Tools to Increase Your Family Productivity

Personal productivity is a popular topic. Everyone wants to do more in less time.

Yet many of us don’t spend most of our life as independent individuals. We are part of a committed relationship, often with children. A family. We share meals, beds and the television remote. We also share family responsibilities, events to attend, bank accounts, documents, and more.

Even those that are highly productive at work can find themselves overwhelmed and underwater with life at home. Fortunately, a few simple tools can bring things back under control.

Here are five tools our family has used for many years to keep things confidently and calmingly moving in our home life.

Calendar

Whether it’s a color-coded paper calendar on the fridge or something online, this is a must. Everyone needs to know the schedule; who is where, and where each person needs to be. In our family, we all have Gmail accounts and share our Google calendars.

Tips

• Plan Regularly. My wife and I spend an hour each Saturday planning for the week ahead. We discuss scheduled events, workouts and meals. Everything goes on the calendar. Not in stone, and things change, but we have a starting plan.
• Review Together. During our Sunday night family dinner, we do a quick verbal review of the upcoming week. This keeps us in sync and also serves to remind our daughters to let us know what they forgot to tell us earlier.
• Admin Access for Mom & Dad. My wife and I can both create items on our daughters’ calendars. We learned that asking them to add events wasn’t always successful.
• When in Doubt, Add it. We don’t wait until an event is confirmed before we add it to the calendar. We’d rather everyone be aware of scheduled items that could occur. Our convention is to preface an unconfirmed event title with “TBD:”.

Files

There are school papers to review, documents to create, forms to print. Avoid emailing them back and forth, and put them in a well-defined location. We use Dropbox. (If my daughters ask me to do something with a file they emailed me, I will respond, “Sure, as soon as you put it in Dropbox.”)

Tips

• Create a Shared Folder for Just Mom and Dad. Your kids need not see everything you are working on together. It may be things that are sensitive or would clutter up the family shared folder.
• Create a Structure for Shared Files. We share all family items under the folder named “Family”. Under Family, we have one folder per family member. Files in each person’s folder are primarily related to that family member. Finally, a General subfolder is for information useful for all of our family.
• Use Functional Folder Names. Many of the files we share are for review or to print. We create folders “To Review” and “To Print” to make them easy to find.
• Move Things to Cabinet when Appropriate. Once a file is is no longer active (it’s been reviewed, or printed), we typically move it to our cabinet (see the following section “Cabinet”) and delete it from Dropbox. This keeps Dropbox tidy, and our cabinet as the single source of information.

Passwords

Whether it’s financial accounts, airline mileage programs or any of a myriad of accounts you share with your spouse or children, a password manager is a must. We use LastPass, but there are excellent alternatives.

Tips

• Create a Shared Folder for Just Mom and Dad. Any password placed into this folder gives us both access. We don’t share everything, but we share a lot (currently there are 122 credentials in this shared folder).
• Create a Shared Folder for Each Child. No, don’t expect your child to put their Instagram password here. This folder will change (and shrink) over time, but with our youngest daughter we’ve had her college property management account, her Soul Cycle account, and Honda Service account here.
• Commit. Anytime you need access to an online site but don’t have the password, don’t ask your spouse to text you. Ask her to put it in your password manager in the shared folder.

A password manager can help in fraud prevention and response. Prevention, by encouraging you to use more complicated passwords (you don’t have to remember them). Response, as you can quickly search for any password to find out if you re-used it anywhere. (You didn’t, but let’s just say you had a friend that did.)

Cabinet

Receipt for that Valentine’s Day sweater? Got it. Manual for the Proton X200? Yep. Favorite recipe for Honey Glazed Chicken? Looking at it.

We are nearly paperless as we move almost everything into Evernote. My wife and I have a shared Notebook where we store all the documents and notes we believe either of us might need to access.

Tips

• Create a Shared Notebook. We named ours Osborn Cabinet. Both parents should have access to view and create content. By convention, we expect any item in here has been curated (tagged, and properly named).
• Use a Defined Tag System. The text search in Evernote is fantastic and often sufficient. Tags provide a way to narrow down the results, but it requires developing a convention and being consistent. We have a defined tag hierarchy in Evernote that helps us keep things tidy and effective.
• Scan Regularly. We scan all our paper documents right into Evernote with a Fujitsu scanner. We love it. But it only works when we scan. We have much less success when the paper stack is next to the scanner, no matter how close we place it.
• Tag and Triage Consistently. Our scanned documents go into a shared folder named Scanned. From there we change the document name and add tags, then move them to our shared notebook. Scanning but not tagging can leave you many hours of work ahead. You won’t like it. I don’t, either. It’s much better to spend 30 minutes a week tagging than to let things get out of hand. If you do get behind, try 10 minutes a day instead of a 4-hour marathon.

Task List

I was an early adopter of Asana. I loved the simplicity, speed and ease of use. Sadly, they’ve continued to add confusing features and muddle up the UI. But we have years of history, and we make it work for us.

We all forget to do some things our spouse has asked us to do. (When you are in the midst of rewiring a circuit and your spouse asks you to pick up some blue pens at the stationery store, odds go way up you will forget. Hypothetically, of course.) Adding items to a task manager, assigning them, and setting a due date will help you both take care of those items.

Tips

• Use Due Dates. If known, create a due date. Even if it’s just a checkpoint. The due date will serve as an automated reminder.
• Forward Emails. Many times an email arrives with some action required. If you’re not ready to advance, what do you do? Leave it in your inbox. Ugh. Instead, forward it to your task system, where it will create a task for you. Then you can archive that email and keep your inbox clean.
• Review Regularly. It’s best to not let your life be run by whatever is due that day. Be proactive and look at what’s coming up. Weekly, my wife and I review tasks due in the next 30 days, as well as tasks with no due date assigned.
• Keep it Human. We try to tell each other before we create an Asana item assigned to the other person. We don’t want to eliminate dialog, nor make our relationship feel like a reporting structure.

You Got This!

Don’t try to implement all of these at once. You’ll only frustrate yourself and your family. Pick one and become familiar with it. Once comfortable, introduce it to your partner. Invite him, or her, to help it succeed and give feedback. Celebrate your wins and stay the course; things will only get better.