On a Thursday morning in March, my family needed to accomplish three things at exactly the same time.
My husband had to board a plane to return from a business trip in London. I had agreed to moderate a panel discussion about how the cost of child care in New York City is harming the local economy. And someone had to sign our daughter up for a first-come-first-served preschool program that typically fills its seats within 90 to 120 seconds of their online release at 10 a.m.
We had not properly accounted for this overlap through our shared Google calendar.
The school registration required multiple passwords that might have flummoxed various grandparents and caregivers. I wondered if it might be a funny bit for me to take out my laptop and frantically sign my child up for child care during a panel about child care, and then thought the better of it. We decided to let the whims of Heathrow Airport’s Wi-Fi decide our daughter’s future.
After the panel, I called my husband, who sounded breathless, as if he had been running laps. The sign-up page had prompted him for a confirmation code that he had not anticipated, throwing him for a loop. The internet had been spotty. We had gotten the seat, but it felt like a Pyrrhic victory.
Something, we agreed, would have to give.
Our snafu echoes across continents and generations, an age-old problem with a newish name: the mental load.
It’s the tedious, all-consuming work of planning our lives, made all the more tedious when young children are in the mix and free time seems to shrink to fleeting glances.
It’s figuring out which music class to sign up for, deciding what everyone should eat for dinner, texting five babysitters for next weekend until one says yes (and then actually taking the kid to the music class, buying the groceries and making the date night dinner reservation) that leads to burnout, resentment and, perhaps worst of all, dropped balls.
And all of those logistics and anxieties swirl around your brain, like socks in a dryer, especially, research tells us, if you happen to be a woman in a heterosexual relationship.
Enter the digital calendar, which aims to make invisible work very, very visible.
We received ours five to seven business days after our Thursday morning meltdown. We had identified our problem — essential information for our household was being shared only in snippets of conversation or haphazard Google calendar invites instead of one central place — and searched for a solution with a monthly installment payment.
The Skylight Calendar, which can cost $170 to $630, depending on size, all with an optional $79 annual subscription fee to unlock special features, would make our scheduling conflicts impossible to ignore. The company took $30 off some of its calendars for Mother’s Day.
Our various appointments, early-morning calls and evening drinks would be beamed 24 hours a day, in all their color-coded glory, from the Skylight’s commanding position in the middle of our hallway.
About 888,000 families own a Skylight, its co-founder Michael Segal, who has two children under 2, told me. The Hearth, one of the first entries into the category of supersize calendars that you can hang on a wall, was created by three working mothers and is itself a supersized version of the Skylight. It sells for $700, with a $9 monthly fee, though the company also ran a sale for Mother’s Day, offering 15 percent off for Mother’s Day (an Instagram ad caption read: “Let Hearth plan, so Mom can play, too.)
The idea behind the product, said Susie Harrison, one of Hearth’s co-founders, was to “externalize the primary caregiver’s brain, and put that into a system that everyone could see.” On the call, Ms. Harrison apologized for her glitchy phone service; her son was sick, and she had escaped to an upstairs room to chat for a few minutes.
I wanted to know how other families used their calendars, and spent the next few weeks talking with the tools’ power users and skeptics: most partnered, all straight, with family budgets that could comfortably include a digital calendar. They were all ages 35 to 50, in the thick of raising young kids and juggling career demands.
As couples and parents across the country walked me through their lives — how they got their kids to brush their teeth in the morning, how they planned for the week ahead, how they managed grocery lists — I was left feeling a mix of awe and spiraling anxiety.
I wanted to know if these families felt that the money had been worth it, if they had finally found a technological solution to an analog problem at the heart of human nature: that we cannot read our spouse’s minds, to know when they scheduled our kid’s next dental appointment or gymnastics class.
Or, I wondered, had the purported fix uncovered new friction points, hiding in familiar gendered expectations of who does what to keep a household running.
The ‘Calendar Partner’
I reached Linda Caro on a Friday morning, as she was preparing for a transcontinental flight. Ms. Caro and her husband are both flight attendants, working opposite schedules, and they are both technically based in New York City despite living in Redlands, Calif., with their two children, 10 and 13, who attend different schools.
She unwrapped the Skylight last year on Christmas morning, a gift from her husband who had noticed that putting some of their events on a whiteboard calendar — and then taping their kids’ school calendars into a semicircle around it — wasn’t really working.
“It was my system; nobody else really understood it,” she said. But, she told me, she quickly became “obsessed” with her Skylight, and joined Facebook and Reddit groups for other die-hard users. “It’s like something we wish we could have invented ourselves,” she said. (Ms. Caro is such an enthusiastic user that she recently became an unpaid ambassador to the brand, allowing her to dispense 15 percent off discount codes to friends, for which she said she receives a small commission.)
She gave her two sisters, who live nearby, access so they could see when she would be flying and could help pitch in on child care. The kids can now check the calendar to track their parents’ flight numbers. Ms. Caro even created an alert on the calendar to remind her husband to do the laundry — a move that some husbands might see as overbearing but that Ms. Caro said hers was on board with. The other day she came home, and it was already folded.
Still, Ms. Caro is the only person in the family consistently adding events to the Skylight. “That’s something we can work on,” she admitted.
It is hard to avoid the dynamic of one spouse becoming the “calendar partner,” a phrase that sent a chill down my spine when Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained it to me recently. (Professor Daminger called me from the first weeks of her maternity leave, assuring me that she was eager to use her brain for a few minutes.)
We talked about the remedy that many families land on when trying to redistribute household labor: using the skills they have learned at work to help run their family life.
“You don’t always want to go from a day of back-to-back Zoom meetings and then go home and have a check-in meeting with your partner,” said Professor Daminger, the author of the forthcoming book “What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life.”
But that’s exactly what several couples told me they do.
Matthew Kraft, who works in communications, told me he is the “de facto C.O.O.” of his household. He lives in Norwalk, Conn., with his wife, Katarina Bridova, who commutes to her finance job on Wall Street three days a week, and their two daughters, who are 7 and 9.
The couple used their Hearth calendar, which they learned about when it was still a crowdfunded project, to figure out when they both had a 20-minute window to chat with me over the phone.
At 9:30 a.m. on the appointed date, I asked the couple whether it felt as if the tools they used to manage work and home felt too similar.
“We live and die by our calendars at work, and it’s like, Are we teaching our kids to run their lives by calendars?” Mr. Kraft asked. “But I think it’s one of those skills that needs to be learned, like learning to read a map.”
Their Hearth is stationed outside the girls’ bedrooms, and the calendar’s “routines” tab, where they can add tasks like tooth-brushing and bed-making, has helped give their days more structure. (Mr. Segal, the Skylight founder, told me that the calendar’s users have completed 88 million chores in the last six months alone.)
The couple is still refining how they use it. Ms. Bridova said she found it frustrating to interrupt her workday to put personal events into their shared calendar, which is how a furnace repairman mysteriously showed up at their front door the other day, startling Mr. Kraft while Ms. Bridova was at work — an appointment she had forgotten to log on the Hearth.
Ms. Bridova got disoriented by the complex color-coding system they initially tried out, which felt like a kaleidoscope of anxiety.
“We are still working through the coloring,” she said.
Maybe the best thing the Hearth has offered their family, Mr. Kraft said, is the ability to schedule their lives so completely that when he sees a blank square with no events, he knows that a rare, glorious day of total freedom is around the corner.
Who Knows When Trash Day Is?
The uncluttered calendar represents true logistical nirvana, said Eve Rodsky, who helped bring the idea of the mental load to the masses with her 2019 book, “Fair Play,” and accompanying deck of cards, each with its own task, used by couples around the country to divvy up their responsibilities.
Ms. Rodsky has put the system to work in her own home. Her husband is in charge of every aspect of the trash in their home — from noticing when the garbage bags are running low and restocking them to sorting the recycling to picking a cadence for when the trash is taken out.
And when is Trash Day?
“I have no idea,” she said, speaking to me from her car after a doctor’s appointment ran late and spilled into our scheduled time to talk.
Owning every aspect of a task, a practice Ms. Rodsky has coined C.P.E., for conception, planning and execution, is the only way to truly lighten the mental load, she says. And you can’t calendar your way out of that.
Ms. Rodsky has never seen “take out the trash” on their shared calendar, and hopes she never will.
“My biggest fear is the disappointment people are going to have when they think this amazing new shiny app will solve their gender-equity issues,” she said.
Professor Daminger said she had been approached by some entrepreneurial digital calendar founders who wanted her advice on how these tools might help moms in particular. “I often end up being a buzzkill,” she said, “where I say, ‘I’m not sure this is actually going to change the underlying dynamic.’”
Ruth de Castro, who has two teenagers and works in technology, understands that dynamic well. Her marriage had long felt unequal, but absorbing Ms. Rodsky’s work on the mental load was the final straw that led to her divorce, Ms. de Castro said.
“I didn’t have language for why keeping all those things in my brain was driving me crazy,” said Ms. de Castro, who lives in California’s East Bay and works in technology.
When she was still with her husband, she debated buying a Hearth — “I was like, Do I really need this thing? It’s 600 bucks,” she recalled — but took the plunge after she mixed up some dates and missed her daughter’s ballet recital.
She uses the Hearth to help ease the scheduling burden of co-parenting her two teenagers with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. It’s actually simpler now that she doesn’t have to hope that her partner will add important appointments to the calendar.
“You can buy something really aesthetic and nice,” she said. “But if you’re not consistent as a parent, it’s almost like another thing you have to micromanage.”
That is the tension for many digital calendar power users: Buying one (or receiving one as a gift) acknowledges that something was wrong or overwhelming in the mechanics of family life. But it’s not a simple plug-and-play solution.
Michelle Ali and her husband work at her family’s flooring business in Suwanee, an Atlanta suburb, and the couple have a 1-year-old, a 6-year-old and a 15-year-old.
There is a lot going on, logistically and emotionally.
“I was feeling resentful that moms always have to have the family calendar in their head and I needed my family to be a little more accountable,” she wrote in an email. “My husband is a fantastic partner. He shares a lot of the family duties and he is great with the kids. But still I felt like he was asking me ‘what do we have going on this weekend?’ And I would feel myself get frustrated and want to reply not-nicely.”
Her parents gave her a Hearth for her 40th birthday, a few weeks after the new baby was born, to try to ease the burden.
When we spoke on the phone, Ms. Ali had mixed feelings about her new device. When the calendar first arrived, she hung it in the most prominent position on her family’s gallery wall.
She hoped her oldest kid and husband would start logging their own appointments. But it didn’t take right away. Eventually, she stopped trying so hard, and her husband and teenager decided, she said, to get their acts together.
Ms. Ali has tried to make the calendar more appealing by creating holiday and themed cover displays. As we were talking about one of her favorites — her infant popping out of a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow on St. Patrick’s Day — I got an email from the pediatrician’s office.
My daughter was rounding her second week of a faucet-level runny nose, and I wanted to see whether she had an ear infection. I could bring her in before the office closed, but I’d have to leave work in the next few minutes. It was too late even to put the appointment on the calendar. I explained the situation to Ms. Ali.
As we got off the phone, I thanked her for her time and wished her good luck with everything. “Good luck with your logistics, too,” she said, as kind a send-off as I could have imagined. I said goodbye, shoved my laptop in my bag and ran out the door. I was already late.
Eliza Shapiro reports on New York City for The Times.
The post The $700 Calendar That Wants to Save Your Marriage appeared first on New York Times.
