Jessica's Friday Five: the fall calendar we swear by

Hi Reader,

It's been a rollercoaster of a week around here - from really fun experiences with friends and my kids to exciting work projects to really stressful moments (reflecting back, all the stress was related to technology not working as expected - ugh).

But it's now Friday, and I'm excited to see so many of you tomorrow at the Weekly Family Meetings workshop! If you haven’t signed up for the workshop yet, get your ticket here.

Let's get to your Friday Five:

1. Essential Calendar for fall: I love this calendar for seeing the full season at a glance. Writing down our fall calendar helped me see something I hadn't realized - that between work and fun trips, I need to be intentional about my capacity in September and October because it's going to have less free space than normal. I totally recommend the accessory bundle too - especially those erasable gel pens. Use my code JOYFULLYMANAGED for 10% off.
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2. Team workshops: If you've ever been curious to have me support your team with an in-house workshop or team retreat, I added more to my team workshops page this week about how I work with clients. I also have public workshops coming up, and I keep that list updated here.
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3. Please don't put your money in a regular savings account. Here's your annual friendly reminder from me about this: if you have more than a few hundred dollars to put aside in savings and have it in a regular savings or checking account, you're missing out on a lot of potential free money in interest (and your money is probably not even keeping up with inflation). For example, my day-to-day bank (USAA) is good for checking accounts but pays just 0.01% interest on savings accounts. Awful. So get yourself a "high-yield savings account". The one we use is ​Wealthfront​, and they offer over 4.05% interest right on savings accounts if you sign up through someone's friend link (​here's mine​), and 3.3% without a friend link. That's literally 405 times more interest. Definitely worth a few minutes of your time to move your savings if you've got it.
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4. Your iPhone has built-in white noise: I don't know about you, but everyone in my family sleeps much better with white noise. Especially in potentially noisy or unexpected-sound places like hotels. We have white noise machines we like, but in a pinch, we just use our iPhones, which, as of a few years ago, have white noise built-in (!!) without having to find a white noise playlist or something. In Settings, go to Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Background Sounds and choose from sounds such as Ocean, Rain, and Stream. I wish this had existed when my kids were babies!
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5. If you have kids with screens: Solidarity for all of us trying to navigate these annoying screen time settings that are almost never intuitive and so frustrating. But here's a thing you might be missing - blocking the website version of apps. If you want your kids to not be using social media, for example, you can't just block the Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok apps on their phone - you also need to block the website itself too - instagram.com, tiktok.com, etc. Or do what we do, which is just remove the internet browser completely (this works for our kids right now at their current ages). Tonight's to-do: Open one "blocked" app through your kid's browser. If the site loads, you've found tonight's tiny administrative task. Happy to share our middle schooler's "phone contract" that lays out how we are currently approaching her screen time if helpful; just hit reply and I'll share the Google Doc with you.

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Last Friday's Most-Clicked Link: The cheap kids' lunch box we used for years and years.