Juggling schedules my family of five is a constant source of stress. Every day I am busy calendar for three children in three different schools, with their extracurricular activities and the ever-changing work schedules of my husband and I. All food planninggrocery shopping, and general housekeeping seems endless.
For years, my husband and I shared a Google Calendar. It helps, but it’s not enough. That’s why I was happy when my family received a Skylight Calendar to try.
My two children—now a teenager and a middle one, ages 15 and 12—are starting to get better at managing their own schedules, and are old enough to interact with an integrated, touch-screen calendar. Families with young children may not get the same benefits from a device like this, as WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell learned when she tried Skylight with her preschool child. My kids are touchscreen natives, and my 12 year old used it right away.
Once we got the Skylight, he unboxed it and placed the 15-inch screen on the counter next to the kitchen using the built-in stand. (They also come in 10- and 27-inch sizes, and the two larger models can be wall-mounted.) We all downloaded the Skylight app to our phones and synced it to the main device.
Calendar can connect to existing calendar applications from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo. I’m a Google user, and I helped my son import my Google Calendar to give us a baseline of scheduled activities. She set up a color-coded calendar for each child in the family and transferred their activities (from my Google Calendar that I had already ordered) to their individual colors. He also added color for household chores, such as taking out the trash and recycling, which are often assigned depending on whose house it is. I liked this idea. It gave those roles their own set, even though I’m the one in my family I still do a lot of lifting.
One thing that surprised me was how excited my kids were to see everyone’s schedule. Little did I know that since they are older they want to know what family activities I have planned for them to work around. Instead of asking me if they can hang out with a friend on Thursday, they can easily check all of our schedules to see if it makes sense. I was happy to offload some of that responsibility, and they were happy to shoulder it.
While giving them access to the main calendar gives me some freedom, my Google Calendar also has private notes, which are now visible to everyone in our family. For example, they might see a letter I wrote to remind me to buy my son a birthday present. I may need to rethink my note-taking habits as I get used to Skylight so I can retain some privacy.
One of the first things my 12-year-old said when he looked for Skylight tools was that we’ll never forget our grocery list again, now that there’s one in the app. For a long time, our shopping list was a piece of paper kept in the fridge, and relying on it often led to annoying problems, like me forgetting to buy bread and going back to the store, or bringing home too many bananas. Now, we all have the Skylight app on our phones, and everyone can add items to the grocery list from anywhere. Whenever one of us (mainly me) is near a grocery store, we (me) can see the list and pick up whatever is needed.
Wall Flowers
Some Skylight features are behind a paywall; a Joint registration ($79 a year, or $8 a month) unlocks things like a meal planning software tool and its AI-powered assistant called Sidekick. I found good use in the Sidekick assistant. After 15 years of manually setting up many kids’ school calendars and dates, I love that Sidekick can bring up events from a paper photo, or from a sent email, and add the activity directly to my calendar. Scanning a paper schedule doesn’t provide a perfectly accurate calendar event (nor does email forwarding), but it gives me a start and reduces the effort it takes to set everything up myself.
With Sidekick, my family can also scan posted recipes using the phone’s camera and add them to the database, where they can tap the recipe title to add the dish to our weekly calendar. When I’m in the kitchen, recipes are easy to access on the 15-inch screen or in the Skylight app.
