The Business of Being a Mom: Let Technology Help You

The Business of Being a Mom: Let Technology Help You

iPhone MomThis is a guest post from Lauren Rothlisberger, the author of Evernote for Moms.

We just celebrated Mother’s Day and since I have young kids I was lucky enough to get lots of school-made gifts sent home. My five year old put that her favorite thing I do for her is “let her watch a TV show after dinner.” Note she did not say, take care of her when she is sick, feed her dinner, or help her with her clothes every morning, nope TV. Sweet huh? Of all the stuff that goes into running my household that is what she loves the most. Clearly her world is pretty self-centered, as any self-respecting five year olds should be, and I am good with that. But it did get me thinking about the business of being a Mom.

It turns out that Moms are good at a lot of things (other than pressing the power button) and if they aren’t at first they improve out of pure necessity. Moms (no matter how free-spirited and relaxed) create systems and multi-task possibly better than some Fortune 500 CEOs. When I had my first baby.. well it was a mess. It took 2 hours to just get an 8lb baby out of the door. Then, like most Moms, I figured out systems and put them in place. Now I get three kids, five and under, dressed, fed and ready to leave every morning in less than an hour. My point being, that putting systems in place is something we know how to do. Unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of Moms enhance their systems by leveraging technology. Your house is a small business and we know that any business now would be crazy not to take advantage of the technology available.

There are many different technology tools out there, but I want to focus on going paperless with Evernote. I encourage you to put new systems in place, for example spend 10 minutes every Saturday scanning in anything in your scan pile.

Here are just a few examples of ways to use Evernote:

Important Documents
Like any business the flow of “business” related paperwork is pretty high. Bank statements, insurance, warranties, mortgages, taxes, birth certificates important receipts and kids artwork are just the first things that come to mind.

Medical Information
Running a home, means you need to have medical information on hand. Keep shot records, allergy lists and medication information for those unexpected medical moments.

Travel Planning
A family vacation is no simple task. You must find a place to stay, make travel plans and keep track of the paperwork. Not to mention the work to get everyone out the door. I keep all my lists with everything we need to get packed in Evernote. It is so easy to share notes I can send them over to my husband too.

Home/Property Management
Managing your home or multiple homes is a lot of work. However, there are massive amounts of time to be saved by tracking all your home information through a paperless system. You can put warranty info, appliance info, leases, paperwork, pictures, and repair contacts all in Evernote. This allows you to easily and promptly deal with any home situation that occurs.

Kids’ Activities Schedules
Kids should come with their own secretaries. Keeping up with their back and forth is exhausting. School schedules, sports information are all saved in Evernote. That way no matter where I am I can reference these events that we need to work around.

Businesses measure success by profit. I think in our business time is the profit. More time gained is less time stressed and freedom to be with our families.

Lauren Rothlisberger is a Mom to three girls and an Army wife who bounces around the country. In 2007 she went paperless and has never looked back. She wrote an ebook called “Evernote for Moms.” It can be found at on Amazon.

 

(Photo by cogdogblog)

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

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