Good news: I found your sanity. It’s in this app.
We all love simple apps, right? Especially when they help us quickly master major tasks like meal planning, family scheduling, and creating grocery and shopping lists swirling around in our heads.
Even better, is when they help us reach ALL our goals (like better productivity, crazy fast meal planning, and total family involvement).
The Cozi app is the app I can’t seem to stop bragging about (so much so, that I think my Mother in Law thought I was a little off my rocker the last time I sat down and gave her a tour of it).
This baby is like a Ferrari. The features go on, and on, and on, and gets almost as much screen time on my phone as my Pinterest app.
Let’s take a tour
Yes, it’s a Calendar App
I think a lot of people come to Cozi thinking it’s a Calendar App. (It is.) But, to be honest, of ALL the features, it’s probably my least favorite.
Their calendar feature (especially in desktop mode) has some great aspects. You can quickly and intuitively load schedules that are themed (you could have a schedule for the whole family labeled “Church Events”, for example), while also having schedules that apply only to certain members of the family.
A Family’s List of Cozi Schedules might look like this:
Whole Family:
- School Calendar
- Church Calendar
- Birthdays and Anniversaries
- What’s for Dinner (more on this later, woohoo!)
Parent 1:
- Work Schedule
- Gym Schedule
- Volunteer Activity Schedule
Parent 2:
- Work Schedule
- Bill Pay Schedule
- Kids Coaching Schedule
Kid 1:
- Football Schedule
- Sports Snack Schedule
Kid 2:
- Gymnastics Schedule
- Chore Schedule
Parent & Kid:
- Popcorn Day Reminder
- Library Day Reminder
- Doctor’s Appointments
- Hair Cut Reminders
- Gymnastics and Football Performance Schedule
As you can see, the possibilities are endless. And, just as they are organized by color in my example, they are organized by color in the app, as well.
You can activate all of your schedules to appear in the calendar at once, or layer just the ones you need. For example, if you want to see only your work schedule for the month, you can isolate just that entry, and read it/reference it quickly (on desktop only, though, FYI).
The best part, (and I will be saying this again, and again, and again) is that it is GLOBAL. So, any member of the family, at any time, can not only see exactly what is happening, but can make changes accordingly.
Privacy: Don’t want the kids to know about your upcoming Pap Smear? Trying to keep your plans for your spouse’s surprise birthday party under wraps? No worries. You can add anything to the calendar at any time that is JUST for you, under your color/profile. No one else in the family will see it/know about it, unless you decide to share it with them (and even then, you can select the WHOLE family, or only individual members).
Cozi is a Meal Planning Boss
When I first discovered Cozi, I was actually looking for a Meal Planning App.
After reading a little about it, I decided to give the free version a spin, and after only 10 minutes on the platform, was enthusiastically upgrading.
Besides being crazy intuitive, Cozi’s recipe box brought immediate clarity to my online world.
If you’re anything like me, you have recipes tucked away…well, everywhere.
Pinterest, All Recipes, Google Drive, Drop Box, Gmail, your kitchen counter, that great cover recipe in Southern Living Last month that you meant to grab, etc.
I feel like I see great stuff ALL the time, but when it comes time to meal plan, I’m at a complete loss. Where are all my great recipes?
Worse, I’ll be cruising through the grocery store frantically trying to grab the few things I need for dinner, and I can’t recall…. “Did that recipe call for crushed tomatoes, or diced? Was it 12 ozs, or the 24oz?” Ugh!
Now I’m hunting: Standing in the middle of the grocery store aisle, cruising through Google Drive, Pinterest, etc trying to remember where the heck that recipe is stashed, and what on earth I named it.
Totally unnecessary drama.
Cozi fixes all these problems. The first evening I had it, I spent maybe 30 minutes pulling up the URL’s for all my go-to’s, and was able to INSTANTLY drop them into my Cozi Recipe box.
Even better, you can also quickly compose your own recipe. I have one that I made up, for example, that uses only about 5 things (which I usually have on hand). Simply seeing the title for that recipe in my recipe box often reminds me that I have that in my arsenal, and helps me remember to make it!
It also works great for sharing recipes. You can quickly export your favorite dish via text (or any other share!) to a friend, or if they send you a recipe (whether it be email, text, hyper-link, etc) you can import it into Cozi in seconds.
Remember that Southern Living Recipe you meant to cut out and save? Don’t bother. Google it quickly on your phone and add it to Cozi in seconds.
Found a favorite dish on Pinterest? Pin it, and then add it to Cozi.
Made it, loved it, but want to keep your changes to it? Easy. Open the recipe and start editing.
Mom wants to know the changes you made so she can try it, too? Click “Share”.
It really, really, REALLLY is that simple.
Plus, each and every recipe has 4 perfect little buttons at the top to help you even further:
1. “Screen On”
Do you find that reading a recipe on Pinterest is literal hair-pulling frustration? You load the blog, you’re reading through it, and while you are off gathering items or performing tasks, your screen goes black.
By the time you get back….welllll….maybe it will take you back to your place, but maybe you’ll find yourself kicked out of the page and back on the Pinterest landing page.
UGHHHHHH!
I had screenshots of Pinterst recipes for miles. My phone was out of storage space, and I could never remember what that recipe was when I saw it in my photos later.
Do yourself a favor: stop all this craziness.
Add your recipes to your Cozi Recipe Box and read them on the app. The “Screen On” feature keeps your screen on (go figure), so that every time you reference your phone or tablet (goopy fingers and all), it’s right there. Exactly where you left it.
2. Add to Shopping List
I’ve used Apps in the past that claim to make shopping lists for me out of my recipes.
They suck.
Sorry, just one girl’s opinion, but it’s my truth, and I’m stickin to it.
Cozi does everything I would do if I had designed the app myself.
- It offers to import my recipe to a shopping list. Before doing this, it gives me the option of selecting one of my already created lists (Costco, Kroger, TJ’s, etc), or lets me create my own list from scratch for that particular project.
- It then imports the ingredients, but allows me to quickly and easily delete anything I don’t need.
- Lastly, I can quickly reorganize/reorder the ingredients so that they appear in whichever order I choose (in my case, usually in the order I shop).
So. Dang. Easy.
3. Add to Calendar
Decided Tuesday night is Balsamic Chicken Night? Perfect. Grab the recipe and post it to the Calendar. It will immediately add it to the family calendar under Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner, for all to see.
Want to add some of your Cheddar Broccoli and Spinach Salad to the menu? One click, and they appear.
Sharing the App with extended family members for a big family get-together? Easy. Post all the recipes to the date of the event, and even assign family members to each recipe (and no need to share, because its already in the recipe box!).
4. Share
Recipes are meant to share. Cozi shoots it over to them in a perfectly formatted, no nonsense presentation that is beautiful, easy to read, and totally add free.
Your recipe sharing circle will love you.
Never Leave Home Without Your List Again
Being a Commercial Airline Pilot, my husband is gone a LOT. A. Lot.
I was a list person before I was a busy (sometimes solo) Mom of two, but now that our world spins with a multitude of schedules, diets, and needs, they are literally the source of my sanity.
Our Cozi lists vary depending on need, but there are five that never leave the App:
Costco
Grocery
Trader Joe’s
Amazon
To-Do
Now, quick detour, I should add that Cozi does offer the option to split your lists between “To-Do” and “Shopping”.
Initially, I confess I didn’t put much stock in this distinction, until I learned the values.
“Shopping” has a great new feature called “Shopping Mode” where, when activated, it grays out any item checked off on your list and pulls it to the bottom. This makes it SO much easier (and quicker!) to see where you are on your list, or what is left. No more hunting!
Back to our lists:
My biggest problem with my lists, is that they are MY lists. When I would keep them on my phone or write them down, I never seemed to have them handy when I was talking to a family member.
My husband loves to do this to me. I’ll be driving through rush hour traffic, speaking to him on the phone via bluetooth in my car, and he says to me “Oh, hey, the next time you’re at Trader Joe’s, could you grab some more of that Shaving Cream I like?”
Ughhhhhh! I won’t remember that!
And I can’t go write it down because I’m driving.
Meanwhile, he’s chilling in his hotel room with nothing to do but add to my list of things to remember.
I can’t tell you how much fun it was the day I got to say “Hey, remember that app I had you download last time you were home? Open that sucker up and ADD IT TO THE LIST”
I’m not everyone’s personal assistant, and it’s refreshing to finally remind my family members they can help themselves!
(I often love to remind kids that it takes just as long to add something to the appropriate Cozi list as it does to text it to ME.)
It took awhile to get the habit going, but now everyone gets it right. Such a huge help!
The same has been true for our Amazon list. My teenager can add things to the list as a wish list at Christmas and Birthday times, or if I’m running around in the morning trying to get out the door and recall I need to order something (but don’t have time to stop and do it RIGHT THEN), I quickly add it to my list, and its there to reference the next time I’m ready to place an Amazon order.
To-Do Lists are even more fun. Each individual family member has their own list, which means I can create a chore list for each of my kids and watch throughout the day as they check them off.
When they come home from school and want screens, all I have to say is “Check your chore list first.” If I noticed socks in the hall or a pile of crayons on the kitchen table earlier that day, I don’t have to remember to tell them when they get home from school. I open their to-do list, add it to the screen, and put the responsibility on them.
Enter: My return to sanity.
Lastly, if you’re like me and travel a lot, you may have a packing list. Hubs and I love these for getting ready for big trips. We not only make lists for the kids that we can quickly add things to as we remember (like: DOWNLOAD STUFF TO YOUR TABLET TO WATCH ON THE PLANE!, or DON’T FORGET YOUR CHARGER!), but we also create global lists for things like camping trips where we can both jot things down as we think of them without having to remember to tell the other person.
Also, you can export lists and text and email them to others or print them out.
Our eight year old daughter never fails to forget at least one (if not many) items when she goes to visit Grandma.
This time, I printed her list out for her and added it to her suitcase. When she was packing up at Grandma’s to come home, I had her pull it out and make sure that everything that WENT with her, also CAME HOME with her.
Nothing left behind. First time ever.
Case in point: Lists are freaking awesome.
Other Cozi Features:
To truly get into every single nook and cranny of Cozi would take me longer than either of us have time for.
However, I will share with you a few of the other great features and things we’ve used them for.
My Favorite Premium Feature: Birthday Calendar.
Ohhhhhh myyyy goodness.
What a lifesaver.
One person. One entry. MANY options.
My husband’s Great Aunt (who in 10 years I still have never met, but always send a card) is the one person I NEVER remember until the day of her actual birthday when my calendar pings me.
Not helpful.
Cozi, solves this problem. Great Aunt Jo’s Birthday profile is set to remind me four times:
- The beginning of the month (So I remember to add to the to-do list and shopping list)
- 10 days out (make sure you got a card!)
- 5 days out (mail that dang card!)
- Her ACTUAL birthday (Cozi reminds HUBBY (not me!) to call her).
Total. Win.
My co-worker’s birthday that we have talked about nonstop in meetings for the past 3 weeks? Her birthday profile has just one simple reminder: Tell me the morning of, so I remember to say Happy Birthday as I walk into the office.
I don’t need 4 reminders for her. Just the quick one the day of.
Thank you, Cozi.
Another great feature is Contacts
Contacts are a feature that went widely ignored by my brood in the beginning.
Who really needed/wanted Contacts? We all have phones that store this information, so it felt redundant to save it twice.
Then we had a great idea: We created contacts for each of the VIPs in our Kid’s lives. We created a profile for Grandma and Grandpa, our Best Friends, our BabySitters, etc.
We used this as an emergency contact sheet for our kids to reference. They always had the full names and phone numbers of important contacts if they needed them, and most of all had their address. The example we gave our children was that if they were at Grandma and Grandpa’s house and had to call 911, would they know the address? Probably not.
Bargaining on the fact that our kids almost always have their device within reach, we remind them constantly to reference their devices for this information during an emergency. (We’ve even done practice drills with this information).
Husband and I have also found this feature handy for notes. His parents rent the same vacation home every year, for example, and we can never remember the gate code to get into the resort. We store this info in their contact and can easily find it when needed.
The kids each have a profile, also. Hubs is gone a lot, so he makes notes of things he usually can’t remember. His favorite is the kids’ Starbucks orders (something Mommy invented for each kid, and neither they nor he can recall). My Starbucks orders are in there also.
Case in point, however you like to use the feature, if you are motivated to keep your entire life on Cozi, there are definitely creative ways to use it.
Cozi Journal
The last bonus feature is the Cozi Family Journal. This was another feature that was untouched in the beginning, but eventually found a home in our daily rotation.
The Journal is a family sharing space where you can make “entries” with photos, text, etc.
We first thought to use it last Thanksgiving. My Mom declared she wanted each of us to write down what we were grateful for each day for three weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.
We did this habit over dinner each night, but to be honest, it was sometimes chaos. Dinner wasn’t always at home, sometimes it was in the car on the way to sports practice, or (in Hubby’s case) sitting in an airport 1,000’s of miles away.
I made a journal entry for each day, and posted a family picture in each entry. Then, each day, we had the responsibility of going in and jotting down what we were thankful for (plus, if we forgot the day before, we could add something to that day, as well).
At the end of the three weeks we had a beautiful momento of family pictures and gratitudes, which we were able to share with the extended family at Thanksgiving (and which I still sometimes go back and reference, as some of our kids’ gratitudes were things like “The earth” or “Insulated Cups”, “Cows”, and “Spellcheck” (our teenage son, lol!)).
Cozi is as unique as you want to make it, and in the end, it’s all about remembering to use it, and customizing for your life and needs.
If You Want toTake It To A Whole New Level
I’ve described a Cozi world for you that involves all of my family members (me, spouse, and kids, for example). But…there is ANOTHER global aspect of Cozi, which can expand your organization and planning even further.
I’ll use our family as an example.
In our family, Hubby and I (+kids) live in the Pacific Northwest, my parents live two states over, and Hubby’s parents and sister’s family live in Texas. We are completely spread out.
However, thanks to Cozi, finding time for our annual get togethers, vacations, and holidays is SO much easier now.
We each publish our family schedule to Cozi, and can easily spot where everyone has a window to get together.
Planning a 4th of July BBQ, or Thanksgiving Dinner?
SO simple. Everyone’s recipes are together in the database. You pull them, pin them to the event, and assign someone to make it (using colors! yay!).
Need some stuff picked up at the store on your way to the BBQ? No worries, I made a list for you in Cozi with everything we need. If I think of anything else, I’ll add it.
Literally. The Platform. Of. My. Dreams.
Don’t take my word for it, though! The free version still has lots of great features, and the Gold version is only $30/yr if you want to upgrade.
Cheers to a Great Life!
XoXo
