After Dina Dreifuerst’s car was stolen, it wasn’t the missing wheels that was the biggest problem—it was the fact that her day planner had been on the passenger seat. All the details of her life, right down to records on about 50 hours’ worth of billable research she’d done for her employer, were gone. “I lost my brain,” she says. “I vowed from that point forward that it would never happen again, and that was when I bought my PDA,” a clunky handheld computer with a black-and-white screen.

Twelve years later, Dina, now a librarian for the international law firm Bracewell & Giuliani in Houston and a single mother to a 10-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter, can’t imagine managing her overscheduled life without a little help from technology. Her smartphone is like her “spare brain.” She uses the gadget—which is a phone but also has features that you might find on a PDA or a computer—to answer work emails on the fly, plan meetings for her son’s Cub Scout den, track her checking account balance, record recipes and grocery shopping lists and even remember the product number of her hair color. At the end of the day, everything gets backed up on her home and work computers—no more lost billable hours.

Dina is one of a cadre of working moms who know that technology can mean the difference between chaos and calm when trying to balance kids and career. It streamlines, time-saves and offers much-needed assistance. Of course, with the constant stream of new and improved high-tech offerings, it can be challenging to discern which new technology is worthy of a busy working mom’s time and money. The key? Make sure you’re running the technology, not the other way around.

Scheduling Genies
With her job as a life insurance analyst, her two under-5 kids and her volunteer work as a youth advisor for her church, you might think that Shawna Foster spends a lot of time coordinating schedules. Not so. Foster and her husband swear by an online tool that helps them avoid that complicated “let’s sit down and match up our calendars” conversation—the online calendar from Google. Its most appealing assets: You can share scheduling information among linked accounts, and events for different family members can be color-coded.


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