Your kids are back to school, you likely had a busy Summer, and now you’re gearing up for an even busier Fall.  We know, we are doing the same.  With late practices, games, carpooling, conflicting schedules, work schedules, and special school nights, it’s time to organize your life to make things go more smoothly.

We compiled a list of 5 gadgets are designed to help you organize your life.  Some we are using, some are on our list to try, but all of them will help you to focus on what matters most, your family.

5 Gadgets To Help Organize Your Life

Anova Precision Cooking

Do you organize your life so well that you know exactly what dinners you’re making for the week?  With as crazy as life gets, this isn’t always possible.

Instant pressure cookers are all the rage right now, but how well versed are you on sous vide cooking?  Used in restaurants, sous vide is a cooking technique in which you place foods in a vacuum-sealed bag and cook it in a temperature controlled water bath.  With the temperature at a precise and consistent setting, food is cooked to the exact level of doneness, no matter how long it soaks in its warm bath. 

Meat comes out wonderfully tender, never overcooked.  The Anova Precision Cooker Wi-Fi is your next best kitchen friend.  It’s easy to use.  Seal your meats and vegetables in an air-tight bag and place in a large bowl or bucket of water.  Clip on the Anova sous vide immersion circulator on the side of the large pot at a low temperature and let it cook.

Meat comes out juicier, retaining most of its nutrients and never burned over overcooked.  What’s better? No pan to clean!  Just toss the baggie, empty the bowlful of water, and you’re done.

Setting the temperature is a breeze.  With the Anova app, select the type of meat and cut and it connects with the Anova Precision Cooker via WiFi to begin heating up and circulating the water.  Set it and forget it.  Come back to an evenly cooked juicy piece of meat…unlike well cooked mushy meat you find in your crockpot at the end of the day.

No need for special bags or vacuum sealing.  Ziplock bags work great.

The Anova Precision Cooker Wi-Fi is available from Amazon for $191 including free shipping.

Google Home

Google Home is my new favorite toy.  It sits in my kitchen and we talk daily.  I’ll ask it the weather, my schedule for the day, and sometimes the news…if I’m feeling up to it.  I’ll ask it to play a certain genre of music while cooking dinner or to call my husband when my hands are full.

My son loves playing Lucky Trivia with it.  You can choose a number of contestants and Google Home goes around asking each contestant a trivia question for several rounds before determining a winner.  Games like Mad Libs and Crystal Ball are a lot of fun too.

But one feature I cannot get enough of is the Google Home Shopping list.  I simply say, “hey Google, add peanut butter to my list” and she confirms it’s been added!  This is such a time saver!  And guess what?  My kids use it to help add grocery items too.

The other night my daughter yelled from two rooms away to add something to our shopping list and Google heard and confirmed her request.  No writing anything down, no typing it into your shopping list on your phone, it’s all done via voice.  I love it!  Just pull up the list on your Google Home app.  

Oh and if you don’t feel like shopping, Google Home has partnered with several companies to have the items on your list delivered!

What else can Google Home do?  So much more.  You can set it up to control your connected lights, connected thermostat, and more.  Your kids can ask it questions while doing homework.  Ask anything that you’d normally search for on Google.  You can even ask Google Home to find recipes and she’ll read the directions for you!

Google Home will help you organize your life better while giving you an extra friend to talk to!

Google Home is available through Best Buy for $129, including free shipping.

Monument Personal Cloud

Organize your photos and you organize your life … well at least your life memories!

Monument is the solution you have been looking for that automatically backs up the photos from all of your smartphones and tablets and allows you to view them anywhere through the app.  If you are constantly running out of storage on your phone because you take pictures all the time, you’re not alone.  But who has the time to keep downloading the pictures from your phone to your computer?

Monument makes this easy for you.  Connect the Monument cloud device to your home’s WiFi and plug in a thumb drive or other external USB hard drive and you’re ready to go.  From the instant you walk into the house, your pictures are transferred to your Monument cloud device.  

At your leisure, you can delete pictures from your phone or pick and choose which ones to keep and discard, knowing that all your photos are already backed up.

I often delete many of the photos on my phone but keep my favorites to show family or friends very easily, without the clutter of the hundreds of photos I take.  

But Monument does more than make your photos accessible via the Internet.  It also organizes your pictures, recognizing faces, places and things (beach, snow, Yosemite, etc.), and more.  Try searching for football and see pictures of your son’s football games pop up.  Try searching for food and find pics involving food.  You can even search for photos by the device they were taken on.

Monument even works with your non-digital cameras too.  Simply place the SD card from your camera into Monument and it automatically downloads the photos for you.  You don’t have to do a thing, it’s that easy.

Compared to online cloud storage sites, using Monument has no monthly fees and gives you privacy since your photos are stored with Monument rather than on some unknown server.  

Pull up your photos on your Monument app from any smartphone or tablet.  Or better yet, you can even pull them up on your smart TV for a wider audience.

The Monument Personal Cloud is available through Amazon for $150 including free shipping.

LG Hombot Turbo

We’ve written about the LG Hombot before.  It’s a great robotic vacuum that uses two cameras to map your floors so it knows where to clean.  The latest innovation from LG, the Hombot Turbo + Robotic Vacuum (CR5765GD), does more than cleans your floor, it even detects and alerts you to movement in your house…and sends you pictures of what it detects!

With its HomeGuard feature, your Hombot monitors your home anytime, anywhere.  Amazing, huh?  It always helps to have an extra set of eyes in your home.  And just think of the unsuspecting robber who thinks you don’t have any cameras!

The LG Homebot Turbo + Robotic vacuum has two cameras, one on top and one on the bottom.  The cameras help the vacuum to calculate distance information and plot its course for the most efficient clean.  The Hombot takes pictures of the ceilings, walls, and floors of every room before it creates its navigational map.  It’s truly amazing what technology can do.

You can schedule the times and days you’d like the Hombot to run.  Sure, you can sweep the floor yourself for cheaper, but this robotic vacuum will likely be more reliable and efficient.  Oh, and it will never complain!

The Hombot’s unique squarish shape and long extending brushes help to get out fur and crumbs from corners.  Its slim profile allows it to easily go under beds and couches for a more thorough clean.

LG thought of everything.  If the battery runs low while vacuuming, the Homebot will go back to its charging station and resume operations where it was once charged.  Although the Homebot won’t  clean itself after a cleaning, you simply press a button to lift the top up and remove the filter to clean.  It’s super easy.

The LG Hombot Turbo+ Robotic Vacuum is available through Fry’s for $749 including free shipping.

Isn’t amazing how technology can be used to make life easier?  Organize your life each day by adopting technology to make it go smoother.  Now the family calendar is easier than ever before.  Finding recipes online is as simple as speaking it now and let the Anova Precision Cooker cook your food perfectly while you’re out working or picking up kids and driving them everywhere.

Keep taking pictures, they’ll be backed up now and think about how nice it would be to come home to a freshly swept home.  No more annoying dog hair and crumbs from breakfast to look out.  There are tons of tech products out there to make life easier, the tricky part is learning what works best for you.

Our team at WellConnectedMom.com are all busy moms with anywhere from 2-5 kids in our families.  Technology can be a great time saver, we know, we use it every day!  If you have heard about a gadget you think would be helpful but would like us to test it first, let us know.  Wherever we can help make family life easier and even more fun for your family, we’re all over it!