277: Are You Missing Appointments? Tips for Better Calendar Management in Childcare!

In this episode of Child Care Conversations, Kate and Carrie chat about the real-life ups and downs of managing calendars, appointments, and communication in child care centers. They swap stories (including a scheduling mishap!), share practical tips for staying organized, and highlight how tools like automated reminders and AI assistants can save your sanity. 

They also discuss meeting families and staff where they are, whether that’s email, text, or social media. If you’re juggling a busy schedule, you’ll walk away with smart strategies and a little more confidence. You’ve totally got this!

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Transcript

Marie 00:00:03  Welcome to Child Care Conversations, the podcast where early childhood leaders like you get real world strategies, honest talk and a whole lot of support. Whether you're running one center or many. We're here to help you lead with confidence and clarity. This episode is brought to you by our summer partner Child Care Business Growth, your go to solution for filling spots, increasing revenue, and scaling your child care business without the burnout. We're proud to partner with a team that's as committed to your success as we are. Learn more at Childcare Business growth.com. Now let's get into today's conversation. One we think you're really going to love.

Kate 00:00:49  You have a calendar and you have people who are expecting you to be there. It could be because you are going to be giving a tour, which means that you want that family to come to your program, and this is a first impression. It could be an interview that you are now looking at. You're trying to hire staff, but sometimes it really it can be your plumber. It can be somebody who's just coming to to provide a service, whatever it is.

Kate 00:01:18  Double check your calendar a couple of times a week. Make sure you're checking your emails and show up on time.

Carrie 00:01:27  Yeah, Kate and I had a little bit of a a challenging morning today. we were going to tour an event space. It was supposed to be a final walkthrough before a special event. We arrived. The owner was there. He wasn't scheduled to be there. The supposed to be walking us through was not there when we got there. We got there a couple of minutes before we talked a little bit with the owner. It was like, well, she normally would be here by now and she wasn't. And so he texted, right. You know, at the time that we were supposed to have the walk through, didn't get a response 15 minutes later when we were like, still just chit chatting, was like, hang on, let me go into the office and call the person who was supposed to be doing the walk through. she picked up the phone and was like, I don't have a tour.

Carrie 00:02:27  and he was like, oh yeah, you do. They they drove in for this. They drove hours and hours. You need to be here. And, it it just did not go well. I love the event space, but I don't know if I can ever recommend the space again, because that is the event facilitator.

Kate 00:02:50  Okay, so let's let's so let's talk about this from a childcare standpoint. Okay. So here it is. The space itself is a beautiful space. We we really like the owner, but we were a little put off by the person who we interacted with. So if you're an owner or a director listening, we want you to think that through, right? So if you're the director and you are the very first impression a family or a potential employee gets, and you're a little late, you know, that that really that reflects on everybody. So let me just frame it from where I'm standing. And Carrie will probably jump into to me, it's all about respecting the time of the people who came to you.

Kate 00:03:36  if you are, if you have to drive in for something, use that drive as a time to calm yourself, to center yourself, to think about what can you do, how do you approach it with your with with the customer? Because, you know, you ought to be hugely embarrassed that it didn't make your calendar, or that you forgot, or you overslept or, you know, just shy of an emergency. You know, you weren't able to be there now you know. We all know things happen, and I get that. But. But even in that case, if there's an emergency, somebody should have access to your calendar so that if they show up and you're not there, they can go, oh, I see that you're on the calendar. I really probably should have called you. You know, in my case, somebody said, you know, Kate called and was in the emergency room, and I should have, should have known to call you because in her calendar has your name and your phone number.

Kate 00:04:25  Right.

Carrie 00:04:26  So, yeah, I think that's definitely a good. You know how to respond if you're the one who who missed the appointment. But I think what would be more helpful to the director? The owner who is listening to us is how do I prevent this from happening? And we can talk about it from both sides. When you're the person providing the service or when you're the one requesting the service. Right. So if it's with the plumber calling them and going, Just want to make sure or texting whatever using their app, whatever is the appropriate way. Reach out to them the day before your appointment and go. Just want to verify that we're still on for tomorrow at 2 p.m., because you don't want a plumber showing up at 1205 when kids are down for nap. That's not going to go over well.

Kate 00:05:17  Well, but what's interesting here is, I mean, we think about we often use doctors and dentists office, even, you know, other professionals that will send you a million reminders.

Kate 00:05:26  Right. And even as a podcast host, we have a system that everybody who's coming onto the podcast gets two different reminders. They get a reminder 24 hours before, and they get a reminder an hour before. And we still have guests who who don't make it on to that time slot for the interview. And we know that child care directors are busy. We totally get that. But, and that's that respect both ways, right? It'd be great if they called us and said or even shot us a text I know I'm supposed to be on in ten minutes, but I'm in the classroom, right?

Carrie 00:06:00  You totally would get that. And the same thing if you're the, you know, on the other side, right? So the director who is doing the tour and you could text a parent and say, hey, I've had a teacher have to go home sick. So can we push the tour back 25 minutes? If not, we're going to do kind of a self-guided tour. Well, you'll come in and check in with me in the room I'm covering, and I'll give you a little spiel, and then you go into the next classroom so you can do a tour.

Carrie 00:06:33  When you're covering a classroom, it's just a really weird kind of tour. Or at least I could. I presume most people can. It's not that hard. It's just kind of awkward.

Kate 00:06:42  Or, you know, maybe it's the one time you take a tour during nap time, right? Because you know that at least in a lot of states, the ratios are slightly adjusted while the kids are napping. And so you could do that or maybe during lunchtime, which are two times I would never go out of my way to have a tour because the kids are asleep or the kids are eating, and who the heck knows what happens when kids are eating? it makes for some interesting dynamic, but.

Carrie 00:07:11  Do you not like the sour cream covered nose? Do you not think that that's a good look? On a tour?

Kate 00:07:16  I think it's a great. It definitely gives the reflection of how the kids, kids are. But I know that sometimes I have teachers who get really stressed out because there's people coming through and they would want the kids to be perfect.

Kate 00:07:29  And so if the kids did not look perfect and had the sour cream all over their face, I would have teachers who would be way more stressed out about it than probably the parents walking through the tour, who would probably just think it was awesome. but not all of our teachers are going to feel that way, so. So, Carrie, what are some tools that you have used? in the olden days, before everybody had automated calendars. that might be helpful.

Carrie 00:07:54  Olden before text message. Olden before automation. I called people on the phone. I would use my fingers and push buttons, and then I would pick up something and put it next to my ear. so I am a paper calendar girl. it drives the rest of my family absolutely bananas because they're like, get into the 21st century, girl. Use your Google calendar, and I do. I take what I wrote in my paper calendar and I put it on my Google calendar about once a week.

Kate 00:08:30  But you know what? As a kinesthetic learner, that is great for you.

Kate 00:08:33  I'm glad that you're aware of your learning style and you are embracing it. you know, one of the things that I think is really interesting from paper calendar days and calling people that I think we sometimes forget, as somebody who prefers an email over almost every other form of communication is especially with our parents or our potential employees. How did they contact us and are we still contacting or are we forcing them to try to use our system? So if they're an Instagram family and they send you a message through Instagram to try to come check out your program and you've told them to email, where did you send them the reminder?

Carrie 00:09:10  Yeah, and I don't know how the automations work with messenger and stuff like that, but I know that they exist. and that people in our company can use them. It doesn't have to be you. You don't have to be the one who knows how to set up that automation. There can be someone else on your team who can set up that automation for you. And so you can, on Thursday afternoon, meet up with the person who can set up all the automations and be like, oh, okay, these are the tours I have between now and next Thursday.

Carrie 00:09:43  Would you please set up automatic reminders that go out two days in advance, one day in advance, and one hour in advance for these tours? And can you put an alert in my calendar 24 hours before the plumber is supposed to come, so that I can reach out to them in whatever way we reach out to that plumber to make sure that they've got it in their calendar, that they cannot come between 11:00 and 230. Like, it can come anytime during the day except those three hours.

Kate 00:10:13  Well, you know what, Craig? Kerry, I really appreciate you talking about that because that's a great segue to this quarter. Sponsor. So this quarter, our sponsor is child care business growth and the tools that they use in their platform through EQ mastery.com. And just the marketing services that they provide for child care centers has all of that. It has that calendar feature that people can go in and schedule their own calendar, their own tours. It has all of the reminders. It could have that reminders go through SMS.

Kate 00:10:46  The the reminders can go through email, and if I remember right, they've also got some that'll go in through some other platforms like WhatsApp or or whatever. I, you know, talk to them. We are not the experts. We just want to thank child care, business growth and their wonderful staff for being this quarter sponsor. So on that Kareem will flip it back to you.

Carrie 00:11:09  Okay. I think we haven't explained to folks why we know so much about what child care business growth does. they actually helped us build our new website. So we know that they do great website building that has automation elements into it so that people, again, can schedule their tours and you can have it set up. So they scheduled the tours, you get a reminder and they get a reminder. So both of you.

Kate 00:11:37  And not only that, we met them because we had clients who used them. So, it really has been full circle and we're just glad, glad to be able to partner with Nick, Jenna and the staff at Child Care Business Growth, or what you might hear us say sometimes.

Kate 00:11:53  CBG. So, Cory, we've talked about calling people. We've talked about keeping a paper calendar. What if you have a joint email box and like there's just one info or support or maybe everybody checks the director email. How could we possibly help things from getting lost there?

Carrie 00:12:12  Folder systems would be my first suggestion there. Or having, Not all email systems have it, but a lot of email systems have a sort of a tasks. You can assign tasks after you read emails. You can also, flag it. so I know in the Microsoft suite and in the Google suite, you could have different color stars. So when you read it, if it's a yellow star, it's for Yolanda. If it's a blue star, it's for Bruce. If it's a red star, it's for Rhoda. so that people can open up the inbox and go, oh, here are the emails that are relevant to me.

Kate 00:12:57  Absolutely. So one of the things that I think is really cool. if you haven't played with it and again, you're going to probably have to train it a little bit.

Kate 00:13:06  But if you are on the Google Suite or the Microsoft Suite, so therefore using Copilot or Gemini, the AI that's attached to that suite's, brain, for lack of a better term, you can actually go in. We use Google and I can actually go into Gemini and go, hey, can you check my inbox and tell me what I need to do? And so as long as it's still in my inbox and I haven't filed it, Gemini will automatically tell me what I need to do. I also have my Gemini scheduled in a way that it will catch if somebody says, oh yeah, I can meet 10:00 anything that looks like a time or a date, Gemini will tag for me so that I can make sure that I do have it in my calendar. So, some things that come in as a calendar invite, obviously, show up in my calendar. but it will also do that. One of my favorite tasks, and I am not really sure how to set it up. I just know that my phone does it is if I actually have home and work set in my Google maps, and I've correlated my Google calendar to appointments.

Kate 00:14:17  Google maps pays attention to the to the to the time it takes to get to places the travel time. And it will actually, if there's an accident, it will actually send me a notice that says, hey, you have to leave now if you want to be at your meeting on time. And I think that's really cool. I don't know how it knows to do that, but it does.

Carrie 00:14:37  Yeah. I mean, other, other navigation systems do that as well. I have Waze, which Google bought, but I still prefer the Waze interface. and I think Apple Maps can do it too. I'm sure the other navigation tools can. You just may have to go into YouTube University and set that up. Or, you know, watch a video on how to set that up. But I think this kind of thing really goes a long way to making it easier for you to be on time for your appointments, whether it's somebody coming into you or you going out to someone else, making sure you've confirmed it 24 hours in advance.

Carrie 00:15:19  Looking at what the road conditions are so that you know how long it's going to take you if you're going out and, you know, just communicating. Communicate people and communicate the way that people want you to communicate with them. If they reached out to you through messenger, then don't say, great, call the office. Don't send a message back through messenger saying, call me at 555123457 because that's they didn't want if they wanted to call you, they would have. They might have the feeling that one of my daughters has, which is if you really liked me, you would text me. they don't want to be on the phone.

Kate 00:16:01  Basically, our whole goal here is to help you go from overwhelm to I got this. And if your schedule is one of those things that you find overwhelming, we're trying to give you a little bit of a tool or 2 or 3. Hopefully we didn't give you so many that we overwhelmed you, but we know you absolutely got this. Carrie, what should they know if they really did get this?

Carrie 00:16:22  I don't know, maybe that they should share the information from this show with somebody else who would like to know.

Carrie 00:16:30  share it with the people on your team who might need to help you with automation. You know, let them know. This is why I'm doing it. These two crazy ladies said I needed to do this, and I was pretty sure you'd know how somebody in your world knows how to set this up. And it will make your life so much easier when you're not feeling anxious about, did I forget an appointment? Oh my gosh, I'm not ready for that tour. You couldn't have an alarm set 20 minutes before the tour to go put together. Make sure that the tour packet is ready.

Kate 00:17:04  Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Marie 00:17:07  Thanks for tuning in. We love bringing you real talk and fresh insight from the world of early childhood education. Be sure to follow us on social media to stay connected and catch all of the latest episodes. And if you're planning a conference, training, or special event. Kate and Carrie would love to speak to your audience. You can learn more about their keynote sessions and workshops at Kate and Carrico.

Marie 00:17:33  If you learned something today. Share the show and leave us a review below. We'll see you next time on Child Care Conversations.