We all love a good helpful app. And you know I'm obsessed with finding ways to make life easier. Here are a few apps that I'm absolutely loving right now.

In this podcast episode:

• Introduction

• Behind the Scenes Updates

• 5 Apps I Use Everyday

  1. Google Calendar

  2. Smart Speaker Shopping List

  3. Voxer

  4. Google Forms

  5. Zapier

• Recap

• Outro

Transcript of the Episode:

Introduction

Welcome back to the podcast, my friend, I hope you're having a fantastic Tuesday or whatever day it is, when you are listening to this. Friend, we have got the tea for you. There are some apps that I have been loving in my personal life and in my work life. I'm going to break them down for you, as well as telling you how I use them. Because you know the name of the game is to get things to be easier, so we can, like, enjoy our lives, maybe. Feel less overwhelmed, less burned out. I'm here for that. But it's been a while since I've done a personal update. So I figured I would give you that tea as well. Sometimes I always like to… sometimes I always… I really did just say that something I always like, whatever. Sometimes, maybe always, I like to know what the people that I'm following, or that I'm listening to their podcast or that I'm friends with them on social media, what they're actually up to behind the scenes.

Behind the Scenes Updates

Here's what's been going on a lot, so much. I realised the other day as I was on a walk, that I have set this vision for myself for who I want to become that is so different from who I am now. Do you ever do that? And I am so uncomfortable, ridiculously uncomfortable living in this space between who I am now and who I want to become. And part of that work that we all have to do is to enjoy that space and literally just take one step forward every day. Because as much as I want to just jump into being that person that I can envision. I'm not there yet. There are a lot of skills that I need to have in order to be her. And there's a lot of dismantling of societal stuff that I have got to dig deep into. And it is not easy.

I've been questioning a lot of how we see women in the world, of the standards that we have to uphold, and why. As I approach middle age, and I'm really looking forward to growth, evolution, ageing, I have grey hairs now. And watching myself become this other version of myself. I'm also torn because as a woman in the world, I'm still expected by many standards, including of my own, I'm only speaking for myself to look and act and somehow behave like as though I'm in my mid 20s when I’m not. But then have the awareness and the leadership skills of somebody in her mid to late 30s.

If you're rolling your eyes, yeah, me too. There's a lot of pressure on all of us to look perfect, to act perfect to have everything all together to have your house in order. Have your kids well behaved. I mean, the laundry done maybe? I don't know. And maybe that's just my Enneagram one, maybe you feel none of this pressure, but I sure do. And I've really been doing the work to try and figure out why. Why is this like this? Why are societal expectations the way that they are? And this comes from the perspective of my own, who I am in the world, but also dismantling what relationships look like, who gets priority in my life. Where I spend my time.

That's a big one is a really aligning my time and my money with my values. Because I bet you do a time audit. One of the reasons why you, and I'm saying this for myself, may feel disgruntled is because the way that you're spending your most precious resources, don't align with your values. And all of this thought and all of this dismantling, and all of these new skills that I've been trying to learn, take up a lot of calories in my brain. And I still have to have the rest of the normal calories for the rest of the normal stuff in my life.

On top of that, I also want to acknowledge you and myself and everybody in the world. Because this week marks two years… two years since your lives have changed. Two years of constantly pivoting, and living with the reality that life is uncertain. I always knew we would never go back to normal. And I'm glad that we aren't. But for a lot of us are still trying to figure out what that new normal looks like. And the world is changing rapidly. Our brains, all of our brains want to conserve as many calories as possible. And it's really hard to do. So when we can't just use the same data to make the same decisions because one plus one does not equal two anymore. We have so many other things that we have to think about at all times.

So that's where I've been in my brain. And on the fun side of things, I've been reading a few new books, they are so fun and amazing. And I have been getting back into Latin dancing, also, so fun, so amazing. All of those things really challenged me. And I've been diving deeper into gentle parenting, which helps my relationship with my kiddos. So lots of crazy, amazing, great, wonderful things that kind of put me back in the seat of the beginner, a lot. Back of the seat the student in life.

And with questioning everything. And with being student again, I'm also wondering where the need to always be working has come from. I mean, I know where it's coming from, but owning my own business, your contract, O&M stuff, I know that you get this. And everything that's been going on in the past two years has left the veil between work and personal hustle and rest very thin.

I was talking to my friend who also used to be my life coach the other day. And she mentioned that she was having a hard time resting for any great length of time, that she can take small rests, like sit down for a little bit for maybe a day off on the weekend. But longer rest is really hard for her, we have such a hustle mentality right now. And a lot of it is from survival, because we all need to survive. But the reality is that there's never going to be enough time to get all of our work done during normal work hours. And if we added more hours on to it, we would just fill those. And there's never going to be enough time or resources to do all of the personal things that we want to do as well. And rest. We need an extra day. I don't know about you, but my book list keeps getting longer. my to do list keeps getting longer. And the more that I do things outside of my values like scrolling social, because I'm just looking for a little dopamine hit or quick fix.

All of that contributes to where we are right now. That's not to say that anything's wrong. But we can change things. And one of the ways that we change things is by asking ourselves new questions. Tony Robbins says, the quality of your life is determined by the quality of questions you ask. So if you're asking yourself questions, like, Why does my job suck? Or why doesn't my student do XYZ? Maybe if you change those questions around, you'll get better answers. My question lately is, how can this be easier and more fun, while still making a significant impact? And one thing that I come back to over and over and over again, is this idea of elevating what I'm doing with my time.

We can feel like our time is abundant and our money is scarce. Especially as teachers that's what we are indoctrinated to believe because the system needs our unpaid work in order to continue. The only reason that the entire United States runs the way that it does is through unpaid work. Think about that for a second. Let's just take the system in the United States versus the systems in a place like Trinidad and Tobago, where colonisation was attempted four times, and colonisation was overthrown four times. Their economy and their system to us might seem broken. It might seem like they're a third world country. But really, our systems seem like they are working. But they're only working because colonisation arrived, and became a capitalist society based on on paid labour. Now, we trickle that down to 2022. And we still are doing it and we are guilt tripped into doing it. Hi, admins, we see you, we love you. But the truth is the truth.

So how can we make our lives easier? How can we do things faster, more efficiently, more eloquently, and do it in a way that's fun, and do things in a way that make our lives easier. In Episode 59, I share an overview of the ways that you can look at how you're spending your time and better align your time with your values. And in Episode 65, delete, automate and delegate your way to a more balanced life, I share more ways that you can delete, and delegate tasks. These apps that I'm going to share with you, they automate a lot of things for me, so I don't have to do it takes out the steps for me.

Now, as you move forward, one thing to know is that I'm always looking for ways that I can delete things off of my plate, I can automate things, and I can delegate them. None of this is comfortable for me, my brain wants to tell me all of the reasons why I can't do that. But beyond HIPPA laws, and FERPA laws, none of those reasons are true. If I could delegate out my data collection, I would. So as you go throughout this episode, instead of listening to any voice in your head, that might say something to the effect of that only works for her because ABC, I want you to instead, ask yourself a better question. How can I make this work for me? and if every idea doesn't work for you, that's totally fine. This is a behind the scenes of my personal life. Not all of its gonna apply. And that is A-okay. But it's my way to share with you what's happening behind the scenes, what I like to do, and how I can run a very successful and growing organisation during school hours for the most part. Okay, so here are a few systems and apps that I use on the daily and then I'll break down how I use them. I'm gonna break it down into personal life and then work life. And how I use them will come up organically.

5 Apps I Use Everyday

a. Google Calendar

Okay, first of all, Google Calendar. A digital calendar. Saved my little family's behind. Let me tell you just a few things that I have on my personal Google calendars and I have like seven of them, okay. Oh, actually, let me just flip over to it. Let me tell you what calendars I have. Because I separate these out so much, because I want them all separated out. You don't have to.

When I had a W two and I worked at the same school, I could have like a little paper calendar. Because the Google calendar with the bell schedule time was a little bit more tricky. But after a while, even that, like I would, if I were a teacher right now, I would still have a Google Calendar, I would still set it up, and then move things around as I needed to. Because that's one thing that I like about Google calendars. But the place that I worked, everything had… we were on their bell schedule. So it was like first period, second period, third period, right? You could just make in two different blocks for you guys. If you're itinerant, you can't really do that. I would suggest a Google Calendar. And I suggest a Google Calendar specifically because it doesn't matter what device you're on, you can just look it up.

On the personal side of my calendars. Oh my gosh, you guys I have so many. I have my own personal calendar, I have our family calendar, and then I have social option. And these are things that are happening around the city every day. And my custody schedule doesn't allow for me to go like every week. So sometimes I just want to pick and choose, oh, there's, you know, a meetup here that I wanted to go to. There's a girl group that's going hiking that I wanted to go to. I just add it there. And then I can click that button if I want to see what's going on in the city that day and if I don't want to, it's off. It's not actually on my calendar, I'm not actually doing those things. But I don't want to search all the different places to see where the different groups are, and what's going on all the time.

Also, I have every dance class in Austin on my calendar, and I don't, I can't go to many of them but they're on there. Also, my family calendar has everything that myself and my ex husband need to be on the same page about as far as parent teacher conferences, doctor's appointments, and our custody schedule is on there as well. My personal calendar has my personal events that nobody else really needs to know about. Like, I'll add my lunch breaks to there, I'll add my workouts. In a book club, I'll add my book club, and I track my cycle on there, too. So that way, I can see, oh, by the way, I need to remember that this thing is coming up. And I may or may not feel well on that day. So I may or may not actually want to go when it gets there. If you're a woman you understand. So I just track my cycle through that.

Now since we're actually on Google calendars, let me just take you over to the work side. And I'll tell you what's on my work Google calendars as well. We have our meetings. We also have a general calendar where our admins will add the times that they are working. So that way we know when we can get in touch with everybody. We have our content calendar. So that's like all the podcast episodes, that stuff that you don't really need to have on yours. But it would be helpful for you to have like one specific calendar, maybe for IEP meetings or things like that. And then I have one, that's just all of my work tasks. For you what that might look like is planning all of your planning periods in advance. Now, the other calendars that I have are holidays, and phases of the moon. And then there's a birthday one too, but I don't use that and reminders and tasks. But I don't use those either. Those might be helpful for you though. Google calendars, my goodness, probably the best invention.

b. Smart Speakers Shopping List

The second thing that I love using, especially my personal life is the smart speakers shopping list feature. If you have a smart speaker, you can add things to your shopping list as it comes up. And then that way, you don't have to remember them later. You ever get to the grocery store, buy all the things that are on your list get home, you're like, oh my gosh, I forgot to put that thing on my list. Yes, exactly happens to me all the time. So I no longer do that. I also have automated all of my shopping lists in my grocery store app as well. So that way, I know what I need on a weekly basis what I need for pantry items. And then my kids have their own list of just snack items. Because if I type in the word snack in our grocery app, the stuff that's going to come up with is not okay. So I've gone through and I have a list of snack options that they can choose from any shopping list feature on any app is a yes, definitely appreciated.

c. Voxer

Now the third app that I am a loving may or may not pertain to you if you're out in the world. But if you are an itinerant or a contract, O and M specialists, or contract TVI. And you feel a little bit like you could use some more connection in your life. But maybe you don't want to be around a bunch of people right now. The app Voxer has been so fun with connecting with my friends, the science behind it, which I didn't realise until I was reading a book on attachment styles and it shared that you can't really get attached to somebody if you don't hear their voice. There's some sort of scientific thing about it. I don't really understand. But Voxer is a walkie talkie app that you just touched the button. And it's like a voice text app and it is been so fun to connect with my friends while we are in such a big busy period of our lives. A lot of us have young kids, we have other busy lives to go around. And we don't always have time to sit down and have a FaceTime chat, or a video call, or even a phone call when we have little ones running around, so I can listen to their message. And it can be up to 15 minutes long while I'm in the car going somewhere else. And I can also respond back, given that I only have to touch the button once. And then when I'm done talking, and I get to a stop sign, I can touch the button again. And we're good to go. And it's just been lovely.

Now, there are other apps where you can pair smart items in your home to do fun things for you. For me, that goes along with my smart speaker. Sorry, I put these notes down below. I don't know why I separated them out. So for example, some things that we really love to do is have colour changing light bulbs in the kids rooms. And I can set their lights to come on at a certain time. And with a smart speaker, I can set an alarm clock to their favourite song. Now who doesn't love waking up to your favourite song as opposed to like an alarm beep beep sound. It's just been really fun way to automate waking my kids up because I don’t. I'm on my own time to like, Absolutely, they get their own time to wake up slowly. And then we can get out the door happier when I don't have to rush to wake them up. The smart speaker and smart home apps can also do things like automate your coffee, there's so many things that they can do. I’m just sharing like the bare minimum of fun ways that we use them. For the things that, you know, help make your life more automated. Might just be habits. And we'll kind of come back to that.

d. Google Forms

Okay, on my work life, we already talked about Google Calendar is amazing. Okay, other apps that I'm loving Google Forms for data. You can also use the New Mexico inventory and then for what, you would do for that is download it onto your phone. And then if you have an apple at least I have no idea how this works on Android, you would actually put it on your home screen. And I have a folder just for my learner's and I'll just go in there by their initials. I don't keep any like names on the forums, I only keep initials.

e. Zapier

Okay. And then the last one that I want to tell you about is Zapier. It's the same concept as If This Then That app. We're going to talk about them in the same, I use the one called Zapier. The other one is called If This Then That, IFTTT. Basically what it does, you have to take some time to set all these things up. But it's basically says, if x happens, then that happens. So if it's Tuesday, then my alarm will go off at 630. If, or may not even be an alarm, mine could be my alarm. But it might be something like then I will get an email reminding me to XYZ. If there's an IEP meeting on my Google Calendar, then I will get an email reminder five days earlier. What it does is it kind of triggers one event triggers another event that you would have typically had to think about in your regular life. But it takes away the fact that you don't actually have to think about it. And it does it for you. For us, we use this software. Very often, if you've come to the symposium, if you bought anything from us, what it does on the back end is it actually opens your portal for you. And it says okay, if this person registers for this product, then they get this product in the portal. Because I don't like the checkout system in the portal. It has too many steps. That's how we use it for business. But I also like using it for my contract. The next thing that I'm going to do is set up a zap to automate my invoices. So stay tuned. I will probably let you guys know on Instagram stories how that works.

And of course, the last thing is going to be any to do list app. Now. The To Do list app that I personally use is Google Calendar. I already talked about that. My work tasks that I have to get done every week. I literally block off the time for it and if it doesn't work that I can't do it at that time I move it around so that I make sure that it gets done. If you're interested in how I set up my week, so that really you could throw away your to do list if you wanted to, I go over the entire step by step and it has much changed. In episode seven, this is how important this stuff is you guys episode seven, time management system. I've been doing this same thing for years because it works.

Recap

Now those are the apps that I use. And I love using new apps to make my life easier to make everything run a little bit smoother. I personally decided not to talk about like oh, and apps like technology that you would use with your learner's because this is really about showing up for yourself as your best self asking yourself new questions, and figuring out new ways to delete, automate and delegate as many tasks as possible. The big thing here that we often miss in doing all this is the habits, we have to make sure that we are forming the habits to use these apps for them to do what we want them to do. In order for them to actually work for us. That's actually something once you've created the habit, it also becomes like an automation in and of itself, really want to do things faster, easier, help burning out and still making a significant impact in the lives of our learners. And having a personal life as well.

If you're ready to step into the best version of yourself, to skyrocket your students success, help them live their greatest potential without you burning out. The number one way to do that is to get everybody on your team to support your ideas. We've been talking a lot about this on social and I'll be talking a lot about this here as well. You are the expert in the room, but you're only with your learner's 1% of the time. So what's going on the other 99% of the time, you have to figure out how to get other people to do the things that you need them to do. And happily, without using the own employees without you being the bad guy. It took me a few years to figure out how to do that.

And on April 7, I'm going to be sharing all my secrets with you, you're going to discover the tools that you need to get your entire team on board, what you might be doing wrong when trying to collaborate with the other team members. And I'll be sharing my exact strategies that I use to go from being the annoying teacher or the teacher got mad, but was too afraid to say something to somebody that people would think when they were asked to do extra work. Like I literally got people to thank me when I asked them to do extra work. If you could see my face right now I'm like, That's magician chip right there. And I'm going to give it all to you. It's a free, accredited webinar. And at the very end of that live training, we're going to be sharing with you how you can go deeper into becoming an even better version of yourself are really, really not that much money at all. We're giving away an entire course for free. But you got to be there April 7. So if you want more information, go to alliedindependenceonline.com/training, alliedindependenceonline.com/training, and you'll get that information and you'll be able to sign up there.

Okay friends, I will talk to you soon. I hope that you can take all this information and use it to take one step forward. Talk to you next week.

Outro

You know that feeling when you've been rushing around all day. Your kids need food your students need to be scheduled. It's five minutes before your next lesson, and you have no plans. Teaching during a pandemic has had many challenges. Wouldn't you agree? One of which being it takes so much longer to plan for a remote O&M lesson, then he did to plan for a face to face lesson. But that's not a problem anymore because my friend we have got you covered. Your Allied Independence community stepped up. And we've bundled together eight remote O&M lesson plans that can be taught virtually or distance all created by your community and customisable to your individual students unique needs in five minutes or less. You want ‘em? I know you do. All you have to do is go to Allied Independence online.com forward slash remote R E M O T E and grab your copy. Eight free O&M lesson plans so you can start spending your time doing what you do best and that my friend is teaching.