10 Apps to Simplify Life & Support You as a Stay-at-Home Mom
The key to streamlining your days and carving time out just for you may already be in the palm of your hand.
When I was in college, I had a therapist who always sensed I’d spent the entire day one step behind. Any time I’d arrive in her office, she’d sit and observe me—wild and flustered as I was—and she’d offer me a few minutes to “arrive in the moment.” It was such a generous gift, a reset of sorts. And I saw it as an invitation to draw myself back together after a day of stress and responsibilities had torn me apart.
Now that I’m well into adulthood, managing part-time work and raising two sweet kids, I crave that sensation of resetting myself. As my children grow and leave the little kid stage behind them, our family schedule grows right alongside them in the most chaotic ways. There are after-school practices and activities, appointments and playdates, and everything I need and want to do for myself, too.
The effect is dizzying, and I’m grateful we live in a time in which absolutely everything can be tracked, managed, reviewed, and optimized, if given the right tool or software. To that end, finding apps that serve me while I mix parenting, work, and my own creative pursuits has been game-changing. It’s allowed me to calm the chaos, feel in control of my calendar, and create space to pursue my own projects.
Here are 10 apps that contribute meaningfully to our home life and offer simplicity, ease, and time enough to enjoy this stage of parenthood.
1. Take Charge of Your To-Do List: Todoist
Designed to empower you to feel calm and in-control, Todoist makes use of a beautiful interface to help users create effective to-do lists and manage tasks without added overwhelm. Each day, the app centers your most important action items so you know just where to put your focus. Set up reminders and push notifications so a to-do never takes you by surprise.
Think of Todoist as a tool for lightening the all-consuming mental load of parenting. With the app, you can keep track of what’s on your plate, delegate tasks to your partner, manage family activities, and so much more. The best part? There’s a free version of Todoist, and you can always upgrade to paid to unlock special features.
2. Stay In-the-Know: Curio
I am the type of online reader who can’t help but leave ten thousand tabs open. If a headline piques my curiosity, I’ll file it away for later reading—by which I mean I’ll let it sit open on my browser until I forget why it spoke to me in the first place. Simply put, there is so much to read—and so much (see: laundry, meal prep, etc.) standing in the way.
It’s a brilliant way to keep up with current events and cultural conversations—without resorting to zoning out in the school pickup line.
This is precisely why my heart leapt with the discovery of Curio, an audio journalism app that presents beautifully narrated stories from top-notch publications like The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Salon, Vulture, Scientific American, and many more. It’s a brilliant way to keep up with current events and cultural conversations—without resorting to zoning out in the school pickup line.
3. Brainstorm Big Ideas: Milanote
Build momentum for your creative dreams with the brainstorming, mind-mapping, note-taking, and storyboarding tools baked right into the Milanote app. Whenever inspiration strikes—whether you’re in the pediatrician’s waiting room or the checkout line—this app makes recording your ideas simple and intuitive. Let’s say you’re designing a website, writing a novel, or branding your business: with Milanote you can start a vision board that helps you strike the right mood. Source images from the app’s library, drop in videos, or add in your own notes or sketches.
Think of Milanote as a creativity journal tucked right into your pocket. One that encourages you to collect what inspires you, organize your projects, and make progress toward your dreams.
Think of Milanote as a creativity journal tucked right into your pocket. One that encourages you to collect what inspires you, organize your projects, and make progress toward your dreams.
4. Manage & Mellow Your Inbox: Sortd
If you have ever entertained the wild notion of creating a separate email account just for the nearly endless school notices and updates, then look into Sortd for Gmail. Sortd is a fully customizable email and task organizer that allows users to visually funnel messages into a system that works best for them. It allows you to sort emails by priority status, even auto-creating a to-do list—meaning, you’ll be well prepared the next time that dreaded school spirit day schedule comes around again. School surprises on your watch? That will be a thing of the past with Sortd.
5. Build Savings (Passively!): Acorns
When I pressed pause on my career after my oldest was born, I was met with a tidal wave of financial anxiety. I had been earning my own income from the time I was 16, so the thought of kissing a steady paycheck goodbye was enough to make my heart race. If you can relate, consider Acorns, a saving and investing app for first-time investors.
While the money you move through Acorns likely won’t rival your former paycheck, the app offers a largely hands-off approach to building toward financial security. Here’s how it works: Use your linked credit card when you make purchases and Acorns will round up your totals to the nearest dollar. The difference is then auto-invested on your behalf. Clueless when it comes to the stock market? Not to worry! Acorns does all the heavy-lifting for you by issuing an investment portfolio that’s been created by financial experts. The app even offers a financial literacy program to help you gain confidence as you go.
Source: Ketut Subiyanto
6. Limit Social Media: Freedom
There are times when my phone’s screen-time averages make me wince. One moment I’m opening the Instagram app, and then hours later I emerge from some sort of hazy fugue state. I don’t even feel particularly inspired or fulfilled—just cheated of the time I meant to use in more meaningful ways. I always go back to these wise words from one of my college writing professors: Get rid of the things that keep you from doing what you truly want to do. At the time, she meant donating your TV in favor of writing a novel, but I’m sure she would agree that social media is as fierce a distraction as any.
Freedom aims to guide users in prioritizing their time, instead of whiling it away on social media and doomscrolling.
That’s why I’m testing out an app called Freedom, which aims to guide users in prioritizing their time, instead of whiling it away on social media and doomscrolling. With Freedom, I can schedule blocks of time in which I cannot access certain websites and apps. It even silences my email and text notifications so that I’m not constantly distracted by new messages and requests.
7. Track Kids’ Chores & Allowance: Greenlight
When life is slow and easy, my husband and I have terrific systems in place for our family—tracking our kids’ chores and allowances being one of them. But as soon as we’re inundated with work deadlines, piano lessons, and volleyball practices aplenty, every manual system we’ve created gets left behind.
To combat this, we’ve been on a mission to automate as much as possible, which makes Greenlight a no-brainer. This app keeps track of kids’ chores and lets you customize a schedule for doling out allowances digitally, if that’s something you choose to do. Chores are visually organized using checklists, and if your child uses the app, they have the option to work toward savings goals. Use of the program also includes a secure debit card for your child, and lessons to help them build financial literacy as they save and spend.
8. Offload Household Tasks: Yohana
There are so many times when the sheer breadth of my to-do list makes me feel like I am frozen in place. Instead of making any progress toward accomplishing my goals, I’m panicked and paralyzed by everything ahead of me. But this is precisely why Yohana is such a dream.
A subscription-based personal assistant app, Yohana encourages parents to set goals, prioritize tasks, and set up an actionable plan to make progress on what matters to you. The best part? Yohana allows you to offload all the sundry tasks clogging up your to-do list to a team waiting in the wings. These specialists will take on tasks like scheduling home repairs, booking doctors’ appointments, making date-night reservations, and more!
These specialists will take on tasks like scheduling home repairs, booking doctors’ appointments, making date-night reservations, and more.
9. Nix Procrastination: RescueTime
RescueTime is a time management program and calendar with similar features to Todoist. The noticeable difference? Along with schedules and reminders, RescueTime includes a distraction alert—which frankly, can be very illuminating when it comes to your work habits. Keep RescueTime running on your computer and it will issue an alert when it senses you losing focus, like if you’ve clicked over to social media several times when you should be writing. It’s an easy way to track the habits that keep you from accomplishing your goals, and to help ensure you can make time for the activities that matter to you most, (see: having time for screen-free kid snuggles!).
10. Invite Relaxation: Calm
If you’ve ever wished Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page could read you a bedtime story, then you’re in luck. While the Calm app offers a host of useful features—like relaxing music, meditations, and courses—I personally love its collection of sleep stories for when I’m struggling to quiet my mind at night. The stories range in length from 15 to 50 minutes, and some are classics, (Beauty and the Beast, for example), while others are exclusive to the app, (like my favorite, The Bookshop, which takes you on a cozy nighttime errand to browse a London bookstore). Each is read beautifully by a familiar voice, tuned just so in attempt to lull you to sleep. You’ll recognize Kate Winslet, Idris Elba, Cillian Murphy, and many more. The app offers many of the same features for kids as well.
Read more:
The Best SAHM Schedule, According to Time Management Coaches
