The best electronic planning tools for moms
Being a mom is a busy job. Using the right tools can help you go from a hot mess to cool, calm, and collected. Find out the best electronic planning tools for moms to support you in your busy life.
We all talk often about how moms wear all the hats. From chef, to taxi driver, to doctor, to everything else.
We’ve got to find ways to keep it all organized.
Planning is one of the pillars of the planned, prepped, and productive brand because learning to manage your mealtimes better and finding more peace comes down to a little planning.
I used to go baack and forth between whether or not paper or electronic planning was best. The conclusion I came to is that they are both good, and both work for certain things.
ULTIMATELY I’m obsessed with my custom paper planner and probably 75% of my planning occurs there.
BUT there are times that electronic tools come in clutch so I wanted to share some of my favorites with you today.
Keep in mind that I’m sharing the tools that work for me, for my way of thinking, for my habits, and my goals.
The thing about planning is that it CAN work for everyone, but there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution because we’re all in different phases with different goals.
One of my favorite quotes about goals is from alice in wonderland.
“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”
So the first thing to do is to determine what you need your planning tools to do for you. Then, hopefully, you can find which of these tools will meet your needs best.
Because I’m generally a paper planner I like to use web tools that support me in my goals and can come in clutch when I don’t have my planner on me. Also, one of the biggest drawbacks to paper planners is that they are really only as helpful as you allow them to be. Meaning, my paper planner can’t send a push-notification to my phone to remind me about my doctor’s appointment, I have to look at it frequently. Let’s dig into the best electronic planning tools for moms. These are the tools I love most and how I use them as a mom and small business owner.
The best electronic planning tools for moms
Evernote
Evernote is my favorite. Evernote is not new, and many people think it hasn’t kept up well with other planning options out there, but I don’t care. I’m loyal through and through. I will admit that the design isn’t nearly as beautiful or streamlined as other systems, but I continue to use it because I LOVE the way it works.
Evernote is a note-taking app.
What I love most about it is it reminds me of taking notes in a basic notebook.
As a person who has done the majority of her planning in a notebook for the past 10 years this is super appealing!
You can set up different notebooks and then write notes in each of the notebooks.
So as an example in my evernote I have a personal notebook, a blog projects notebook, a recipes notebook, a home projects notebook. You name it.
You can clip things from the web to save them for later, and all of your notebooks are searchable.
Honestly the biggest reason that I love evernote is that I’m not naturally organized. I know that’s a little unique for a planning and productivity podcaster and blogger, but I think that makes me all the more useful to you. I’ve had to work my booty off to find systems that work for me because it’s not intuitive.
So my evernote is only really as organized as it needs to be. There’s loads of random notes in there and I write anything I need to remember for later and put it in the right notebook, but other than that I don’t even NEED to be super organized because I can easily search and find whatever I need at a later date.
Evernote is most effective for keeping track of all of the zillions of things and projects going on in your mom brain all of the time.
It’s not my go-to tool for to-do lists or scheduling though, so let’s dig into some tools that I like better for those things.
Todoist
Todoist is the bomb. I honestly don’t use it as frequently anymore because I do rely so heavily on my paper planner, but if you want to go fully digital with your planning this tool is for you. It’s one of the very best electronic planning tools for moms out there.
Todoist is the best app for getting stuff done.
You can create tasks, categories of tasks, write notes about tasks, and make the tasks recurring (meaning you can get a reminder every Tuesday that it’s bathroom cleaning day. Or maybe you don’t want to do that…haha).
One really cool thing about to-doist is that you can link your tasks to google calendar (another wonderful tool) and have all of your tasks pop-up as
To-doist is great to set it and forget it and create routines and reminders of things you want to make a habit.
One thing I want to mention about planning is that you CAN have too much of a good thing. So if you can make something a routine or habit that you DON’T need a planner for, that’s better. But sometimes we need tools to help us create the habit.
…and todoist is wonderful for that!
Amazon Lists
Some of these next tools are so basic that I was almost embarrassed to put them down, but sometimes simple is best!
I love using my amazon echo to give me reminders or make grocery lists. The reason I love it so much is that it allows me to disconnect from my phone, but I still don’t forget important things. One of the biggest reasons that I’m so big on paper planning is because I feel so strongly that we weren’t meant to live connected to our devices.
But let’s be honest, sometimes the bells and whistles of the tools on our phones can be really enticing and paper can’t accomplish them.
Enter amazon alexa. I can be reminded of things without getting sucked into the vortex that is my phone.
Google Calendar
This is another one of those tools that seems obvious, but I’m still giving it a mention.
Google calendar is my favorite for collaboration.
In general, my paper planner works out just fine for me, but for collaborative things it’s best to put them into a google calendar.
I absolutely loved google calendar when my husband was in school because I could easily check it to see if he had extra meetings or things I had forgotten about.
Google Web Tools
This is another one of the obvious ones, but I love google sheets and google docs. Again, these are super convenient for shared documents. I do budgeting using google sheets and any other tasks that I need to collaborate with my husband.
If you have older kids with their own devices you could totally use google calendar and google sheets to collaborate on projects with them too!
Runner-up: Trello
A lot of moms and business owners love trello for planning so it had to make the list of electronic planning tools for moms. Like Todist, it can link to your google calendar and it is super feature rich. It’s similar to evernote in that you can create different boards (which are like notebooks) and cards (which are like individual notes). It’s pretty cool in that you can make different views and overall it’s a more visually pleasant experience then evernote.
It gets an honorable mention from me simply because despite having all the features I need, I can’t seem to stick to it. Maybe it’s habit, or just something about the other programs I use working better, but it’s definitely worth checking out.
Others awesome electronic tools for moms:
I had two other apps I wanted to talk about that didn’t necessarily fit perfectly into planning, but I find them extremely useful so I thought I’d bring them up anyway.
Calendly
The first is calendly. Calendly is a scheduling system that allows you to input your availability and then lets others make appointments with you based on your availability. It’s awesome because it converts time zones, and links with zoom, google calendar, and other programs to make scheduling a seamless experience. I don’t know about you but the back and forth of scheduling meetings or appointments drives me crazy, but calendly takes out so much of the headache.
I use it to schedule podcast interviews, but there are endless uses and it could be helpful even to set up play dates, church or pta meetings, or anything else!
Sofi Banking
For finances and banking it took me years to find a system that works for me. I tried wave and other budgeting apps and ultimately there was just too much bookkeeping and I’d stop keeping up.
Enter SoFi banking.
I hesitated to put this on here since it would involve you getting a new bank account, but it will also take two seconds, you can do it all online, and you will love it so it’s worth it.
SoFi is an online bank, but the thing that has me sold on them for life is a feature their bank account has called vaults.
Vaults allow you to segment your money into different “folders” for better organization.
So instead of having your savings account all in one giant pot you can make a folder for vacations, a folder for your emergency fund, a folder for home projects, etc…
This literally is the only thing that has worked for me to budget.
Simply because I can easily see where all of the money I have needs to go.
Before if I saw a bundh of money in the checking account I would just spend it. Then I would try to allocate it correctly later, but I honestly just didn’t have a good idea of what money was needed where.
Now I can move our money to the appropriate vault when we get paid and I know exactly how much money I have to spend in each category.
It’s basically like an electronic version of an envelope system.
Sofi just barely added a credit card as well (which was the only thing it was missing) so I can do my weekly spending on the credit card, and then pay off the credit card from the correct vaults.
It’s seriously amazing.
So if traditional budgets haven’t worked for you and you need something easy, check out SoFi!
Alright, I hope you found some new tools you might want to try for keeping all of your many mom hats on straight. I know I didn’t cover everything you might need, but I hope I covered several bases of apps and programs you need to organize your life as a mom.
What do you think? What are your favorite electronic tools? Are there any tools you want to know more about it or you wish I would have covered here? Let me know!
Also are you looking for great paper tools to go along with the best electronic planning tools for moms? Check out last week’s episode about choosing a planner that is right for you!
