Getting Organized for Summer with some Great Apps (and other tools)!

Since we have moved (and are still not unpacked completely 6 months later), I have been making a concerted effort to get myself and the family organized.

I have managed to organize the van, the boys’ room, and the boys’ playroom. I am now working on the rest of my life! One thing I have been focusing on is organizing appointments, schedules, and keeping all of our family commitments straight.

I go back and forth between using a paper calendar and the Google calendar on my iPhone. Now that I have the iPad, I am going to convert to 100% online. I thought that I would share some of my favorite productivity/organization/making family life easier tools:

1) I tried out the ARC notebook from Staples awhile ago for keeping all of my work lists and brainstorming organized. While I don’t use a paper calendar, I am a pen and paper person when it comes to brainstorming and list-making for work. I love that the ARC agenda has refillable sheets and it’s small enough to throw into my purse. It has customizable tabs and nice fluorescent post it tags to make sure I don’t miss important notes!

2) I found the Action Method app recently, and I LOVE it for organizing work or family projects. You can create different projects, give them due dates, choose to focus on them, and even delegate projects or tasks to others. You can have multiple users with access to the projects, which makes it great for team work.

3) I LOVE the Home Routines app (I use it on both my iPhone and my iPad) for housework. It’s very user friendly, and I love that it allows you to customize morning and evening tasks and your focus rooms for each week. The app chooses one “zone” each week to focus on. You check off each task as you go, and you get a nice gold star when the zone is finished. This app definitely keeps me on top of household chores—God knows I definitely need someone to!

4) Tripit—For those of you with summer travel plans (or travel plans in general), Tripit is AWESOME! It scans all of your incoming travel-related emails (i.e. airline confirmations, train ticket purchases, and hotel reservations), and starts an itinerary for you. I relied on this app when we went to Jekyll Island, and I was so happy to find that it kept everything nice and neat. I didn’t have to print out confirmations for anything. When we arrived at the rental car counter, instead of scanning my email for the confirmation email, I could pull up the info instantly on Tripit.

5) Evernote and Skitch—For those of you that haven’t heard of Evernote, it’s a great app for both iPhone and iPad that helps you group all of your information into notebooks. For example, if you have a recipe you want to save for later, you can snap a photo of it and file it into a Notebook. It’s very cool (and addicting!). Skitch is a new app that works in conjunction with Evernote. Skitch allows you to take a screen grab of a web page you are surfing and save it to a notebook.