{"id":229,"date":"2009-05-29T08:50:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T12:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=229"},"modified":"2009-05-29T08:50:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-29T12:50:00","slug":"managing-the-household","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/managing-the-household\/","title":{"rendered":"Managing the Household"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like many modern households, we&#8217;re managing a lot of moving pieces.\u00a0 Three kids w\/ activities, brother &amp; family living nearby, grandparent visits, travel &#8212; it adds up to some &#8220;complexity&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>We depend on a number of technologies to make it all work.\u00a0 I&#8217;m pretty technical and have been labeled a geek.\u00a0 Kellie&#8217;s very comfortable with technology, but would never get that accusation!<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what we use:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Email. <\/strong> For virtually everything, no paper notes.\u00a0 Reminders, phone messages, questions, family business (&#8216;<em>Please pay so-and-so<\/em>&#8216;).\u00a0 We&#8217;ll exchange several emails on some days.\u00a0 And, a review of the email trail has settled more than one &#8220;you never told me!&#8221; argument. \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>IM<\/strong>.\u00a0 When we&#8217;re each at the computer, we almost always have IM running.\u00a0 (We&#8217;ve been known to IM within the house)\u00a0 It&#8217;s great for short exchanges, and it&#8217;s a great way to stay in &#8220;light&#8221; touch when one of us is traveling.\u00a0 (And we use video chat as well).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Text messaging.<\/strong> We text quite a bit, but mostly computer-to-phone since message composition is tedious (no smart phones, yet).\u00a0 It&#8217;s great for short messages (&#8220;<em>pick up so-and-so on the way home<\/em>&#8220;)\u00a0 If Kellie knows I&#8217;m in a meeting, she will text instead of calling.\u00a0 Plus, it&#8217;s a great way to stay in touch with your kids, since it&#8217;s a mode they prefer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Google calendar. <\/strong> We each have shared calendars, one calendar for each of the kids, and a &#8220;guest\/vacation\/family activity calendar&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Private wiki (access controlled). <\/strong>The family note card file I&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2007\/11\/01\/private-wikis-as-the-collective-family-note-file\/\">written about before<\/a> &#8212; not well formatted or organized, but all the info is in there and searchable:\u00a0 &#8220;<em>What&#8217;s our FastLane account number?<\/em>&#8220;, &#8220;<em>what&#8217;s the teacher&#8217;s email?<\/em>&#8220;, &#8220;<em>who&#8217;s the tree-trimming guy we used 2 years ago?<\/em>&#8220;, etc.\u00a0 Kellie was skeptical at first, but it caught on pretty quickly.\u00a0 (Note: we do not store financial account numbers or passwords).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Google Documents.<\/strong> For example, we keep our Christmas card list in a spreadsheet.\u00a0 It&#8217;s easy to update &amp; refer to, from anywhere.\u00a0 Since it&#8217;s hosted, there&#8217;s always one master copy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Scan and shred.<\/strong> The paper problem is killing us.\u00a0 We&#8217;re trying to do more scanning of important documents and getting rid of the paper.\u00a0 The key here is a good scanner and simple software to scan and file.\u00a0 We&#8217;re not quite there yet.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The only thing missing is the iPhone &#8212; when (if?) Apple figures it out with Verizon, we&#8217;re there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like many modern households, we&#8217;re managing a lot of moving pieces.\u00a0 Three kids w\/ activities, brother &amp; family living nearby, grandparent visits, travel &#8212; it adds up to some &#8220;complexity&#8221;. We depend on a number of technologies to make it &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/managing-the-household\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ramblings","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}