Get Organized for the Holidays with Google Sheets and Toodledo

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll share some of my tips for getting organized over the holidays using Google Sheets and Toodledo. 

I love the holidays, but like everyone else, I frequently feel overwhelmed by all of the additional tasks during holiday season — decorating the house and tree, ordering and sending holiday cards, and buying and wrapping Christmas presents.  All this amid lots of late-night seasonal festivities and, for us, holiday travel. 

My very first order of business is that I cut myself some major slack around the holidays. I would highly recommend doing an analysis of what is critical to you and what is not and then prioritizing accordingly. For example, weekends are hectic for us at this time of year — my husband travels, my kids have a bunch of activities.  It was getting increasingly difficult to plan enough time on a weekend for all of us to go out, get a tree, put it up, and decorate it. Along with all of the other house and outside decorating requirements, it used to require like a 5 hour block. So, we got a reasonable quality fake tree — and now we only need a 2 hour block.  Much more manageable.  Plus, I don’t feel like our whole house is going to go up in flames because I forgot to water the tree!  I’m also NOT a perfectionist AT ALL when it comes to decorating. Our tree honestly looks like someone just took all of our ornaments and threw them at it. But, for me, the process with all 4 of us involved is more important than the product, so there it is. 

I’m going to share with you some of the tech tools that I use to keep the holidays sane for me.  None of this is rocket science, but sometimes it’s useful to see how others do things in order to come up with a system that works best for you.  First off, 

Annual Reminders

I use Toodledo for task management. One great about Toodledo is that you can enter recurring tasks. I have some holiday-related annual appointments that keep things from sneaking up on me. The first is

1. Order holiday cards - this comes up right before Thanksgiving each year, which might seem like overkill.  But 2 things: 1) there are great online deals happening then and 2) if I DON’T have a good photo to put on the card, I can usually convince my family to take a couple over Thanksgiving, when everyone is already a little more cleaned up than usual AND there are willing photographers around. The next recurring task is to 
2. Plan a weekend for decorating - this task also comes up around Thanksgiving. It’s just a heads up for me to look at the calendar and find a 2-3 hour block of time on a weekend, usually in early December to make the whole family help with decorating.  As an aside, I keep notes about decorating details in Evernote, like what goes where and where the lights are plugged in. Some people can remember this stuff, but I cannot and why recreate the wheel every year?  The next reminder is to 
3. Buy decorating munchies - again this is more about process than product, so I have to make sure I have our traditional snacks on hand for decorating time. For us, that is cider,  hot chocolate, sugar cookie dough, and candy canes.  Nothing makes your house smell better than freshly baked sugar cookies and hot cider. And my last reminder is to 
4. Start filling out gift spreadsheet - this occurs on the day after Thanksgiving each year. So, let’s talk about my

Gift Spreadsheet

I just looked back and I have been keeping my Xmas Gift spreadsheet since 1999. That is nearly 20 years with a tab for each year.  Again most people don’t need to do this, but there is no other way for me to adequately keep things straight. At a high point, I was buying some kind of gift for almost 50 people.  Things are way less crazy now, but i still find this spreadsheet crucial to maintain my sanity. 

Here’s my gift spreadsheet. If you want to use it, just open the link and copy it to your own Google Drive.  It’s pretty self explanatory, but you’ll see that I have a field for gift ideas and a field for gifts that I’ve bought. I move gift ideas over to the bought column once I’ve made decisions. I also have columns for when I’ve purchased, received, and wrapped gifts. I don’t love shopping, so I tend to do as much online shopping as possible.  And I am an efficient, but not a particularly enthusiastic or creative present wrapper. So, I usually block off 4-6 hours one night to wrap all of the presents once they have all arrived. 

The downside of this spreadsheet is that it isn’t a great format for multiple gift ideas per person — particularly not for online shopping, since I want to keep track of website links.  Because of that, the last several years I’ve also created an Ideas tab for each year, but I still record the final gifts purchased on the main spreadsheet. 

Holiday Cards Spreadsheet

The other holiday spreadsheet that I’ve had for more than 20 years contains addresses for holiday cards. Most people use one of these unless they really enjoy handwriting addresses on 100+ envelopes.  Up until this year, I’ve been cutting and pasting from Google Sheets into Excel to print labels in MS Word. BUT this was the first year that I used an extension from Avery to produce labels directly from Google Docs. That eliminates some complication and makes me happy. I’ll show you how I do this. 

Here's a link to my holiday address spreadsheet. You basically just have to have fields for name, address line, and city, state, zip. Those last 3 can be in one field, if you want.  I make a tab for each year.

Okay -- even though your addresses are stored in Google Sheets, you have to access the Avery label extension from Google Docs.  So, go into Drive on your computer and create a new Google Docs document. Now click the Add-ons menu and choose "Get Add-ons."  Search for "Avery" and it should come right up.  It is rated really low (2 out of 5 stars), but worked fine for me -- maybe because I wasn't trying to do anything fancy?  Okay, go ahead and click on the Free button, you'll have to possibly choose a Google account to associate with this and click on Allow, at which point it is installed!

The Avery add-on hijacks your document and puts a bunch of instructions in there, which I find very helpful.  Basically, you are just using this document to give instructions to create a new document with all of your labels to print.  

So, go up to Add-ons again, choose Avery Label Merge, click on New Merge, and click Address Labels.  Choose your labels.  I purchased a life-time supply of 5160 labels at one point, so that's the one I use.  Now it's going to prompt you to choose a Spreadsheet containing your addresses.  Once it is reading the spreadsheet, you can make some changes to what sheet or tab it is looking at and which rows you want to use here on the right.  

Now -- here's the important thing - put your cursor in this box and give Google Docs some instructions on which fields should go where.  I put name first, second line address, then on the third line City, State, and Zip with the punctuation that I want.  Now hit Merge and see how it looks!  It might take a beat or 2 depending on how many addresses you have.

Go ahead and Open the new document that was created.  You'll also be able to find this in your recent documents in Google Drive named generically -- in my case Avery_5160.  Make sure you print one page first and hold it up to the light to make sure it's going to print properly.  You can make formatting adjustments in the document before printing on your label paper.  

So, those are some of the tricks I use to keep the holidays sane for me: I make annual reminders in Toodledo and use a Google spreadsheet to keep track of gift buying and holiday cards. Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!