As a nanny, household manager, or family member — you know how hard it is to stay organized! Keeping a household running smoothly and on track can take a village, which is why we’ve dedicated this post to a few go-to organizational apps. These apps can provide a lot of assistance that could ease the stress of maintaining your household and keeping a steady schedule. Whether you’re a single parent trying to run several schedules, a household manager attempting to keep a fully staffed household running, or a nanny who wants to share their calendar with their work family; this blog may be for you!
We put a couple of feelers out and conducted a small survey across a couple of online nanny groups. The majority of nannies/household managers chose Google Calendar followed by Cozi, and then Teamup. Below we will touch base on these top three apps!
Google Calendar is a great, but very simple tool that many people often use to share their schedules with one another. This app was the most popular amongst the household employees who chose to participate in the survey and comes highly rated on both the iPhone and Android. With Google Calendar, you can: add events, set goals, track work schedules, meetings, school schedules, sports schedules and easily share them with several other people. There’s also the option to color code events, put on reminders, and set locations. It’s a very user-friendly app and would be sure to meet your basic needs! Some other feature that Google Calendar offers are:
- Different ways to view your calendar. Switch between, month, week, and day views.
- Events from Gmail – Flights, hotels, concerts, reservations, etc can be added automatically from your Gmail account
- To-dos: Reminders to creative and view to-dos alongside your event
- Add personal goals
- Quick event creation
- All your calendars are in one place — works with all calendars on your device including Exchange and iCloud.
Cozi has an app that is available on both Androids and iPhone. One app is a family organizer and the other is a shared calendar; we’re going to take a look at the family organizer. It’s highly rated on both phones at a 4.5 on the Iphone and a 4.4 on the Android. It’s an amazing app that came in as being the second most popular and allows more options than the Google Calendar. (Also, a huge plus, it allows the sharing of the calendars!) As the they advertise Cozi “helps you focus on the family”.
A couple of things that stood out while doing some research on Cosi were: creating a family calendar and assigning family members to events, creating and emailing shopping lists, being able to keep a daily journal, adding sticky notes, and being able to add/store recipes. The more we’ve played around this app, the more it’s become a stellar option for very busy households–especially if you’d like to keep a ton of your daily needs in one place. Being able to add a sticky note is quite a thoughtful tool that they incorporated! It’s a great way to add a specific detail or reminder to an event that has already been logged. We also know how hard it can be to have recipes to pull up and to keep track of staple ingredients that you want in your house. This is another awesome feature that Cosi offers! With Cozi you can manage hectic schedules with many more tools from this app that include:
- Creating a family calendar and assigning family members to events
- Syncing your schedule across devices to keep your family/household managers up to date
- Integrating your shared calendar events
- Add to-dos with due dates and reminders
- Create and e-mail shopping lists
- Keep a daily journal/log
- Store and share your favorite recipes
- Quick-add recipe ingredients to a shopping list
- Personalize the app with your own background photos
- Track birthdays
- Add “sticky notes” to any day
- Check daily weather forecasts
- Set your own background music
- Export your data as an e-mail
Teamup was another app that was an option in the survey. While not as popular as Google Calendar or Cozi, it still had enough attention to give it a try. Teamup is a new app for the Iphone with very few ratings leaving it at a 3.6, but has a higher rating on the Androids at 4.3. Teamup is similar to Google Calendar in which is allows you to use it in such a way that you can sync it with other users. One thing that is unique to Teamup is that you don’t need a user account, all you need is a calendar key or Web URL. A couple of other things that stood out specifically for this app is the option to prevent double booking (household management can get busy!), it’s centrally managed by the calendar administrator (great for a parent or household manager that runs a fully staff or variety of schedules for children), offline access, and time zone support. Outside of some of unique things that have been listed, Teamup is a “flexible, but innovative” app that allows a variety of feature:
- Color-coded events
- Synchronization with other users of the same group calendar
- Custom access permissions for individual users
- Centrally managed by calendar administrator
- Display images in event details
- Link to location
- Prevent double booking, if needed
- Upload images and files (if you pay!)
- Toggle calendars and change views in sidebar
- Time zone support
- Dashboard for multiple calendar links
- Offline access
- Even more features available in the web version: notification emails, daily agenda, iCalendar feeds, import, export, etc..
After collecting some brief data from several groups of nannies/household employee, we have found the mentioned to be the most effective. We researched them ourselves and to say that each apps has its pros and cons! Google Calendar seems to be a great tool for a household that needs to maintain a simple schedule, while Cosi or Teamup may be more ideal for a busier household (fully staffed, several children, etc..). We hope that this little article will put a dent in your stressors for trying to keep an organized household!
Written by: Ashley Wainwright
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