Review ~ Paperless Home Organization by Simplified Pantry

Keeping up with schedules and piles of papers is a struggle just about every family has.  I’ve been a list maker since I was a child, but following through on the lists is a whole challenge in itself.  

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.

With the Molly Review Crew, a sister company to the Schoolhouse Review Crew, I recently had the opportunity to review Paperless Home Organization by Simplified Pantry. I was so looking forward to this one!

I also received Simplified Dinners and Simplified Dinners Gluten/Dairy Free. The focus of the review will be on Paperless Home Organization. Simplified Pantry was created by Mystie Winckler a homeschooling mother of 5 children.

Paperless Home Organization is a 75-page ebook that is available in both PDF and Kindle formats.

Paperless Home Organization takes you step by step through setting up an online home management binder. The main setup uses 3 programs that will run on anyone's computer since they are web-based.

Remember the Milk, Evernote, and a Google account for Gmail and calendar. You could use this process with other applications, but Mystie includes step-by-step screenshots using her suggested apps.

I’m already a heavy Evernote user, I started using Evernote when it first came out a few years ago for my genealogy organization. At that time I began converting my file folders and notebooks into Evernote files. I love how much space this saves and it’s so easy to find anything with the search.

I had already started converting my home management binder into Evernote and I was glad to be able to pick up some tips from Mystie! Things like automating groups of emails to be forwarded into Evernote and setting up daily routine to-do lists.

A large section of her book deals with how to organize your emails. Now I have to confess I have 6 different email addresses that I use daily including 2 different gmails. I do have a good folder/label system set up but finding time to organize them isn’t always easy.

I already had email filters set up to sort my e-group messages into sorted folders, but Mystie had so many good ideas for taking this process further. Getting a handle on my emails so each inbox is zeroed out every week will take a while.

Seriously I get a crazy amount of emails every day between my YouTube channel, e-groups, newsletters, and research projects. I am making progress!

Mystie recommends checking your emails online, I don’t do this I use Thunderbird email and have all of my accounts download into it. I also don’t normally check my Google calendar online since I use a plug-in with Thunderbird to synchronize its Lightning calendar with my Google one. However, even with these differences, I could still use many of her ideas.

Mystie suggests Remember the Milk as a to-do list organizer for the “extra” things outside of your normal routines in Evernote. Remember the Milk has been around for a while, but this was the first time that I tried it.

It is a free web app but if you want to use a more complete syncing feature you need to pay for a premium account.

For my own use, I find the free version worked just fine and I was happy to see it could be synced with my Linux desktop to-do list program that I already used. This is actually great so if I’m away from home I can still check my list.

For myself, I don’t own a smartphone although my hubby does. I do have an Android tablet but it’s not connected to a data plan only wifi.

In our area, most restaurants have free wifi as do the libraries but other stores don’t. So for myself, I have no way to check my lists using Remember the Milk or Evernote if I’m not in a wifi zone.

If hubby is with me then it’s not a problem as I’ll just snatch his phone!  So for myself, if I’m heading out somewhere I’m still likely to print off my shopping list.  Also living in a rural area our internet can hiccup a lot.

So it is very important to me to have access to my information if the internet goes out.  Thankfully Evernote has desktop clients for Windows and Mac and there is NeverNote for Linux.

For me, it’s about finding the right balance between having things on your pc, online, and in paper format.

I can highly recommend Paperless Home Organization to anyone wishing to move their home management system online or even if you're looking for new ideas for using Evernote, RTM, and Gmail.