One way to spend more time on activities with your family is to waste less time on scheduling those activities -- to become so organized about carpools, Little League practices, and band rehearsals that you make every minute count. Two new Web-based tools can help. The first, eGroups.com, will turn your coffee-stained, out-of-date telephone lists into a state-of-the-art email list. An Internet service based in San Francisco, eGroups.com provides an easy-to-use interface that lets you set up a private discussion group. As with a traditional email list, you can organize the site so that anyone on the list can post a message, or you can limit posting privileges to select people. You may never need a phone tree again.
Family Shoebox, a Web community produced by KOZ Inc., of Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, lets families maintain private Web-based calendars. Parents and kids can track who's doing what when, and it's easy for them to access that information remotely.
Coordinates: eGroups.com, www.egroups.com; Family Shoebox, www.familyshoebox.com
Many parents drop their kids at day care and spend the rest of the day worrying about whether the kids are having fun. Don Vickery doesn't worry anymore. To stay connected with Nathan, his 22-month-old son (below, in circle), he uses Watch Me!, a Web service that provides images from day-care centers in 15 states. "I like being able to see him during the day," says Vickery. At $20 per month, this peace of mind comes cheap.
Nathan's day-care center features digital cameras that feed snapshots every 30 seconds or so to a Web page that Vickery keeps open on his desktop. Watch Me! has at least one practical use: Because Vickery can see how long his son has napped each day, he always knows what kind of night his family is in for. The site also has at least one entertaining use: "I can capture and download the best screen shots," Vickery says.
Coordinates: Watch Me!, www.watch-me.com
"The weird thing about being pregnant," says Deborah Smith, 32, an information architect at Organic Online in San Francisco, "is that you're kind of in a vacuum. You're always wondering, 'Is my body doing something strange?'" Of course, the nice thing about being pregnant is that lots of other women are going through the same experience.
Smith, who is expecting her second child, uses ParentsPlace.com to fill the vacuum with information from experts and with advice from fellow moms-to-be. She logs onto the site's daily "Pregnancy Calendar." Working backward from a woman's due date, the site produces a calendar that "tells you each day what's going on with your fetus," Smith says. She also checks in with the March 1999 "Expecting Club," a bulletin board with advice from mothers-to-be who are at the same stage of pregnancy. "It's so specific, it's pretty amazing."
Coordinates: ParentsPlace.com, www.parentsplace.com (www.pregnancycalendar.com)
Katharine Mieszkowski is a Fast Company senior writer, is based in San Francisco.
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