Cozi Calendar Saves the Day…

…and the week, the month and possibly our year. Cozi Calendar is an online calendar, to-do list, recipe file and overall organizational wonder. We have been using it in earnest for the last two months and it has been awesome. Yes, I said awesome and I really mean it. It has taken this family from saying “What do you have today?” to knowing what we have today.

I happened upon Cozi through FlyLady almost a year ago. At first, I looked at it, made a to do list or two. downloaded the room by room cleaning lists from Fly Lady and then forgot about it. A few months passed and my tutoring schedule ramped up for the summer and with my DH now watching the Tomato during the day, we needed something more than the old paper calendar to help us out. DH had recently gotten the iPhone and I mentioned that I thought Cozi had an app (it does!!) and we set about putting our calendar to work.

What I like best about the calendar feature is that I can set things to repeat each week. With my part time job, that is such a time saver! Even with this feature, they allow you to delete an appointment for one week only, but keep the rest. It makes everything very manageable. I can also choose who is involved with each event that we put on the calendar and can even send a text reminder to a designated cell phone. Pretty cool! I also enjoy that you can look at the year before and the years ahead, which will be great to help plan the garden next year. I will be able to see when I planted things and I can make notes as to whether or not those days or efforts worked. With the iPhone app, it is also easy to check the calendar on the go and to add or delete appointments and events. This may actually lead me to getting an iPhone, but I’ll wait to see when the new one is coming out this fall.

In the To Do List section, you can add your own lists or use some pre-made ones. Some of the pre-made ones include School Morning checklists (great for an iPad or other tablet on the kitchen counter), an Emergency checklist (for those earthquakes and hurricanes that we recently had) or a kid’s birthday party list (which we may have to consult with Tomato’s first coming up). I haven’t used any of these yet, but did download the pre-made FlyLady ones for when I am ready to tackle our house by weekly zones. I have made a general knitting to do list, which is a must with all of the babies coming this fall. I also made a to do list for each room in our household. It was great to do a brain dump of all of the little things that I know need doing and now we can all see what is on the list. Once the Tomato is older, we can also give her a helping chore list. You can download Kids’ Chore Lists to your family organizer and customize them for your own household.

I can also make a shopping list, which is great since Whole Foods does not have that feature on their website. I tend to do the Whole Foods run, so this will come in handy in time. We don’t use this feature for our Wegmans list because we use the Wegmans online shopping list to manage those items. The Cozi Family Dinner Club looks like a great feature too. You can plan weekly meals and think ahead on the grocery list. They have several recipes available and once you view a recipe, you can click on items and have them transferred to your grocery list for that week. You can also schedule the recipe to your calendar so that your family can know what you are having that evening.

There are a couple of areas that we have not yet used. One is the samples and savings page where you can get free samples and find out about great deals. We haven’t had any interest in using the Journal section, but could see how some folks would like it to share good news and milestones.

Overall, we are very happy Cozi customers and have been thrilled with how it is helping us to organize our lives. Thank you, Cozi! So, does anyone else use this program? How has your family made it work for you?