Sneaky inside information from radio research...

Like every other company that wants your attention, radio companies do a pile of research called "psychographics" to see how you shop and why you think what you do. I get to share some of the good stuff with you here.

See, every woman SAYS she'd like to simplify her life.

That's crap.

There's too much to do, especially in this economy. So, what we REALLY want is...balance. If you feel like you're juggling with all twenty fingers and toes, here's some ideas to help.

Streamline:

www.Google.com/calendar is a great site where every member of the family has a seperate space to lay out scheduling issues and plans. You can even color-coordinate that bad boy! There's another good site called http://www.cozi.com/ that'll do the same thing, THEN send it to your phone!

http://www.doodle.com/ will keep you from murdering your girlfriends for saying, "I don't know, when do YOU want to go?" It's an online poll that logs preferred dates and times of all invitees and shows you the best agreed-upon times.

Kiss off the paper:

(Editor's note: this one will be hard for me, I loooove my filing. But it must be done. Who has the time?)

http://www.jingproject.com/ is a free application that snapshots a digital image of your payment recipts and store them neatly on your hard drive. There's a nice little budgeting website called http://www.mvelopes.com/ that can help you pay everything online if you feel a little intimidated.

Lists are my curse: we have an entire calendar for medical stuff for our twins...one for the show...one for interviews for the show...one for appointments and such...one for family events with our massive extended family and friends. I managed to screw up everything until I found http://www.springpadit.com/. You can create as many lists and calendars as you need, then it combines them and shows you overlaps or problems.

Next week:

Decluttering and online tools...