and help me see where coverage is still fuzzy.
If you do not already keep a separate school calendar, start there. I would not put every school event directly on a work calendar, especially one controlled by an employer. A separate calendar called School lets you keep the details where they belong and turn it on beside Work whenever you need to see the overlap.
Put the days there that change the normal school schedule. When School and Work are both visible, the conflict is much harder to miss before you say yes to something.
If the only calendar you regularly look at is your work calendar, use a neutral private hold for the time you need to protect. “School coverage” or “Family coverage” is enough. Your coworkers do not need your child’s name or school details.
I want to create a separate calendar called School so I can see school schedule changes alongside my work commitments. Read the attached school calendar and identify every date when the normal school schedule changes in a way that could affect a working parent, including school closings, early dismissals, conferences, breaks and other schedule changes. Do not put these events on my work calendar. If you can create calendar events, prepare the School calendar entries for my review before adding them. If you cannot create calendar events, give me a clean chronological list I can add myself. Then compare those dates with my work calendar and, where useful, relevant work email. Do not move, cancel or change any work events. Show me the dates where a school schedule change creates a likely conflict with an existing work commitment. For each one, tell me the date, the school change, the work conflict, the coverage needed, the current plan and what is still unresolved. At the end, flag the conflicts I should deal with first.
| Date | School change | Work conflict | Coverage needed | Current plan | Still unresolved |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|