I love a little list app, me.
If you’re looking for a tool that can take away some of the mental load of being a working parent and help you get organised with all your family, life and work tasks – I’ve tried a few that might help!
I’ll break them down for you here so you can see which one might fit your needs. (By the way these aren’t paid reviews, just my thoughts from using these tools regularly).
Trello helps you organise your lists in a very visual way – plus it looks stunning. A lot of software development teams use this tool for their actual day jobs as it’s well-suited to the Kanban style of managing projects.
You create a ‘board’, and then you can have lists and cards (tasks) within those lists.
It has great backgrounds to choose from:
You can easily drag and drop your cards back and forth between buckets, and the mobile app works great too for when you’re not at your computer.
You can do a lot with the free version, it has some great power-ups and automations for things like repeating tasks. You can even visibly ‘age’ your tasks so that you can tell which ones you haven’t touched in a while because they go all yellow and parchment style.
I love the visual and tactile nature of it, and the flexibility of creating lists that are meaningful to you.
It’s also great to track tasks through a linear process, as you can literally drag and drop them through the different process stages from left to right along the board.
This one might not be for you if you want to keep a clear line between work tasks and home tasks. However, if you’re a person whose home/work/life all blurs into one it’s got some features that make it a great option.
Again it’s got another really easy-to-use mobile app, which I find is so important for when you’re out and about and think of some task or other that you need to do.
You can easily create lots of different lists for whatever you want:
You can set due dates and auto-repeat tasks too.
The best thing about it is that it connects with other Microsoft products that you use. So if you use Outlook for your email, you’ll find that To Do syncs up with it, so you’ll get email reminders about your To Do list straight into your work inbox. Could be handy if you’re juggling loads of things during the work day.
It’s also got a pretty good ‘ding’ noise for when you check off a task. You’ve gotta love that.
I’ll admit a heavy bias here as ClickUp is my absolute new favourite thing.
It’s the same as lots of other list tools in that it’s got lots of flexibility to create lists:
But there are cool features even in the free version like setting your own statuses on tasks, for if you want something different to ‘to do’, ‘doing’ and ‘done’.
There are custom fields for you to add extra information to tasks, but the game-changer for me is all the different options you have for viewing your list – you get to see the same information but chopped up in loads of different ways:
You can create a board (like the Trello layout) – or if you’ve set due dates you can see how all your tasks lay out in a calendar view – which makes it really easy to see clashes!
You can even create a table out of your list items, and if they include numbers you can do formulas too, just like a spreadsheet. (I know there are some spreadsheet lovers out there…)
I love being able to see my list items laid out in different formats without having to re-create the same information each time. It’s brilliant.
Which tools are you using to keep on top of your Juggle Struggle? Let me know in the comments!
Juggle Struggle blog 