Life can be chaotic without a schedule—more so if you’re dealing with an entire family. Overlapping schedules and appointments, a pantry running low on stocks, and looming family get-togethers can be difficult to juggle without jotting things down on a calendar.As luck would have it, there’s an app called Cozi that makes organizing your family’s schedule become an easy task. However, the app is more than just a shared calendar—think of it as your family’s personal secretary. Here are things that this amazing family calendar can do for you and your household.
What Is Cozi?
Cozi is a family organizer that helps individuals in a household to communicate, plan, and coordinate their activities and agendas with everyone. This is very handy, especially when planning get-togethers or family bonding time.
It can even be a life-saver so that you won’t skip any important school activities or forget to buy toothpaste on your next trip to the grocery. You can set the app to notify you through email, on your device, or both of them about reminders, new events, and changes in events.
Moreover, you and your family members can set the app to send you your family’s schedule daily or weekly.
Download: Cozi for Web | iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)
While you can just use any other shared calendar, Cozi has features that set it apart from other calendar apps.
1. Have a Calendar for the Entire Family
With Family Calendar, your entire family can plot their schedules in a single location to make it easier for you to manage your family’s schedule. The Calendar is accessible to everyone, ensuring that individuals within the family are in the loop. Since every individual is color-coded, you can filter schedules by individual.
It can be tiresome to manually add schedules from your other Calendar, say work-related plans sent to your Gmail. What’s excellent about Cozi is that you can sync other calendar programs like Apple Calendar, Outlook, and Google Calendar so that your shared family calendar is automatically updated all the time.
You can also print your family’s schedule or your own schedule if you’re a visual person. However, this feature is only available in Cozi’s web app.
2. Complete Your Shopping Lists Together
Don’t you just hate it when someone assigned to shop for your necessities forget about an item you badly need?
With Cozi’s Shopping Lists, you can create one master shopping list for the entire family, so everybody can pitch in their requests and needs.
The app also allows you to sort your shopping lists into categories to make them easier to manage. If you’re done doing a task or buying an item, you can simply tick the box so that you won’t end up with more than what you need.
If you can’t think of what you need, Cozi has a set of pre-made lists that you can import to your family’s list and modify based on your needs.
3. Quickly Note Your To-Dos
Like shopping lists, Cozi’s To Do Lists allows you to create your to-do lists and sort them into categories. You can access your own list and the list you share with the family.
What’s great with to-do lists in Cozi is that assigning a task is as fast as a tap of a finger. However, note that the app won’t alert other users that they’ve been given a chore. The color-coding is more for organization and sorting purposes, which is still very useful.
Like Shopping Lists, Cozi also has a collection of pre-made to-dos to help you jumpstart your list. Examples include lists for Summer Planning, Birthday Party, Spring Cleaning Chore List, and Family Budget Checklist.
4. Know What’s for Dinner With Cozi’s Recipe Box
One of the most common struggles homemakers have is deciding what to cook for the household. Cozi has the problem covered by giving you recipe collections sorted into folders like Cheese Appetizers and Easy Dinners.
You can view the recipe and add them to your Cozi Recipe Box. These recipes are curated from websites like Southern Living, EatingWell, and Real Simple. While it simply lists recipes from these sites, the app allows you to tweak them to make them your own.
The app also has the Add to Cozi meals tool for web browsers to help you add recipes you found online to your recipe box. Alternatively, you can also import a recipe you found online or record your own recipe from scratch.
Since your family can see the recipes on the recipe box, they would know what’s cooking for dinner—saving you the need to repeatedly answer the same question over and over again.
Is It Worth Paying for Cozi Gold?
All the things mentioned above are free for everyone. While the free app would suffice for your family’s needs, Cozi brings its game a notch higher with Cozi Gold, its premium subscription.
Cozi Gold offers all of Cozi’s features and has several additional features, including:
Removal of ads: This gets rid of distractions and gives you a clearer view of the app. Month view on mobile: A monthly view that previews all appointments for the month in a single view. Calendar Search: This feature allows you to instantly find an entry on the calendar. More Reminders: Instead of one, you get to set up to three reminders to ensure that you’d never miss any upcoming appointments. Calendar Change Notifications: Enabling the family to see plan changes. Birthday Tracker: Ensure that you won’t miss a family member’s birthday or get confused with their age by using this feature. Shopping Mode: This feature assists you by placing ticked items at the bottom of the list and highlighting things recently added, so you won’t miss them. Mobile themes: This gives you theme options for a more personalized touch.
Cozi Gold only costs $29.99 per year and covers the entire family already. If you don’t want to spend money just yet, Cozi offers a 14-day trial when you subscribe through the web.
Spend the Rest on Family Time
Having a more organized schedule not only makes everyone’s moods better, but it also gives everyone more time to spend with family.
Use Cozi to find the best time to dine out, watch a movie, or do whatever your family enjoys doing together the most.
