As a busy mom, how do you manage your time to make sure you cover everything in a day? These time management tools and apps might come in handy for you.

As a mom, your time is practically fully occupied the moment you wake up in the morning. There are kids to take care of, spouse to take care of, breakfast to prepare, house to clean, lunch, dinner…you get the picture.
You barely have enough time to catch a breath. It gets worse when you are working from home. The disruptions and distractions alone can drive you crazy. It takes a lot of effort to get some work done, with kids running a ring of chaos around you. Nevertheless, some supermoms still do it with so much ease that you would think they were born to do this. What’s their secret? Time management. If you manage your time well, you can have an easy life as a busy mom. You may even have some time for yourself! To manage life easily as a busy mom, here are some tools and apps to help you get started.

Calendar tool

Every mom always keeps track of the dates for so several reasons. Every other member of the family expects mom to know the date all the time. In managing time, having a calendar tool/app does much more than tell your kids the day on a whim. It helps you synchronize your days and plan everything the right way. For instance, the CalenGoo application contains to-do lists and allows you to integrate everything with your emails and contacts. You never have to worry about forgetting ever again.

Task management application

There is an application called Toodledo that is multifunctional, allowing you to organize your life easily. There is so much you can do with this application. For instance, you can create custom listings, write short notes and track your daily habits. It also gives you the capacity to collaborate with your friends and family about the milestones you set to accomplish and how you are doing it.

Meal planners

Since you are busy working from home, you might not have enough time to keep researching the kind of meals you want to cook with your family. That is where a meal planner app comes in. It saves you the time to research what to cook by giving you numerous different options. The good thing is that most of the meals in the planner are nutritionally correct with balanced diets and recipes on how to prepare them. You will be able to find a meal to cook and get going within a very short period.

An application such as Yummly contains an assortment of meals in various cuisines across the world. With over 1 million choices, you can never lack something to prepare with your family.

We also love Hello Fresh! We used them for my entire pregnancy and for the first 3 months after. It was cut and dry – meaning here are 4 meals, which one do you want tonight? haha It helped us just know what our options were and we really enjoyed making them together!

Planners

How do you plan your life as a busy mom? How do you keep track of everything happening around you and still get work done? A planner comes to help you plan practically everything in your life. You can schedule meetings, keep track of something you want to do and check off stuff as you hit these milestones.

The good thing about an event planner is that it offers you the capacity to create prompts on different tasks. This ensures that you will never find yourself missing something just because you forgot. And because you can easily sync with emails and other applications, you get notifications when the event is due. A good event planner you can use as a busy mom is mylifeorganized.

Communication tools

When working from home, you will need tools to communicate with your team members and to stay on top of things. There are numerous free communication tools you can use online. The choice of the tool to use depends on the capacity of the tool and your internet connection.

For instance, some communication tools (especially the ones that allow video calls) demand that you have a very good and stable internet connection to operate optimally. The tool you choose should be reliable and can allow you to seamlessly sync with other members and other projects.
A tool like Slack does much more than just being a communication tool. It’s sort of a corroborative tool where you get to work together as a team on a project. Here, you can communicate and share links and material related to the project you are handling. This makes it effortless to collaborate and manage a lot of the project’s aspect as a team, albeit working remotely.

File saving and sharing tools

How do you normally send large files that your email cannot accommodate? If you are using Gmail, Google provides the option of sharing files using Google drive. However, if the recipient does not have a Gmail account, they might be restricted to ‘view’ status only. If you are sending (or receiving a large number of files), you might need to use a tool designed specifically for that purpose.

Dropbox is an amazing tool for this purpose. You can save a lot of files and share them easily with your colleagues. If your colleagues have registered accounts on Dropbox as well, they can be able to work collaboratively on these files without the need to download them.

Time and productivity tracking tools

Although many companies are coming up with their system of managing and tracking what their employees are doing remotely, some tools have proven to be quite effective in this regard. A tool like Toggl, for instance, does a great job of analyzing and offering you an overview of how you have been spending your time in a day.

When using Toggl, you create a project and milestones for this project. Then once you start working, you start the timer on Toggl. At the end of the day, you can be able to download reports and find out how you have been spending your time during that day. The app keeps track of how you spend your time. If you integrate the app with other software, you get added features, such as automated sending of invoices based on the reports you generate.