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Life Hack: 18 Apps to Help Sort Your Life Out for 2018

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Family LifePost Category - Family LifeFamily Life
LearnPost Category - LearnLearn - Post Category - TechnologyTechnology

Why yes, there is an app for that: wardrobes, kids’ art, chores, translation, travel, cost sharing, even meditation!

Life gets pretty chaotic right? What we really, really need is a personal assistant or maybe a life coach – you know, to sort our lives out, keep us up to date with all those saved articles (that we never have time to read), tackle our fitness goals, organise the house, the baby and the kids. Luckily, there really is an app for pretty much everything you and your family might need help with! Here we round up 18 of the best apps for 2018.

Personal Reading: Pocket (Free)
When you are browsing the web and see an article or video you like but don’t have time to read/watch it then – use Pocket. It saves anything interesting from Facebook, Twitter, or email (across all your devices) so you can read it later – even offline! Pocket can even read aloud to you with its handy text-to-speech feature, making the school run so much more productive!

Storing Kids Art: Keepy (Free)
You know all those sweet pictures your little ones come home with that you can’t bear to throw away (but really you need to declutter!)? Well Keepy is the app for that! Keep and organize your children’s artwork and schoolwork – just upload photos and videos and Keepy will keep it in your own private website. Each family member can get their own timeline; you can also share with grandparents and even order prints.

Wardrobe Manager: Stylebook (US$5.98)
Stylebook
presents the ultimate way to organize and make the most of your wardrobe. Snap pictures of every outfit in your cupboard and you can put together looks from the office, make packing lists, and utilize every piece in your wardrobe to the max.

Fertility and Personal Tracking: Period Tracker Lite (Free)
This discrete app (called P tracker on your homepage) tracks your period by calculating the average of your past 3 months’ menstrual cycles so you can predict the start date of your next period. It’s also a great way to keep track of ovulation and fertile days, moods, and other menstrual symptoms.

Nursing/Baby Tracking: iFeed Baby Timer (£4.99)
iFeed Baby Timer keeps track of nursing sessions. This app is super useful for busy mamas to remember when they last fed their baby! The app is pretty basic and straightforward, but also has functions to track things like diaper changes, sleep patterns, bottles, and growth.

Read More: Control the Clutter: 5 Easy Ways to Keep your Kids’ Toys Organised!

Sports:  Nike+ Run Club (Free)
We love the Nike+ Run Club app, even though we barely scrape the surface of its capabilities. It’s great for tracking runs, including GPS maps, breaking down pace by mile or kilometer, and chiming in along the way to let you know how you’re going. The app also does fun trophies and badges that celebrate achievements like “fastest mile”, “longest run” or “fastest 10k”. One of the app’s newest features – guided runs – includes all sorts of cool guided workouts from world-class runners and coaches.

Meditation: Headspace (Free)
A few years ago Sassy Mama interviewed Andy Puddicombe, the founder of the meditation and mindfulness app Headspace. With meditation sessions as brief as 10 minutes long, it’s great for tapping into when stress gets on top of you. The basic version is free, although you need to buy a subscription to access its in-depth and popular “packs”, which include Focus, Anxiety and Motivation.

Household: Tody ($6.99)
Tody is the app that manages your to-do list for household cleaning routines – categorizing things that you have to do weekly (like change your sheets, check for drycleaning), or every 3 months (maybe descale the iron, ‘defuzz’ the dryer) so that you can remember when to do what. You can get the whole family involved, too: Tody can be synched across different devices and users can check in to claim credit for chores they’ve done! Definitely a great one to get older kids involved in chores.

Shopping: OurGroceries (Free)
OurGroceries 
keeps grocery lists synched on all the smartphones in your household. No more hubby calling you at the shops asking you what groceries you need. Updates are instant so if you change an item on your list – all other devices reflect this change. OurGroceries keeps track of the items you’ve entered before and lets you search through them when adding an item so writing lists is that much easier.

Read more: 6 Life Hacks To Make Parenting In Dubai Easier

Photos: Google Photos (Free)
You can’t go wrong with Google Photos, which has free unlimited storage and syncs easily with your phone and computer. It’s a lot more intuitive and easier to use than iCloud, and we like that you can get automatically created movies and collages from your photos.

Personal Postcards: Touchnote (Free)
Touchnote turns your holiday snaps into postcards with the option of having a personalised message, too (printed on thick 6” x 4” cards and laminated to protect each side), which it then will send on to friends and family — postage included! No more schlepping around looking for the perfect postie then figuring out where to buy stamps when you are on holiday in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere!

Travel Planner: Google Trips (Free)
Google Trips turns your smartphone into an all-in-one travel assistant (everyone needs own of those!), consolidating travel itineraries, flight details and hotel reservations from your emails. Google Trips also recommends related local attractions based on your interests. We love having the ability to save trip details so they can be accessed offline as well (goodbye, crazy roaming charges!).

Translation: Google Translate (Free)
If you could never get the hang of that second language but love to travel around the world, never fear. Google Translate can convert words, phrases and short sentences from one language to another at the click of a button. You can have the translation in text or as a short voice message, plus there are also visual translation features so you can read road signs and other visuals with the help of your camera!

Read more: 10 Half term/Spring Break Holidays For Your Family

Finances: Spending Tracker (Free)
Spending Tracker
is a super simple and user-friendly way to keep track of expenses (and thereby make it easier to stick to a budget).

Bill Splitting: Cost Split (Free)
For when you are out having dinner with friends or buying movie tickets plus munchies and there’s that ‘Who owes who what?‘ question at the end of the night. Cost Split gets rid of any cost-share headaches by keeping track of everyone’s communal spending (thanks to the cloud sync) and working out who owes who what. We are hearting this app big time.

Transport: RTA Dubai App (Free)
Gotta know how to get from A to Z via F? The RTA Dubai App will help you do just that and more. From renewing your vehicle registration to topping up your parking account, pay salik or fines (eek, hopefully none!), you can do it all here.

Read more: 5 Realistic Tips For Budgeting In 2018

Directions: Waze (Free)
Waze is the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app. Join other drivers in your area who share real-time traffic and road info, saving everyone time and gas money on their daily commute -you can’t get better than that! Time to beat the traffic.

Taxis: Uber (Free)
Uber
is a reliable app to have when you are looking for a taxi in a foreign city (as long as you can get a Wi-Fi connection). It’s especially handy when you’re wary of driver safety in a foreign country, as Uber vets all their drivers and it also takes away that awkward haggling for a fee in countries where this is commonplace.

So consider this your “get organized” to-do list, people! Let us know if you have a favourite app that we need to know about!

Read More: Best Educational Apps For Kids of All Ages

 

Lead image by Rahul Chakraborty via Unsplash

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