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Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my slightly off the wall use of the AnyList app for remembering stuff when you are leaving the house for multiple activities. 

If you'd watched some of my other videos, you might know that my ADHD brain has issues keeping more than 3 things in it at any one time -- otherwise known as working memory.  I'm a mom with active teenagers and this deficit is particularly annoying when we forget important things that they need for activities. I remember showing up to football practice once with Crocs and no cleats -- that didn't go over well with the coaches. And we have forgotten tennis racquets for clinics more times than I care to recall. I won't bore you with more examples, but believe me when I tell you there were MANY and I really needed a system to prevent it from continuing to happen. 

The biggest problem was not when we have just one activity. My kids and I can generally manage to remember everything for a single practice or game. The problem is really pronounced when we are leaving the house having to remember items for multiple events. Here's a particularly complicated example, we are leaving the house in the morning and not planning to come back until late afternoon and need to pack items for the following activities:

• Morning tennis clinic for both kids
• Pool outing for all
• Packed lunch for all
• Afternoon field hockey practice for my daughter
• Afternoon baseball practice for my son
• Afternoon snack for all
• Something for me to do while I wait

Complicated, right?  I'm super impressed with people who can keep all of that straight without any help. Obviously, that's not me!  Here's my solution. I use the AnyList app.  Now -- I already use AnyList for shopping lists and errands. You can see my video on that if you are interested.  In addition to shopping lists, AnyList has a recipe database function that interfaces directly with its lists.  You can enter a recipe and all of its ingredients and then add the ingredients for multiple recipes to your shopping list.  Maybe you can see where I'm going here. I use this recipe function in a way that wasn't intended, but that I find really helpful. 

Okay -- so here is AnyList.  This is the List area that I use daily. And here is the Recipe area.  Recipes can be organized by collection. So, I created a collection for each of my kids, one for me, and one as a catch all, called Other/Both.  Then I created a "recipe" for each of the kids' activities.  For example, this first "recipe" is "Daughter - Field Hockey Practice".  Then, for each "recipe" I added in all of the "ingredients." In this case, the "ingredients" are the things my daughter needs to remember for field hockey practice. The nice thing is that ingredients are not specific to recipe, so, for example, I can add "Daughter socks" to multiple recipes. And yes, I am this specific, just in case we are coming from the swimming pool -- we will TOTALLY forget to bring socks for FH practice!  Okay -- so let me just go through some of these to show you the recipes that I've created and their ingredients. 

Alright, now that I have all of these entered, I can add the items for multiple activities to Today's List. I can also choose to add only some of the items. Let me show you how. Let's take my example day that I mentioned earlier.  The first activity is morning tennis clinic for my daughter.  I generally choose the option to "Add all ingredients to list," but I can also just choose certain items to add by toggling this list button on or off for each item. So, if I just add these 2 first items, I can check Today's List and there they are.  But I'm going to go back and add them all.  Done. The next activity is tennis for my son, then pool for everyone, packed lunch for everyone, then field hockey for my daughter, baseball practice for my son, afternoon snack and lastly, something for me to do as I wait.  Okay -- now go into Today's List and I have this huge checklist to use for confirming what my kids packed and packing up my own stuff. 

Now -- I've deliberately made this a complicated example, but we have definitely had days like this -- particularly during the first part of the summer when the days are long and multiple activities are still going strong. On those days, without this system, there is 100% chance that I will forget something and will either a) have to go back home and get it or b) have to figure out a workaround and be annoyed with myself.  Forgetting things injects a level of stress into the day that I don't love and this system happily solves that problem. 

I'd love to hear what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!