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Tag Archive for Evernote

Grocery List Curiosity

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Renee Spindle

I had a curious thought this morning while putting together my list for my Sam’s Club shopping. How do you write out your grocery list these days? Personally I do not go to the store without a list. I would forget too many things. I try to keep my store visits to a weekly minimum, and don’t really like to spend any great amount of time browsing the food aisles. You can read about my love (or not) of grocery shopping from my Sam’s Club Shopping story.

We keep a running list of groceries we need on the fridge. I have these write-on small white board labels that stick to the fridge, and use a dry erase marker. They have been very handy. No papers flying all over the front of the fridge. When I’m ready to do my shopping I transfer that list to my phone. If you live in my house, when we are out of something please write it on the fridge list, so it’s not forgotten.

My go-to app for my grocery list is Evernote. Once I have transferred my list into Evernote I can easily share it with my favorite Travel Man if he happens to be home. When he’s home Travel Man does like to go shopping with me, especially if the list is rather long. He’s the complete opposite of myself. He likes to browse the aisles, and read the labels, and look for new products. I like to stick to the list, and get in and out of the store.

It’s been a long, long time since I went to do my grocery shopping with a paper list. I would rather use my phone, and not have to fiddle with an extra piece of paper. I used to have a really elaborate list for my Sam’s Club shopping. It was an excel spreadsheet with all of the groceries categorized and took up almost an entire sheet of paper. If I try to use that paper now the grocery shopping task seems completely overwhelming. Thank goodness for my smart phone and Evernote.

So here’s my curiosity – How do you grocery shop these days? Do you take a list or just run out to the store with no list at all? Do you write your list on paper or is there no paper involved? Are you a daily, weekly, or monthly shopper?

I’d love to hear about your shopping habits.

This post shared at the #MidLifeLuv Linky Party.

#MidLifeLuv Linky

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10 comments Posted in Around the House

I am the Family CFO.

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Renee Spindle

It’s the beginning of a New Year, and it’s a good time to get the paperwork in order around here. New Year, clean file cabinets, that’s my motto right now. One of my main job titles here at home is Family CFO. I take care of all of the family finances. There is no way I would want my Travel Guy to have this task on his shoulders. He has enough to worry about going from city to city, and staying on task with his job.

Here’s what I have been working on since the New Year started. I have a fairly decent filing system for all of the paperwork. Designated by income info, banking info, auto info, mortgage and house info, utility info, and medical info. These are my major filing groups. I still have a fair amount of papers to file every month, but more and more have gone paperless over the last two years. Since January, I have been going through my files and archiving any papers over a year old. I like to keep the last year’s paperwork in my current files just in case I have to refer back to any numbers. This is especially the case with any medical bills.

All of my bills are paid online through my bank’s bill pay feature. Most of the bills are scheduled to be paid automatically, so they are just set on auto-pilot. I do make a point to go in and review the payments at the beginning of the month, just to be sure everything is in order. This is a handy way to pay the bills, and allows me to have the bills and the receipts for the payments right at my fingertips on the banking bill pay site.

One other tool that I like to use for organizing the paperwork is Microsoft One Note. You can print any bills or receipts that you want to organize directly to One Note. In One Note you are able to create notebooks, and then organize the “paperwork” in each of the notebooks for any future reference. For example, you can have a notebook for medical receipts, major purchases, paid receipts for any bills that you want to get your hands on quickly. It’s a great tool, and similar to Evernote.

One last item that takes time in the finance part of my world is keeping Travel Man all put together with his expenses. Once a month or more, depending on the current travel frequency, I go through and audit his expense reports against our credit card statement. Some months when the trips are back to back it becomes important to be sure we are getting reimbursed for all the travel expenses owed back from the company. This is a quick task for me to take care of to be sure there is nothing missed. Of course coming from a bookkeeping background does help a little in this department too.

Oh, and I do have to mention that Travel Man and I do discuss our finances on a regular basis. The finance meetings happen most often via email or a Skype call. But we stay on track together, and try not to have any big hiccups. Like I have said before, it’s a bit of a crazy existence, but right now it’s what works for us.

How do you like to organize your bills and such? Paper or paperless?

4 comments Posted in Organizing

A Near Electronics Mishap

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Renee Spindle

Last week I was in my kitchen working on chopping up some apples from our own tree, for an apple crisp. Many recipes that I use in the kitchen these days reside on my iPad. I use a program called Evernote to store a lot of my family favorite recipes, and also favorites that I have found on the internet.

I was diligently working, talking to the kids, and as I moved the cutting board I knocked over a glass of water, and it splattered my iPhone and iPad. My twenty-somethings jumped out of their seats, and got my iPad out-of-the-way. I grabbed my iPhone, and I was ever so thankful that I had the Otterbox cover on it. The twenty-somethings quickly grabbed some towels while I was tending to my iPhone, and we got everything dried up. Oh, and I also had my favorite Pioneer Woman cookbook sitting on the counter. This was a big glass of ice water.

Without the Otterbox cover on my iPhone it would have been toasted. I got the Otterbox for my iPhone because I’m always carrying it with me outside, especially when Travel Man’s on the road. And since I garden a little everyday it becomes a necessity when I am working outside. My Otterbox has saved my phone a few times now. Totally worth the investment.

There was a little skosch of water underneath the screen saver on the iPhone, and I had to remember how to get the darn Otterbox off of my phone. I could not remember which tabs to push or pull, so my daughter when on the internet and googled it for me. She tried to find a you tube video for me, but Travel Man knew how to take it off and saved the day.

Normally I don’t have a glass of anything liquid anywhere near my electronics. But I must have been extra thirsty on this cooking day, because I wasn’t really paying attention to where my glass of water was. I was focused on apple crisp (Which is a great recipe for another day). With so many electronics in the house it’s a wonder we have not had more mishaps similar to this one. Fortunately for me, this one turned out A-ok.

Have you had any electronics mishaps recently?

2 comments Posted in Around the House, Blogging, Electronics, Family

I think I’m a List-a-holic!!

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Renee Spindle

How do you keep track of your to-do’s? Are you using Outlook, Evernote, an old-fashioned tablet and a pen? I have what I will loosely call a passion for making lists. Sitting down with a cup o’ coffee in the morning and putting together my list for the day or the week, just gets my day and week going on the right foot.

I like to keep myself fairly organized, and feel like I am accomplishing things each and every day. I have lists for groceries, sewing projects, household projects, gifts ideas, recipe ideas, etc, etc.

I am always trying new and improved ways to organize my lists, with the hopes that the things on the lists will get done just that much sooner. Ha! As we all know the only thing that helps move your lists along, or get things checked off of your list is just by digging in and “doing”.

My lists were bugging me recently, because a few assorted tasks were sitting on the list idly and not getting done. So, I decided to keep track of my time for a few days to see where I was wasting time, or not making an efficient use of my time. This is kind of like writing down what you eat every day to keep track of your calories. As soon as I started keeping track, in writing, each day of what I was doing I started getting more things done. More productive time spent on things I wanted to accomplish each day. My to do lists started getting the items on them checked off in a more timely manner than normal. Boom! This principle also applies to stalking your calories each day. When you write down what you are eating, Boom! You stop snacking so much because you don’t want to write it down on the list and add it to your calories!

My favorite list / project tool right now is using Evernote. Evernote can be used for project list or shopping lists and if you have a smart phone you can sync your lists with your smart phone to your pc. In Evernote you create a notebook for your “project”, and then within each notebook you can create a list of to-do’s, and the notebooks can be shared. I find this to be a great way to keep track of ongoing projects, that are longer term items.

For my daily lists, I am finding that the old-fashioned paper and pen method is working best for the moment. Just taking a few minutes in the morning to write down what I want to accomplish each day helps me to get on track first thing in the morning. There is some kind of sense of accomplishment for me to check things off the list! Oh and I use a red pen for this part! A good way to feel good about getting things done.

How do you keep yourself organized? What’s your favorite way to make a list for the day? Do you work a list each day or week? Do lists make you cringe?

I’d love to hear from you about how you keep track of your to-do’s. Leave me a comment! Happy listing everyone.