Use Excel to Keep Your Family Organized
In my first post-college role, I worked with a boss who loved Excel spreadsheets. She thought that almost everything could be packed into “boxes and rows,” and after my first year there, I officially became a convert. I know organization in one way or another, and these table cells called me, tempting with their promises of order and clarity. Event planning logistics? For this I had a table. Flight and hotel reservations for office managers? Table. Goals for the new fiscal year? Table.
I have not worked in this office for almost ten years, but what I learned there about the power of spreadsheets has stayed with me. That’s good too – now I have three kids, and in addition to homeschooling two of them, I also work as a freelance writer. I don’t think I can survive motherhood with my sanity if I didn’t distribute my life based on it.
Parents: If you don’t use Excel to keep your wheels from the hustle and bustle of your day, you are overlooking. Let me show you the beauty of a spreadsheet (you can thank me later when you have tons of stress free time).
It’s not just for budgeting
Of course, you can use Excel to keep track of your family’s monthly or yearly budget. But in its simplest form, a program is a collection of boxes. Whether you use formulas to calculate data within these fields is up to you.
I put my freelance work and family homeschooling plans on spreadsheets. I follow everything there. But if I have a hectic week ahead of me, I make a to-do table for that, writing down different tasks for each weekday. It helps me manage my time effectively.
Summer camps schedule. Monthly school fees. College admission requirements for your teenager. Christmas Gift Lists and Spending Purposes. Carpool shifts and PTA fundraisers. Do you have multiple athletics kids playing games on three different pitches each season? There is a table for this.
It’s comfortable
The spreadsheet format makes organization possible even for absent-minded parents – once you decide what to put and where, all you have to do is paste the data into the fields you want. Move them, do more or less, work side to side or up and down. It can be adapted to suit any of your needs. I tried journaling with markers, but quickly became frustrated with the consistency of ink on paper: I couldn’t delete or change things without messing up or tearing pages.
When keeping a diary, I also needed to make sure that I always carry a physical diary with me. In comparison, the spreadsheet system is very portable. If you have a Gmail account, you can download or even create new Excel spreadsheets right in Google Drive and access them anywhere and anytime: on your desktop or laptop, smartphone or tablet. (Editor’s note: You can also use Google Sheets from the get-go, and it’s free.) The simplicity of Excel’s layout (as opposed to software like Trello or OneNote) works in its favor; it could be considered old school, but it means that even tech Luddites can figure it out – no learning curve to overcome.
And while there is no shortage of organization apps, most of them specialize in one kind of organization (remember Milk for your to-do lists, Cozi for your family calendar, Mint for your budget). With Excel, you can organize multiple types of content in one central location and avoid missing out on many different programs while trying to mentally sync everything together.
It helps you manage all the moving parts of family life.
Despite my love for spreadsheets, there are some things that don’t necessarily work better in Excel than in a simple note-taking application or in an email to myself. A reminder to return books from your kids’ library before you incur another late payment can be written just about anywhere.
A spreadsheet is best for any kind of complex cataloging (ie, things that have more than one moving part). While you can jot down your supermarket list on any old piece of paper, something like your weekly meal planning would be much better laid out in a spreadsheet. You can categorize the days of the week and then fill out the dish itself, a list of required ingredients, a link to an online recipe, and any other special notes to maintain your sanity (for example, “take tomorrow’s meat out of the freezer TODAY” so you don’t find that you’re trying to defrost a chicken breast at 5:30 pm while your eager family watches the hunger).
In other words, don’t use it to brainstorm a list of places to go on family vacation, but definitely use it to figure out the pros and cons of each potential destination, what attractions are there, and how much you can spend. about travel and accommodation.
You can make it yours
Let me give you a quick set of tips on how to really work with your Excel spreadsheet like a mom, so that she does exactly what you need to do in no time:
- Use tabs . I don’t have ten different spreadsheet files for my freelance work. I have one master file with eight tabs for everything I need to organize. I only need to open one document, but everything is sorted in such a way that the information I’m looking for can be easily found.
- Make headings bold . This may be a personal aesthetic choice, but I think that bold category headings (either column or row, or both) make it easier to find what to do.
- Don’t overfill boxes . One of the benefits of a spreadsheet is its readability: crisp lines are pleasing to the eye and data can be quickly viewed. However, once you start cramming too much text into individual fields, some of that readability is lost. Limit your information to small chunks.