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.
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.
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% off for Mother’s Day.
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.”
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.
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’
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I reached Linda Caro on a Friday morning, as she was preparing for a transcontinental flight. 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, California, 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. (Caro is such an enthusiastic user that she recently became an unpaid ambassador to the brand, allowing her to dispense 15% 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. 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 Caro said hers was on board with.
Still, 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Owning every aspect of a task, a practice Rodsky has coined CPE, 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.
“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.
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 Rodsky’s work on the mental load was the final straw that led to her divorce, de Castro said.
“I didn’t have language for why keeping all those things in my brain was driving me crazy,” said 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.”
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