Organized Parenting: An Oxymoron?

Apparently, being on top of things is in vogue.

If you want your blog to really make it, you’d better write about organization and productivity. Lifehacker and Lifehack are just two examples of successful weblogs that are riding the productivity wave.

Despite a recent backlash, David Allen’s GTD system for time management is still going strong.

The problem for parents is, that parenting is often messy and chaotic and totally unpredictable. Those little - or not so little anymore - darlings, bring a lot of chaos into one’s life. Many of us have several kids and each of those kids has her own activities: preschool, school, enrichment programs, sports teams, scouts. At times, keeping tabs on all their different activities seems hopeless.

I searched the web for tips on organized parenting. There are lots of those: apparently, I’m not the only one who hasn’t given up on the hope of controlling the chaos.

The website eHOW features an article on “How to be an organized parent“. My favorite tip: “Keep all family information in one place… you can keep emergency phone numbers, school directories, class information, sports schedules, extracurricular activity schedules and any other papers crucial to the running of your household inside. Keep it in one spot, perhaps near the telephone, so everyone knows exactly where it is at all times”.

Another good article on organizing family life is Jennifer Hull’s “The Organized Parent: Get Your Growing Family’s Act Together“. One of her best tips: “Get an electronic organizer. As the family grows, so do the number of regularly scheduled events. Kids’ activities, PTA meetings - why record these by hand each week when you can program them to repeat? The best gift I got preparing for my second child was a Palm organizer”.

Another parent who recently came up with a great tool for managing the daily family chaos is Yuval Spector, founder of UpToUs. Yuval created a comprehensive online system for organizing family life. As a parent of two school-age kids and AYSO/Little League coach, Yuval recognized the need to organize, simplify, and above all - place all the information in one convenient place. The UpToUs solution combines both of the approaches mentioned above: it is a free online service that enables parents to manage all aspects of daily life, from homework to carpools to potlucks to snack schedules, on one screen.

How does UpToUs work? Once your classroom or sports team joins UpToUs, the classroom parent or the coach can create a private community for their class or team. Each community comes with a set of free tools such as a shared calendar, photo sharing, snack schedule, a volunteering organizer and more. Each individual family who joins the community will have a private personal organizer, so that information from all the different communities it belongs to can be viewed and managed from a single convenient screen. No more juggling of numerous paper fliers, email messages and separate websites. UpToUs wants families to have all the information they need on one screen.

No solution, paper-based or high-tech, can make parenting simple. But these organizing tools can make the daily tasks of parenting easier to manage and save parents a lot of time and headaches.

Photo credit: pillowhead designs