The Underwhelming State of Digital Family Calendars

I guess there’s real demand for easily visible family calendars. The NY Times recently featured an article on the Skylight Hearth calendar: essentially a vertically mounted touchscreen monitor, dedicated to running a subscription calendar service with a couple of user-friendly integrations. My hacky version of this arrangement, an e-ink display running an open-source Python app on a Raspberry Pi hooked up to Google Calendar, still gets the most views on this blog.

The killer use case is kids’ activities. It’s that combination of shared responsibilities, for a common set of activities that doesn’t stay consistent week-to-week1, that needs to be shared with kids who don’t yet have their personal electronics. Plenty of us have grown up with paper calendars hung on the kitchen cabinets for exactly the same reasons; digitalizing and syncing it just makes that itinerary accessible across devices. For us, that means setting up events on our laptops (where .ical files are most easily parsed), and then checking the calendars via a combination of phones, smartwatches, and the aforementioned calendar display2.

If anything, I’m surprised that there aren’t more products or features that provide this common-room view of shared calendars. I remember setting up my kids’ Apple watches:

• First, email accounts per child, with my account confirmed as the recovery account;
• Then, Apple accounts per child, accessible via email accounts;
• Through the Watch phone app, enabling calendars per account with double confirmations;
• Finally, enabling permissions to subscribe to the shared family account, and waiting for the calendars to eventually sync.

It took almost an hour per watch, for what is essentially a mini read-only view of the family calendar.

Most of the functionality and workflows have already been hammered out in the workplace. Managing daily schedules, shuffling events around, important metadata like location and visibility and notes, have been fleshed out with the likes of Google Calendar and Outlook in the enterprise. Critically, calendars are such a central part of office work3 that the skillset gets honed in the workplace, an ideal training ground for application in domestic affairs.

Of course, the actual reason that these domestic workflows are underdeveloped is that there are just scant business opportunities, and a business model around managing family activities and events is at best limited. The custom e-ink calendar came about because I couldn’t find any smart home screens that had built-in calendar functionality, and before the TRMNL, there didn’t seem to be any other simple e-ink devices focused on status and calendar views that weren’t designed and priced for the enterprise.

For couples, parents, and families who have to deal with the same amount of schedule complexity at home as at work, we’re stuck with repurposing some of the same tools, haphazardly integrated, not exactly working as designed—just good enough to add some semblance of management on top of itinenary chaos.