Time isn’t just money. Time is what you spend with your family, on a vacation or watching a kid’s dance recital. Time can be gained or lost based on how efficiently or inefficiently you use and implement mobile technology.

First and foremost, your mobile phone is a communication tool. It should be set up to access and communicate with everyone in your life that you depend on and who depends on you.

Contacts: There are apps built into all devices that store your contacts’ names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, and you really should make sure all these points of data are entered and backed up. Google’s Gmail Contacts is one way to have all your contacts backed up and in sync with your device. It baffles me whenever I text someone and the person responds, “Who is this? I lost my phone and my address book.” Gmail backs up automatically from your desktop or your mobile device.

Calendar: Every device has a built-in calendar. Again, I prefer Google Calendar. I can set appointments from my desktop or device, and every appointment has a set of alerts to remind me one to two days and then two to eight hours ahead of time. I get lots of pings and beeps as reminders, but with a busy life, I need that extra bit of reminding.

Docs: Yes, I use Google Docs too. There are dozens of documents I need access to wherever I am. I have yet to find a more efficient program than Google Docs to safely store and access my documents right on my mobile.

Google Chrome browser: The beauty of this browser on your desktop and on your mobile device is in that you can access whatever tabs you have open on your desktop from your mobile and vice versa.

All this works just as well on a tablet as on iOS and Android. Thank you for saving me time and making life more efficient, Google.