Getting Organized

Several tools are making our lives much easier: Google Calendar, Ta-da Lists, Google Chat and Google Documents, with a nod to Blogger.

We have set of lists in Ta-da that we use to manage what we need to get and do. This is great since we can access it online from anywhere, so if we have a minute here or there we can take a look at the list and see if we can work on something.

Google Calendar has been great as well. We keep our time based activities in there such as daycare payments, trips, training, appointments and social events. We also move things to do in the calendar and assign them to a day. This is good for planning what to do when.

We use Google Documents to share information like parts of the FAM on allowances and logistics manuals. This is very helpful for easy reference.

We are more of a Google Chat family than AIM, since you can use it in your Gmail interface, where we spend most of our personal online time. Currently Alan is meeting with the shippers to conduct a pre-survey of our household and he will talk to me via Google Chat when a question comes up. This is a little easier than calling or texting.

And finally, I want to praise the use of Blogger. Since all of this is happening so fast and it can be time consuming to document our activities in other ways, we are using blogging to document how we managed the move and our experiences with our FSO life to-date.