Keeping up with regular maintenance saves money, energy, and time. Having concentrated on regular maintenance of my health these past two weeks, I am so thankful to have escaped illness. I did get a mild cold, but no fever, chills, or other flu symptoms.

As Paul is still recovering, we will wait until full healing before changing our air filters and giving our home a good cleaning. In keeping up with regular maintenance on our home, we can prevent some major repairs and expenses.

Continuing to schedule 2014 using the Planning for Success series from last year ^[2], I am adding these regular maintenance tasks to our calendar:

19. Schedule Annual Home Maintenance: Planning for Success – Day 7 ^[3]

Keeping up with our termite inspection, pressure washing, and heating and air conditioning maintenance, I select months where the contracts renew or where the service is most needed to remind me to make the call to have these services performed.

20. Check Light Bulbs and Air Filters: Planning for Success – Day 21 ^[4]

With a year’s worth of air filters housed in our garage from a great sale where I found the filters $.59 each, I tend to forget that the filters need to be changed. By adding this maintenance item to our calendar toward the end of the month, I remember to ask Paul to change them out when he checks for burned out light bulbs.

21. Purchase Batteries: Planning for Success – Day 14 ^[5]

With daylight savings time on our calendar ^[6], I make a note about 2 weeks prior to look for sales on batteries. We then store these batteries in their original container.

Please be very careful with 9-volt batteries as storing them in a group where the positives and negatives could touch each other could start a fire as it did in the embedded video.

22. Face Vehicle Maintenance: Planning for Success – Day 30 ^[7]

Our mechanic sees our vehicles at least 4 times a year for regular oil changes. During these visits, he checks our vehicles and alerts us to any major maintenance services that need to occur.

With the advanced warning, we are able to save for those costs and schedule a date before getting stranded by a non-working vehicle.

23. Address Technology: Planning for Success – Day 28 ^[8]

To protect my files, I schedule regular updates, backups, and cleanup. Though I have an on-going project to consolidate all my documents into two locations, I do keep backups. Last year Paul purchased a terabyte hard drive for me to backup Using Time Wisely and my computer and laptop files.

If something should happen to my hosting site, I have a backup which gives me peace of mind. Having lost documents in the past, I learned and now have a backup system.

In taking care of our home, vehicles, and computers, we schedule regular maintenance. As life happens and I would forget to do these items, I add them to the calendar to jog my memory to save us money, energy, and time.

As you continue scheduling 2014, remind yourself of regular maintenance tasks to save you money from big problems, energy from hurrying to find a solution, and time waiting for a problem to get fixed. Happy scheduling!

Question: What regular maintenance items are you adding to your calendar?