Working moms juggle so much during the day, from managing pressures at work to organising a multitude of family responsibilities. Apps to make life easier for busy moms have mushroomed on the market, and while some weren’t originally designed with moms in mind, they’ve been adopted wholeheartedly as ways to more easily navigate daily life. Try these seven apps to help moms under pressure.
Manage family tasks
Has the trash been put out, the garden watered and the dishwasher unstacked? It’s many a working mom’s endless battle to keep track of who has (or hasn't!) done their chores. OurHome offers a simple way to coordinate chores, and turn the doing of them into a game.
Family members can create to-do lists and assign tasks to each other, such as wiping counters, mowing the lawn, or walking the dog, with a note box allowing comments to be added. Adults can award points to tasks, with kids able to exchange those points for rewards such as pizza, an hour more of Playstation or having car privileges. Suddenly washing the dishes becomes meaningful, with kids incentivised to help keep the family home humming along happily.
Healthy eating made easy
Eating healthier is easier when you have a plan. Mealime is a perfect way to customise weekly meal plans with delicious dishes to suit your family’s unique tastes and lifestyle. Simply pop in your food preferences and any dietary restrictions, then select the week’s meals from recipes the app curates for you.
To help even more, the app automatically generates a shopping list with the ingredients you’ll need for that week’s dishes, saving time on unnecessary trips to the shops. The recipes all have a healthful bent and can be cooked in 30 minutes or less. The app is so smart that if you use the automatic meal planner, it will combine recipes to use up any leftovers, meaning zero food waste!
Meditation and mindfulness
Rated as one of the best meditation and mindfulness apps on the market, Headspace will bring calm into your busy life, with hundreds of meditations of varying lengths for you to choose from in its comprehensive library.
Perfect for beginners, the app has convenient features like being able to set reminders, track your progress, and download some of the sessions to experience offline. Other site perks include sleep casts to induce restful sleep, calming music playlists and child friendly content.
Find a great electrician, plumber or handyman fast
Need help around the house fast to fix a burst geyser, unblock a drain or get keys out of a locked car? SweepSouth’s Connect app takes the hassle out of finding a reputable handyman, plumber, electrician or painter, by connecting you to vetted and rated professionals close to you.
Once you’ve selected the service you want, a chat feature allows you to talk to them directly. The app also has a very handy image recognition feature, which lets you take a picture of a household area or broken item so that it can identify which service professional is best suited to help fix the problem!
Keep your focus in a busy environment
Having worked from home for so long, many of us may struggle with the distractions of a busy office space once we go back to working in an office environment. To help you focus, A Soft Murmur offers a simple, yet effective solution, with various ambient noises to drown out distractions and help you focus.
Choose from a selection of sounds found in nature, such as the soft patter of rain or the easy sweep of the wind, each softly soothing, and overlay them for hypnotically comforting effect.
Making charity easy
We're all aware of how much some people are struggling, and that charities are heaving under the burden of helping the needy. It's not always easy to know where help is needed most, but one app does an incredible job of helping everyday South Africans give back to others.
The MySchool MyVillage MyPlanet app lets you 'swipe' your virtual card when doing purchases in-store and online, and have a portion of your spend go to the cause of your choice - at no extra cost to you. Visit www.myschool.co.za to sign up now, and shop at any of their retail partners including Woolworths, Bidvest Waltons, loot.co.za, Builders, Engen and more.
Eating out, for everyone
Being a vegetarian or going vegan is fast becoming a life choice for many, including teens, and while restaurants are rising to the challenge, it can be frustrating finding one when family or friends want to go out.
Enter Happy Cow, an app with listings not only of vegetarian or vegan restaurants in your area, but any establishment with vegan or vegetarian offerings, such as an ice-cream shop with vegan flavours. Each venue has a description of what’s on offer and user reviews.
You can also join a community of like-minded people worldwide, sift through delicious recipes posted by users and find loads of information on topics such as travel (vegan friendly B&Bs, and the top 10 vegan-friendly cities in the world), making sustainable food choices, and going veg and the environment.