Dear FlyLady,

We have had our FlyLady Calendar for precisely three days and it has already become a lifesaver.

My husband and I work very opposite schedules, I’m a microbiologist who goes to work at 6:30 am and he’s a rock musician that often does not make it to bed until 5:30am. Until recently we have made this work by enjoying our days off together and the few evenings that we are both home and awake (absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?), but this year my husband has started playing out more and more, so much so that we we often joke that our new definition of a “hot date” was when I would watch him play from across a crowded bar.

We would make vague plans to have an evening at home just for “family time” with the dog but gigs and rehearsals, book clubs, company, work and vet appointments just kept getting in the way and we never seemed to actually get as far as having “us time” and couldn’t quite figure out why.

Your calendar arrived last Friday, but we spent the weekend driving from one gig to another so it was Monday before I got to sit down with it. I took both of our cell phones and wrote down all of the scheduled appointments for the rest of 2014.

Once we stepped back from the calendar the reason we have been feeling so discombobulated and generally exhausted was very clear: for the month of September, we have only two days (that’s 6.6% of the month) without a single event planned…and this month is an easy one compared to the last three! We immediately blocked those two days out just for us and then went through the rest of the year (November and December are only half full at the moment) and picked out one day every other week and put a big “X” through it so we know not to schedule anything on that day.

We are excited to have a very visual way to remember “us time”, if we had not taken the time to sync our calendars into one written calendar we would never have seen so clearly that our schedules were out of hand. Thanks to your calendar we now know we need to step things back a little and we have a plan for reclaiming our lives…thank you!

Kristi and Nick

PS. We love our stickers that came with the sticker kit but you don’t have any “Gig” stickers (for some reason this actually surprised me) so we had to buy some guitar stickers…every time I see them I smile and get all “gooey” because they remind me of Nick.