Tips to Organize your Holiday Shopping

We're rapidly approaching that time of year where the stress builds from trying to manage your holiday gift giving. I have three kids and my wife and I spend a fair portion of time each year texting back and forth as we shop making sure we know what's being purchased and did we get the right things for the kids. This year we're going to try something different.

For the past couple of years our kids have focused on using Amazon wish lists to pull together what they would like to receive for the holidays, giving my wife and I plenty of options. This year I'll be taking the items from their Amazon wish lists and sending them to a special Springpad notebook for just my wife and I.

First, you find the wish list on Amazon by the person's name or email address. Then click on the item you want to take a closer look at. Next is the trick...while viewing the gift, click on the Springpad Clipper in Chrome to create a spring from the item. The resulting spring will look similar to this:

Before saving the spring I tag it with the name of the gift recipient and the holiday on which the gift will be given.  Now when you open the spring you have some great options to use:

You can see the WANT / HAVE button at the top that makes it easy to track what you have purchased vs what you haven't.  Also further down the spring:

you can see the link back to Amazon for the item and the price that Amazon is returning for the item right then.  It's a great way to keep things organized as you do your shopping.

Tips:

Instead of using the WANT/HAVE flag, assign a tag "Unpurchased" so you can filter by that tag and find everything still remaining on your list.

Using your mobile devices to coordinate your shopping means you can shop separately and still avoid the classic "duplicated present" syndrome.

I'll be talking about this more on the Springpad Show in the coming weeks.   If you can't join us live, just look for the Hangout recording after the show to learn more.

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