Maybe you can’t have it ALL. But thanks to technology, you can do a pretty great job faking it!

By Randi Zuckerberg.

Now that I have a three-year-old son who needs to get ready for school, a one-month-old baby who wants to eat every five minutes, a bleary-eyed husband who heroically takes the 5am feeding shift before going to work as a tech executive, and my own morning talk radio show on SiriusXM, mornings in my household are, well…chaotic. Happily chaotic, but chaotic nonetheless.

I think back nostalgically to all those mornings in my twenties. When I could just leisurely press the snooze button on my alarm clock, go for a jog, maybe even spend a few minutes in the sauna, come home to a hot breakfast and an even hotter shower. Sigh.

Thankfully, unless you were my mom, popping by to help out and inquire why I’m still in pajamas at 3pm (newborn baby buys me at least eight weeks of that, no?) you’d never guess that the chaos in our house was at code red level. Living in the heart of Silicon Valley, we get all the latest apps, gadgets, and sites dreamed up by some the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet. And as more entrepreneurs become parents themselves, they graduate from creating dating apps to creating…you guessed it…technology for parents. Honestly, some of these innovations make me feel like super mom; as if I’ve gained an extra set of hands in the morning. (And ok, my mom is allowed to give me grief for still being in a bathrobe at 3pm – after all, she raised four children without any of these tech innovations!)

While some moms will always want to do it all themselves, painstakingly staying up into the wee hours of the night to hand wash cloth diapers, make complicated baked goods from scratch, and braid a French braid with not a hair out of place, I fall squarely into a new generation of moms – moms who are starting to feel more and more comfortable outsourcing some “super mom” tasks to technology, so we can focus more on what really matters.

When I think about how technology has enabled me to balance focusing on my career, my children, my marriage, and ok, sometimes even myself, I think about a few different categories: Food and Health, Fun and Enrichment, Creating Good Behavior Patterns, and Being Your Best Self.

When it comes to food and health, I’d love to be able to tell you that I have time to cook my family a healthy three course meal for my family every single evening. But I’d be lying to you. Between a busy job, two young children, and the fact that I lived in New York City and had to use my oven as storage during my formative years, I often have to get creative to put a nice dinner on the table. Luckily, there is a huge trend in San Francisco, and other major cities, around restaurants that are delivery-only, they don’t even have a physical place that you could sit at and eat! Services such as Munchery and Spoonrocket bring healthy, fresh-cooked meals to your doorstep and have menus that change daily, so you can put a fresh cooked, multi-course meal on the table every night, while services such as DoorDash and Seamless enable you to order from any local restaurant within minutes, without having to pick up the phone to talk to someone. (PRO TIP: Often, I’ll throw in an extra item or two that I can serve for breakfast the following morning!) I’ve found that by giving myself the permission of “outsourcing” dinner prep, I get more minutes in the day to do the things I love, I still get to put a healthy, fresh dinner on the table, and everyone gets to choose what they want to eat. Winning all around.

In our family, we’ve also made an effort to replace the focus on the “family meal” with a focus on the “family walk.” Instead of making food and dinner the central focus of evenings in our household, we’ll go for a family stroll around the neighborhood after dinner, sometimes even making a little competition of it with our his-and-hers Fitbit.

Fun and enrichment is an area where tech can really help out. From apps that teach reading and creative skills, to sites like Pinterest that give you ideas within seconds, tech has opened up a world of ideas beyond what I could ever dream up on my own. One of my favorite sites is Red Tricycle. Via weekly newsletter, they deliver ideas of what to do with young children in your city/town that week: kid-friendly restaurants and shows, festivals, parks, etc. With zero effort, I instantly become that in-the-know mom who’s always doing something new and creative with her children. Obviously, I spend hours and hours researching these things, right? Wink, wink.

Creating good behavior patterns is something that is very important in our household. A few of my favorite apps are Morning Kids which helps turn the morning routine into a game, and Bank of Mom which allows your children to earn allowance for doing their chores in the form of monetary OR…digital time! Brilliant, right! Screen time vs. non-screen time is something many families struggle with in this digital age – so why not have your children earn those extra digital minutes they want so badly?

Finally – The Little Things – because carving out time to pamper yourself and your partner is often the first to go when you’re also juggling a career and children. Recently, I started working with Whirlpool and Procter & Gamble on their newest device, the SWASH™ System, which really embodies this philosophy of The Little Things. My closet is often full of “in between” items – not quite clean, not quite dirty. Not quite smelling their freshest, but not quite ready for the dry cleaner. Well, just like the Keurig machine has completely changed our lives by allowing us to make one cup of coffee at a time (my husband likes Donut Shop, I like Pumpkin Spice Cappuccino, in case you cared), SWASH enables you to “refresh” an item of clothing, so that you can get a few more wears out of it before it has to be officially cleaned. Put in an item of clothing – a suit jacket, a dress, a favorite blouse – and just come back ten minutes later, to find your item refreshed and ready to go. The first time I presented my bleary-eyed husband, fresh off his 5am baby-feeding shift, with a warm, nice smelling, de-wrinkled shirt for work, he looked at me like I was super wife. (I have to admit, I felt like super wife!)

I know what you’re thinking – doesn’t everyone who works in tech in Silicon Valley just wear hoodies all the time? Well – yes – but not me and my husband! You can take us out of New York, but you can’t take the New York out of us! Also, PRO-TIP time: If you’re a new mom like me who can barely manage to shower, and changing out of a bathrobe by 3pm feels like a huge accomplishment, well…there is nothing quite like putting on a pair of pajamas or using a towel that just came out of the SWASH machine. (I just won at life, didn’t I?)

So, the next time you see someone who looks like they are managing it all effortlessly, instead of seething with jealously, ask them about their favorite tech apps and gadgets they use. Because in this day and age, behind every successful mom, is lots of very helpful technology.

This post is part of a sponsored collaboration with Swash. 

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