Digital Family Management for the Tech-Savvy
By KC Brothers
November 28, 2023
And a straightforward methodology to help you and your partner make the move.
I don’t know about you, but I can have a great system to manage my professional life but a less than-efficient (or very analog) system to help me manage my personal and family life. There are many moving pieces and balls to juggle, and the more kids you have, the more there seems to be to remember, forget, or delay.
So, what gives? How can I be so system-oriented professionally but miss the mark with all of those other hours in the days, weeks, and months? First, you don’t have an outside force enforcing the usage of a system (no boss in your home… at least not like what you might have at work). Second, you need stakeholder buy-in (yes, that means your partner in crime, your co-parent, your spouse, or whatever other silly pet name you’d like to insert here). Third, you’ve got to find an approachable and easily understandable methodology for digital management so each of you can stick with it and create that habit.
Tiago Forte created a simple and easy-to-follow methodology that we recommend for your family and life management. Here’s how it goes:
Projects: short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now
Areas: long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time
Resources: topics or interests that may be useful in the future
Archived: inactive items from the other three categories
Projects
Do you have a honey-do list? These are likely projects. Hang the ceiling racks in the garage. Put away the Halloween decorations. Fix the upstairs bathtub. Build the laundry room cabinets. Note: If these are not active projects, they’re best kept in the Archived space. Don’t clutter up your Projects space with things you can’t work on right now. Staying focused on active projects will help you and your partner be realistic about your time and budget constraints.
With Pixie, you can create a Projects board and then add others underneath for each project. You might even have a Home Improvement board with boards for each area of the home. Within those boards, you can then keep track of items you need at the hardware store, pictures of the room, photos of inspiration, and more.
Meal Prep is also a great example of a project that is always active (laundry is, too, but you don’t necessarily need to track that in an app unless you just love making to-do lists and checking things off). Have a meal prep board where you track different weeks of menus. Maybe you have the same core set of recipes you like to repeat. Build a board for each week; for example, let’s say you have five unique weeks of meal planning. Create a board for each week. Then, within each board, you can have a note for each recipe, a grocery list, and the actual meal plan.
Areas
Areas can look like children, health, finance, holidays, vacations, or home appliances for family management. For personal management, you could have areas for Anniversary, Weekend Getaway Ideas, or your side hustle (psst, in Pixie, not only can you share these with your spouse, but you can also make a board private for those fun anniversary plans you want to keep a surprise).
This system can be super fluid. Under a board for a child, you may have a health board where you can document immunization records or health concerns.
Resources
These are ideas, notes, concepts, reels, recipes, or thoughts while reading a book. Your brain is meant to connect dots, have inspiration, and get big ideas. It’s not great at holding onto that information. So don’t let that fall by the wayside. Capture it and put it somewhere you can reaccess it. In Pixie, it’s helpful to title these resources more thoughtfully so that you can find them easily when you’re ready to use them.
Consider setting aside time once a month to review these and categorize them into subboards in Pixie. Doing so helps refresh your memory, connect dots, have bigger and better ideas, and continually refine your system in order to find things when you look for them.
Archived
Most of us are averse to deleting digital documents. Whether they’re old tax files, appliance warranties, or our beloved Apple device boxes (I know that last one isn’t digital, but how many of us hold on to these or feel scared to throw them away?), information can clog up our devices, homes, and brains fast. Some of it may, in fact, be necessary to keep. Often, this is the most challenging information to 1) organize and 2) find later because we just don’t reference it frequently.
But when it’s digital, it’s much easier to find. No boxes to dig out of the closet. No dust to blow off. Just accessible, searchable, and visual digital locating.
In Pixie, you can have an Archived board for each Project or Area board you have. Maybe you have an Archived board on your 5-year-old’s board with last year’s class list, just in case you want to reach out for a playdate with an old friend. Or maybe you have an Archived board on your Home Projects boards where you and your spouse can keep track of all of those DIY projects you will do on the weekends.
Need Help With Your Stakeholder?
It’s not uncommon for one partner to be more tech-forward than another in a marital relationship. As we said in the beginning, it’s crucial you get stakeholder buy-in. Build out a proof of concept so they can imagine themselves in the system.
Ideas to get your stakeholder on board:
If you’re the “honey-doer”
The honey-do maker loves to see when you’re on board with their latest home renovation plans. Get them excited about your new digital system by showing them how you’ve laid out your plans for your master bathroom “refresh.”
If you’re the “default parent”
In most cases, the non-default parent truly wants to help lift burdens and be more involved. The invisible load you carry creates a significant barrier to entry because they’re simply not mind readers. But as you write down meal plans or cleaning rotations and share them in Pixie, where they can see them and collaborate, you’ll find that that mental burden that can cause you stress, anxiety, and exhaustion will slowly get lifted. You’ll know that you don’t need to be the sole person to remember family information. Even if collaboration with your partner is small or less than ideal, simply having that information in a place outside of your brain that is accessible and efficient will alleviate those pains.
Get started managing your family life digitally today. Download Pixie for free.
Happy Pixie-ing!
