The Best Family Scheduling Hack? Slow Down

Recently, my husband told me a story he heard about another family. The parents, both working demanding jobs, found themselves dropping the ball (figuratively) on getting the kids to and from their many activities and keeping up with their other responsibilities. At last, they splurged on a nice smart calendar for their kitchen, which synchs with their phone calendars and now offers them much-needed organizational structure for doing all they need to do. Problem solved. The nearly $700-price tag seemed worth it to them, although had they done some price comparison shopping, they could have found a version for less than half the price. 

This problem at hand—having too many activities on the family calendar to be able to keep track—is remarkably common these days, especially for families where both spouses work full-time. A simple online search will yield multiple reviews of calendars and hacks—such as this roundup review of the top six apps for sharing family calendars. The good news, by the way, is that many of these are free. But I think that the problem is indicative of a larger phenomenon in the lives of many modern families: living life too fast for our own good. The various smart calendars and scheduling hacks offer a way to solve the problem by allowing everyone in the household to keep up with the breathtaking speed of life. But is this really the solution families need? 

Imagine this scenario. You have to pick up a child from school at 3:00pm, take her to the dentist at 3:30, soccer at 4:00 (oh, I guess you might be just a little late, and the kid will have to change into a uniform in the car), ballet at 6:00, and dinner and homework in the car somewhere in-between. Perhaps, you also have further work obligations—client zoom calls—to conduct in the car while chauffeuring the child. A work report to file tonight. Meanwhile, your spouse is repeating similar well-choreographed dance steps with your other children, who happen to be at a different school. One of the kids has a poster project due tomorrow, so you have to stop by a store for supplies. The spouse also has a deadline at work, which will necessitate staying up into the wee hours of the night. Oh, and someone needs to be home between the hours of 1:00 pm and 5:00 pm to let in the plumber, because the kitchen sink is leaking. 

People are creatures of routines. Thus, it is relatively easy to remember where we need to be daily or weekly at the same time. If school drop-off is always at 8:15am, most of us remember. I do not need to write down my daughter’s 4:30 pm Thursday ballet class, because it is every Thursday. The only times I mark on the calendar, in fact, are the Thursdays when there is no ballet. But family life is also filled with additional one-time obligations, which are harder to keep track of. Pediatrician well-check appointments are just once a year. Dentist check-ups are twice a year. Special projects and friends’ birthday parties come up periodically. Things breaking down at the house are highly regular, but not on any sort of predictable schedule that can be planned for in advance. 

Which brings us back to family calendars. Every activity, chore, doctor’s appointment, plumber appointment, or meet-up requires an adult from the family to be tagged as “it”—the one who will steward this task to completion that day. A university where I used to work years ago had a term for this—every action item required a designated SPA, or single point of accountability. The acronym made it sound much more fun than it was in reality. This point applies to family life as well.  

But let’s take a step back. The idea of synched smart family calendars takes a view of time that is the product of the Industrial Revolution. Once machines arrived at factories, they could work around the clock. And so, it was simply a matter of scheduling the human workers in shifts to be in attendance upon the machines. The machines never grow weary, after all, and the optimal schedule for productivity was one that allowed the factory to never close. 

We are humans, not machines...limited by time, fatigue, and these bodies of ours that require regular meals and adequate sleep, and our brains that have limited capacity for keeping track of activities. 

It seems that modern family schedules have adopted the industrial factory model of scheduling. Families simply add more activities into their schedules, and worry about keeping accurate calendars, as if this were the main issue at hand—to keep the factory rolling. The problem is: A family is not a factory. We are humans, not machines. This is not a problem—it’s a beautiful, glorious fact of our nature. We are limited by time, fatigue, and these bodies of ours that require regular meals and adequate sleep, and our brains that have limited capacity for keeping track of activities. 

When we deny our bodies the rest, sleep, and proper nutrition they need, we can ride the wave for a while, fueled largely by caffeine—I remember doing just that in college and early grad school. But these are not sustainable, long-term approaches to living. Sooner or later, the stress takes a toll—emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Furthermore, we cannot expect our overscheduled kids to just get with the program, the way we adults too often do, enslaved by the perfectly-synched calendar that says we have to be across town in 20 minutes, traffic or no. 

And that is exactly what a tool like the smart calendar can become—a slave driver, telling us what to do and when to do it. But what about the human factors? How might we approach family scheduling as, first and foremost, humans? 

Perhaps we start by admitting that family life has become too full. 

In other words, the solution to the modern family dilemma of too many things to keep track of is not just to get a smart calendar and pack more into it, but rather to scale back the family scheduling to something more human-friendly. Perhaps avoiding yet another technological solution, in this case, could lead a family to recognize the beauty of limits. For my family, in some seasons, this has meant saying no to kids’ extra-curricular activities. This academic year, we did some activities (like ballet for the youngest), but we were very deliberate about our choices, limiting activities to what was realistic. Most of all, we prioritized time with friends and with our church. 

Is there room in a healthy family’s life for a synched family calendar app or similar device? Absolutely! My brain is not what it used to be, and sometimes I need to remember what day it is—such are the perils of homeschooling and working from home. But the calendar should not be an encouragement for over-extending our already busy lives. Sometimes, the best family scheduling hack is simply to just slow down. 

Nadya Williams is a homeschooling mother, Books Editor for Mere Orthodoxy, and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church, and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic.