productivity

I know I'm not the only one who wants to get rid of the unread email count badge on my phone that taunts me loudly in BRIGHT. RED. NUMBERS. Every so often, a friend on social media gleefully (like a Mr. Burns kind of gleeful if you ask m…

Lately I've heard some mixed opinions about the Focus feature on the latest iOS 15. If you haven't updated your iPhone yet, Focus mode is similar to the Sleep mode introduced with iOS 14 with even more detail and more ways to customize y…

There are so many things you can do with an Amazon Echo , something I quickly learned after getting an Amazon Echo Dot for Christmas a few years ago .(It's no Echo Studio , but still...) I admit I was a little skeptical at first. What's …

We recently had a mom reach out on our Out Tech Your Kids group on Facebook, asking for the best tech to help turn handwriting into text. Like so many kids today, her daughter is using her finger to write on a school issued iPad, and the…

Every year I swear , this is the year I get organized! This is the year I find the best ever to-do list app and put everything on it and finally check things off my list instead of losing them forever and make more time for the things I …

One of the many reasons I love my smart phone is that it allows me to untether myself from a desk or home office, so I actually end up spending more time with my family. That means I'm sending emails on the fly, and doing a whole lot of …

Next up in our Alexa Organization Series, we’re sharing some of our favorite Alexa calendar skills to help you keep your family organized. Whether you want to add events to a joint calendar, keep up with a shared to-do list, or just make…

Next up in our Alexa Organization Series, we're sharing some of our favorite Alexa finance skills to help you keep your family budget it check. Whether you want to track your investments or keep up with your spending, even pay you bills,…

With the new year starting up, if you're like me, you've got organization on your mind. I've found that using my Amazon Echo -- which is strategically placed in our kitchen, the hub of our house -- can be a huge help. So, we're sharing s…

If you're needing a little break from your Facebook feed, but still would like to be able to post, check your messages, and see your groups, then you should get Kill News Feed , a Chrome extension that will block out just your feed. Rela…

Raise your hand if you know how to lock your notes on the Notes app on your iPhone. And now...here's me not raising my hands.Honestly, I never even realized you could do it at all! So leave it to my 11-year-old daughter to show me a cool…

Managing my kids activities -- and the time it takes me to get them there -- is one of the more complicated parts of parenting for me. Carpooling is the solution that not only saves my sanity, but also helps out the environment. We have …

Leave it to the kids to figure out cool iPhone tricks before we do, especially where emoji are concerned. Turns out, there's a fun way to insert emoji into your texts without toggling back and forth between keyboards -- something that ca…

One of my biggest new year's resolutions is to stay organized, and getting my meals planned is key. Because the hardest part of cooking for me -- other than the kids pulling on my shirt or asking me to help them put together their 1,487-…

Okay, so please tell me I'm not the only iPhone owner who's had an iPhone for literally years ...and never knew this super basic time-saving iPhone trick. Turns out, your clock -- you know, the little digital display of the time at the v…

Even though I've become a strictly digital planner kind of person, but I do find myself missing paper planners . Well, Moleskine, who's my long-time personal favorite source for old-school paper journals, has a brilliant new solution tha…

For ages now I've touted the wonderful benefits of Boomerang for Gmail to help me better manage my incoming and outgoing email, and it seems the folks at Google like the feature themselves. Because now Gmail has actually incorporated Boo…

I've been seeing a lot of research lately that seems to find a correlation between how much time we spend on our phones and our kids' behavior . Specifically, their bad behavior. The constant distraction of pings and alerts from my phone…

In a recent New York Times article , one of our favorite organizational apps Unroll.me was mentioned as selling user data (specifically emails with Lyft receipts) to Uber, and not surprisingly people are worried, including us. We've been…

If you've become more of a news junkie over the past year like I have, you've probably realized that your standard browser bookmark bar isn't necessarily your best best for saving articles you want to come back to. Let alone recipes you …

I'm always a little more motivated to get to my chores when there's a little reward involved, like watching a guilty pleasure TV show while I fold laundry. It's the same for my kids, and the Stridepost app (iOS and Android ) helps them s…

My kids are master negotiators when it comes to screen time, which is why we've never been successful with cookie-cutter methods to manage it. Sorry, Marble Jar . So that's why I'm excited about the free unGlue app (iOS and Android ), wh…

So many families are looking for ways to give back over the holidays -- and so many charities and schools are looking for helpers -- which is why we love resources like Golden's volunteer app (iOS and Android). Golden lets you scroll thr…

When I first heard about apps describing themselves as u ber for kids , I was dubious. Calling a random driver to pick my kids up from school just didn't feel safe, and I thought I'd probably be a nervous wreck the entire time my kids we…