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There are a few apps that I just couldn’t live without. Cozi is hands down in the top three. Since my family has started to use the Cozi app, my life seems much more organized and manageable. It could just be a placebo effect, but I’m pretty sure this app is life-changing.
What is Cozi?
Cozi is a family organizer app. It has a shared family calendar, shared grocery list, to-do list, a meal planner, contact list, birthday list, and more. You an access Cozi on the app or on your desktop which makes it very accessible for your whole family.
How much is Cozi?
Cozi has a free version and a subscription version. The free version is really good and includes most of the available features like the shared family calendar, grocery lists, and to-do lists. The free version is supported by ads, which are not too intrusive to your experience. There is also a subscription version of Cozi, which I quickly upgraded to.
The paid version includes all of the features of the free along with a monthly calendar view (which is the reason I upgraded), access to more notifications and reminders, shared contacts, and the birthday tracker. The paid version is also ad-free if that is important to you. The cost of the subscription is fairly inexpensive, I paid $29 for the whole family for the year.
What is so great about Cozi?
Shared Calendar
My husband and I both work and travel pretty regularly for our jobs. When we do get to see each other we are typically trying to keep our kids from eating batteries or something (my daughter literally just had a battery in her mouth, the joys) so we don’t have a lot of time to debrief on our schedules. Now, we just put our work commitments, travel schedule, and kids activities in there. You can set up notifications, so if my husband adds something in there I receive notification and vice versa. I also love that you can set up multiple reminders. For things I have to get to, I set up a reminder a few weeks out, a couple days before, and the morning of. Seems excessive, but I need all the help I can get.
You can also have other family members and caretakers use the app. My mother-in-law watches my kids most days so we added her to our family calendar. She has access to all of the kids activities and our work schedules. My kids aren’t super involved in sports or activities yet but I can see this being a super helpful feature once they are. Grandparents and other family members can see all of the kids games and other activities. You can color coordinate your calendar and also automatically send a daily or weekly agenda to people.
Shopping List
Another feature of Cozi that I absolutely love the shopping list feature! It’s a centralized list so everyone in the house can add items to the shopping list. Nothing is more annoying than going to the grocery store and someone not telling you that you ran out of something. This makes it easy for everyone to add items to one list that you always have access to. You can even sync your Cozi app with Alexa!
To-Do List
With Cozi, you can pretty much create a list for anything. We have a family to-do list for items that need to be done around the house. I add things like “buying a birthday gift for Susie” and “get oil changed” to the list so that everyone can see and pick up the slack (hopefully!). The opportunities are endless with lists.
Some other helpful lists I have seen are a kids chore list, vacation packing list, holiday gift list, and a back to school shopping list, In fact, Cozi has a whole library of pre-made checklists that you can start using. The lists help you distribute the workload and keep everyone organized.
Meal Planner
I absolutely hate meal planning. I never know what to cook so I pretty much end up cooking the same three things (cooking is not my zone of genius). Each week, figuring out what we would eat would take up so much mental capacity. It was silly. Cozi has a meal planning feature that allows you to set your meals ahead of time. It is so amazing. One night I was watching tv and decided to plan our dinners for the next three months. It took me minutes (seriously, 20 minutes, tops) and has probably saved me hours of time and anguish. This simple act has also saved me a ton of time in grocery shopping. I just go in each week to see what’s on the menu and I order accordingly. I just use it for dinners right now but will definitely use it once fall comes around for school lunches.
Recipe Box
Cozi also has a Recipe Box feature which is pretty awesome. You can save recipes to the box which are then accessible to everyone and anytime. There has been a few times I have been at the grocery store and referenced the recipes to make sure that we had all the ingredients. The app even has a dim-free feature which prevents your screen from blacking out while you are cooking. Literally, Cozi has thought of everything.
I am such a fan of this app. It is clearly designed with busy families in mind (it would even be great for busy couples) and it just keeps getting better. If anyone has any questions about the app or has any tips to share, leave a comment below! I would love to hear how others use it!
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