Random family I don"t know, but they look busy.
This time of year, everyone feels the need to get organized. Store’s ads offer everything from home office shredders, to plastic storage containers, to free office basics, so it’s easy to clear off your desk and tidy up the office with so many tools available. But if you are like me, the place that’s most difficult to get organized is the rest of your life. To get that organized, I stopped fretting so much, and just got Cozi.
I’m a meticulous keeper of my Outlook calendar for professional appointments and meetings, but as my business grows and my family activities increase, sometimes I let organizing my personal life slip and I start to feel out of control (which is scary for a control freak). So I felt I needed a better way than a kitchen calendar to keep track of everyone’s schedules. I recently set up a Google calendar for my spouse and me to track each others’ schedules, add school functions, weekend plans, etc. I loved it, but unfortunately my husband could never get logged on and really had no desire to use it. Plus, I still had my professional calendar in Outlook.
Not much happening here.
The same thing happened when my mom needed radiation therapy 5 days a week for several weeks. My family had a plan to take turns driving her the 25 miles each way so my dad wouldn’t have to do it every day. My lame solution for keeping us all informed was, again, to set up a Google calendar and share it with the entire family. Exactly one person was able to figure out how to view and edit the calendar, and that same exact person is the only one who ever actually offered to drive my mom. (How the plan failed altogether is another story and has more to do with a stubborn father than the Google calendar. Oh, and my mom is fine now.)
But today I stumbled upon cozi.com, a free content management system for my family. Cozi doesn’t promise to manage the actual family members themselves—that’s what PhD’s in psychology are for—but it does manage information family members need to share in order to prevent someone from getting accidentally left at soccer practice.
No more fretting. Get cozi.
Cozi is another example of Software as a Service (SaaS) that we have come to love and depend on, much like our Gmail accounts and Google docs. It’s one place where you can can post photos, manage a calendar, keep a family journal, and create shopping lists.
But what good is all that when you are on the run all day? Cozi truly is a content management system. So you can do all those things in one place, and retrieve them from another. Aside from the convenience of being able to log onto your family management system from anywhere, you can access lists, appointments and reminders via a toll-free number from any phone. So if you failed to print and take your grocery list with you, you can call in from the canned food isle at the market and have it read to you or have it texted to you —or both. Who wants to waste paper anyway? And you can send reminders and notes like, “Don’t forget to pick up the cat,” or “For the fifth time, dinner is ready, now get home or starve. “ I know I’m sounding like your mom, but hey, that’s my personal life, and don’t pretend it’s not yours, too.
I tried this feature today, but Cozi kept sending me text messages that asked me to approve receiving a message, so I approved them, but never got the messages I wanted. So I contacted Monya Mandich, Cozi marketing director, and she had her tech team look into it. Apparently there are some cases where a glitch occurs in either the cellular service or their software and the number has to be manually verified. So they did that and it works fine now. But the discussion forum on their web site has several inquiries about this so hopefully its a glitch they can fix soon.
Cozi has a few other features such as a downloadable calendar widget if you have a Google desktop—which I don’t have so I didn’t try that out—and a handy little syncing tool to import your Outlook calendar directly into Cozi (Yay!) or sync Cozi with Outlook.
Outlook toolbar.
Either way, you can choose which items to share and which to leave at work or home. This feature is still in beta version and has some known issues, so be sure to check them out before you expect life-transforming results.
There are some features I’d still like to see Cozi add. One, is the ability to share parts, but not all, of my Cozi stuff with extended family. For example, my sisters and I would like a place we can keep in contact, share photos, post extended family events and reminders, collaborate on gifts for our parents, etc., without sharing individual family schedules and appointments. At this time that’s not a feature Cozi offers. However, Ms. Mandich said (via email) that they have gotten the same feedback from others and are working on that feature.
Darn. I have to create another account?!
Another thing that seems like a no-brainer to me—but I’m sure there are some type of legal obstacles for (aren’t there always?)—is the Betty Crocker recipe widget on Cozi. On your shopping list page is a link to the Betty Crocker featured recipe. If you click on it, it takes you to where else, bettercrocker.com, where you can browse recipes, create shopping lists and perform other typical cooking site actions. But you have to have a separate bettycrocker.com account to create a shopping list. I don’t need another form to fill out and another account to forget my password for. And again, what good does it do me to have shopping lists trapped on a web site somewhere? Why can’t I just import the shopping list directly to my Cozi lists, send it to my cell phone, drop the cat off at the vet, and dash into the store to buy what I need? Maybe just a downloadable toolbar for my Firefox browser?
Maybe Cozi can’t fix everything I slack off on in my personal life—it won’t do laundry or go to the gym for me—but it might give a control freak some semblance of control, and today may have been the last time I ever see a family member walk in the door when they are supposed to be at the dentist.
