5 Apps to Master Your Life Admin
Episode 009
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My 5 favorite apps for managing your life admin so you can regain your time
Apps for personal finance, to-do lists, using voice assistants, calendar sharing and location sharing
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Episode Transcript
Hey, everyone, and welcome to Episode Nine of The Seriously Sorted Podcast. Today, I want to talk to you about the five apps I love for mastering your life admin. So obviously, I talk a lot about being as efficient as you can with your time in your business, but also, we want to make sure that you're being as efficient with your life admin as you can because that's another way we can free up time for doing what we love. So without further ado, let's get into it.
Personal Finances:: PocketBook
Alrighty, so app number one is called Pocketbook. So Pocketbook, I like to describe it when people haven't heard it before, think of it like your QuickBooks or your Xero accounting software, but for your personal finances, that's how I describe it. So in the same way that QuickBooks or Xero can pull in different bank accounts and credit cards, Pocketbook can do this too. You would create an account in Pocketbook, pull through your different bank feeds, and then you would start allocating just like in QuickBooks, categories for the different things that you purchase. Now, it sounds like a little bit of work. But I can assure you that if you spend a little bit of time upfront, it's really easy from there on out. So once you've, for example, allocated that when you go to Safeway or Coles that that's groceries, it knows in the future that's the case. It also when you first pull in transactions, suggests different things that happen might be bills. So if you have your Netflix subscription come out on the second day of every month, it will suggest to you that here you go, maybe Netflix is a bill that needs to come out every second of the month, and then it creates for you a calendar of when all your different regular bills are. So ultimately, you'll be able to get a really good visual of when your bills come out, when your income goes in, and create some savings goals for yourself and really start to look at where you're spending your money. So definitely a nerdy one, but it is a really great way to stay on top of your money. And if you're wondering, yes, it is a free apps, so definitely go check that one out.
To-Do Lists:: AnyList
App number two is called AnyList. So this app has a free version and a paid version. But what I love about this app is it's a basic to-do app on face value with a few special little features, which I absolutely love. So you will create yourself an account and set up yourself a couple of lists, and they've got different types of lists that you can set up, you can just set up a free for all list. But what I love is the grocery list. So you can set up a grocery list. and when you add things to this list, so let's say you add bananas, it knows that bananas goes in the produce category in your list. And why this is great is because if you're a bit of a nerd like me, you can then change the order of the categories in the list to reflect the aisles in your supermarket, which sounds maybe a little bit insane at first, but when you think about it, it'll get you in and out of the grocery store quicker than ever, I promise. It has a few more features than just that. So you can categorize things, you can put prices to things so you can have a bit of a grocery budget that you can stick to, you can actually create recipes within this app. So when you're looking to make a recipe, you just tick the ingredients that you need and it transposes it onto the shopping list. And you can also share the list with other family members. So it means that everyone can finally contribute to the one shopping list and stop just telling you to add things to it. And then when you rock up to the supermarket, everything that everybody needs is on the list.
Voice Assistants
The next app is something that everybody has but probably is underutilized. And that is your voice assistant on your phone. So I'm talking about your Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, or your Siri on Apple products. Now I use this feature on both my phone as well as at home with my Amazon Echo. So Amazon Echo is the physical product for Alexa, just like the Google Home is the physical product for the Google Assistant, and Apple Home Pod is the physical product for Siri. Regardless of whether you're using the voice assistants on one of their physical products or whether you're using it on your phone, there's some really great things that everyone can do to make their lives a little bit more efficient. So you can obviously ask to add an appointment to your calendar rather than physically typing it in. You can send messages and emails and the like. And if I circle back to app number two, which is AnyList, you can add grocery item, to do list items to AnyList with any of these three voices assistants, which is so cool. If you're standing at the fridge and you're looking at what ingredients you need to go to the shops, you can just call out to your voice assistant and ask them to add it to your shopping list which is so awesome.
So in general with a voice assistant, think of it like if you don't have a pen and you're on the go, ask your voice assistant to write the note down for you. So ask them to add something to the grocery list, ask it to add a to do or draft an email so that you don't have to stop what you're doing.
Calendar Sharing:: TimeTree
The fourth app is one that I haven't needed personally, but I have a few family and friends who highly, highly recommend it. And that is called TimeTree. So TimeTree is essentially a calendar app where you can share your calendars between groups of people. So it's really good for people who don't necessarily share everything on the one Google calendar or Google account. So I know a lot of families try and separate everything out on Google Calendar. But there's always going to be that one person or that work email account that just is not on the same platform as all the other calendars. So this is a really great opportunity for people to bring their calendars together, whether that's ongoing or for a short period of time to make sure that you can see where everyone needs to be at once. So apart from using this as perhaps your everyday sort of daily calendar, that you and your partner both have your calendars in there and you might have a third calendar for children's activities and the like, this could also would be really great for itinerary sharing. So if you've got a group of people that are all coming together on some kind of trip, and you don't need to all share every single calendar that you have from a personal point of view, someone could establish one single calendar and share it around on this app. And the beauty of that as well is you can actually comment and have discussions on different events. So again, if you're coming together as a group, whether that's for business or pleasure, you could potentially share a calendar and then have people start to talk about "Oh, what are you bringing to the dinner?", "What am I bringing to the dinner?" on the actual app itself.
Location Sharing:: Life360
And my final app is actually one of my favorites. And I'm gonna say up front, don't judge me. I'm not a stalker. But the last app is called Life360. And it's essentially an app that tracks the location of people that you put into a group within the app. So not dissimilar to Find My Friends on iPhone, but this is obviously a cross-platform app, which is great. So again, this app is really great if you are a family unit, and you need to want to track where your kids are at any point in time. So you can actually set up locations and get notified. So you could set up for example, the school as a location. And as soon as that phone I suppose, and that child reaches school, you'll get an alert to say that, you know, your son or your daughter has arrived at school. And similarly, when they leave school, you can get an alert to say they've left school, that they've arrived home. Basically, any place that you set up, you can set up an alert to let you know when particular people have come and gone from that place if that is what you need. Now, this is also again, a really great safety element for not just families, but if you're travelling, so sometimes you might just want to set up a group for if you are travelling somewhere and just all those people in the group have their locations turned on purely from a safety point of view. And just for the duration of that trip, you can make sure that you're monitoring where everyone is just to make sure that everyone's safe. It does save me from always having to ring and say "Where are you?", "What time might you be leaving?" because you want obviously time different activities for when people are obviously going to be around. So sure it's a little bit stalkerish, but please don't judge me!
So there you go they're my five top apps for mastering your life admin, there's Pocketbook for your personal finances, AnyList for your to dues and shopping lists, using your voice assistant to your advantage when you can't be writing things down, TimeTree for managing multiple calendars on different platforms and Life360 for location sharing. Let me know if you use any of these apps. Hopefully there's something in there that you haven't heard before. Thanks, everyone.
your podcast hostess
Lauren Stratford
I’m Lauren and I help overwhelmed creatives like you embrace their strengths, get clear on their customer journey and maximise their impact (without adding to the never ending task list!).
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