Oh, There's an App for That!

Today is June 1st, we are now officially in the same calendar month as our departure for furlough.  Count downing and crossing off days on the calendar, with a big orange circle around June 18th.  I have enjoyed planning for the furlough more than I thought I would, and it has reminded me how much I enjoy administrative work.  If I had to pick a career outside of the home, that I believe I could thrive in, administrative assistant would be one of my top choices.  I like the research and gathering of data, and then organizing and presenting it in a helpful visual manner.  I like projects that have a clear start and end to them and don't require a lot of introspective thinking in order to come to fruition.  These are fun for me.  But on the other hand, planning is not easy or fun for my husband.  So I am being a helpmate to him and planning a lot of our furlough and am having a fun time in the process!  As I was looking over the progress of our furlough plans, I realized that I have been using a lot of apps.  So I thought I would do a post sharing all of the various apps that I have been using.

TNT Connect

TNT Connect is a free database for your contacts designed specifically with missionaries in mind, which you download securely on your computer to use offline.  Basically it is like a very elaborate electronic address book with the missionary in mind.  It has some really cool features.  One feature (which is pictured above) is a map with the location of your supporters.  Seeing and knowing where our supporters are at, better helps in planning who to visit and where.  TNT Connect also helps in planning our pasalubong shopping.  Pasalubong is a gift one brings when they travel, you bring pasalubong to those you visit and you also bring back pasalubong to your loved ones at home after you went on a trip.  Oddly, I keep thinking that furlough feels a bit like a Christmas shopping trip on steroids, bringing gifts for loved ones that we haven't seen in a long time.  Over half of our luggage we are packing will include gifts alone, so it is a big part of furlough planning.

Roadtrippers

Roadtrippers is a fun app that if you aren't careful, you can waste a lot of time.  ha ha!  But this is a super app!  You can plot all of the destinations on your road trip and it calculates the mileage, drive time and even budgets the cost for gasoline.  Pretty cool!  And then if you are curious what additional rest stops or sight seeing you want to do along the way, it has a button to bring up destinations all along your route (which is great for home school field trips along the way).  It even has a button to look up what hotels are along your route.  You can click and drag your destinations around if you wanted to drive various places first.  I have made two trip guides, as you can see above.  The main one is for our big 2-month road trip with at least 22 stops so far planned.  You might be wondering why we are randomly starting our road trip in the middle of North Dakota, of all places.  Well there is a car rental place there that rents vans to missionaries for very cheap, making this giant road trip possible.  The second trip guide you see pictured above is when we fly up to Washington and then take the train across the border into Canada.  That trip is much shorter but a bit more tricky to plan since it involves planes, trains and automobiles.

Google Calendar

What planning wouldn't be complete without good ol' google calendar.  Both Allan and I already use google calendar for planning, so it was quite simple to just add a shared calendar for our furlough planning.  This way as I start to plan and plot our road trips I can put the dates of visits to certain families and churches into our shared google calendar so Allan will be able to see what plans have and have not been made yet.  The layout of the calendar helps me also in planning since I am very visual, so I can quickly see what weeks and slots are open during our furlough to continue to make plans with friends and loved ones.

Slack

Slack is an app for communicating with others about various projects.  You could argue that there are many various ways already to communicate; email, face book, text messages, Skype, viber and many others.  But maybe that is part of the problem, there are too many ways to communicate and if you don't always use the same platform each time you might find yourself searching all over to try and remember where you shared a specific information about a project.  So we are using Slack exclusively with each other when we have something to communicate regarding furlough.  As pictured above, you can see that you can use various channels (or tags) to keep all the various aspects of a project separate.  For our planning I created different channels according to the region or area we are visiting, and then I post all planning details under that channel so that Allan can simply look up the channel and see the various details of that part of the trip.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk is a task management app.  Again this, like all of the other apps we are using, is an app that two people can communicate on the same account.  So I have a furlough folder and then I have tags under that folder for all of the various tasks that need to be done.  The idea is to get the task out of your head and into the app for the app to remember for you.  You can also assign tasks to various people.  So this app is also my "honey to do" list. ;)  Pictured above you can see a few of the tasks that we will have to do once we arrive in the US.  This task management app is helpful as I am planning our trips, in Roadtrippers or with Google Calendar, and something comes up that Allan needs to handle before more planning can be done.  I simple click over to Remember the Milk and assign a task to Allan.

Pinterest

Pinterest is not a stranger as most of you probably use this regularly yourself.  Part of my enjoyment in planning is research.  I love researching and look up various ways to solve a problem.  Two boards I created specifically for our furlough is a road trip board and a family capsule wardrobe board.  The road trip board I pin and save various tips and hacks for making a 2-month road trip not only bearable, but fun and enjoyable as well.  I have various tips for homeschooling while on the road also saved on that board.  Then my family capsule wardrobe is for planning how to pack one carry-on luggage for each member of the family.  The goal is to get all of our wardrobe needs, for 6 months, packed within a single carry-on luggage.  The invention of and wide availability of dryers in the US makes this possible, as we plan to pack key necessities and simply wash them as needed.  This is fun and freeing, to have everything we need for wardrobe purposes down to one carry-on luggage, which should make the constant travel possible.

So those are the apps that I am using to help plan our furlough.  As you can imagine going on furlough has many things that can be and are stressful.  So we are tremendously thankful for all of the prayers from others.