How to (actually) get organized this fall

The surprising science of family scheduling

Welcome back to Techno Sapiens! I’m Jacqueline Nesi, a psychology professor and mom of two (soon-to-be three!) young kids.

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7 min read

The spreadsheet has 40 rows and 8 columns. There’s a daily schedule, broken down into 15- and 30-minute increments. There are indications for school and activity drop-offs, plus assignment of tasks to various caregivers. There’s a section for notes, another for tracking extracurriculars, and another for outstanding questions. There are codes in the form of colors and abbreviations, and many—too many—question marks (JN stay with baby? Date night? Need help with school pickups?)

It’s late, and my husband and I are staring silently at the sheet on his laptop, our eyes glazing over the intersecting lines.

But even if we figure this out, I start, How are we going to remember all this? Do we have to check the spreadsheet everyday? Do we transfer it all to a calendar of some sort?

We keep staring.

And how do we track all the other stuff? Like, remembering show-and-tell on Wednesdays, or to pack up his swimsuit and towel and snack before swim lessons?

We stare some more.

And what happens when there’s a change in the schedule? What about doctor appointments? What if one of us needs to work late or can’t do our usual drop-off?

We kick around various systems, solutions, and strategies, but instead of landing on an answer, we end the night with a question.

How do people do this?!

Let’s get…Organized! Organized!

I know my family is not alone in the challenges of navigating new schedules, dividing up tasks, and managing the competing demands of work, childcare, and everything else.¹²

Perhaps you are not married to a reformed investment banker, so your version involves a little less Excel. Or maybe you have older kids, and your version involves more extracurriculars and homework.

No matter, the question still remains: how do people do this?!

As my husband and I grew stuck, muddling through increasingly complex equations of baby naps, carpools, and babysitters, I decided to kick things up a notch:

It was time to go to the research.

What, if anything, does the evidence say about organizing family life? Are there things we can learn from the research that might actually be helpful?

To my surprise, the answer was yes.

Here are three research-backed tips.

1. Create a shared calendar system

I was shocked (and delighted) to find that there is research on this. Much of it comes out of the world of human-computer interaction (HCI), and was done for purposes of building digital calendar products for families.

I found one study, for example, that interviewed 44 families about their “calendaring routines” to create a full typology of calendar types. This, sapiens, is a level of nerd-powered detail I can really get behind. It also may be helpful for considering your own system.

So, let’s take a look at three key questions you’ll want to answer, based on this research.

Who manages the calendar?

Most families have a “primary scheduler,” or the person who adds the majority of activities to the calendar and makes sure others know about them, and “secondary scheduler,” who does less of this. This creates three basic options:

• Monocentric: primary scheduler does almost all calendar management, little to no involvement from secondary scheduler

• Pericentric: primary scheduler does most of it, secondary scheduler does some

• Polycentric: primary scheduler is still “in charge,” but secondary scheduler is frequently involved

Each of these options can work, as long as everyone is opting into the system.³ Note that in most studies of heterosexual couples (93% of them in this study), moms are the primary scheduler. It’s worth clearly communicating and deciding if this is the right set-up for your family (see #2).

What do you use the calendar for?

The goal is to integrate all relevant calendars into a shared, single “source of truth.” Here are some of the main tasks families may want their calendars to achieve:

• Public awareness: Everyone can see the calendar in a publicly viewable place in the home (or device)

• Personal work: Inclusion of work events that may impact family scheduling, and vice versa

• Personal children’s: Teach kids about scheduling and organizing

• Planning/reference: Provide a reference for dates and times when scheduling new events

• Tasks and chores: Record different family member’s responsibilities

In general, shared electronic calendars are useful for things like personal work and planning, since they’re available anywhere you go (your office, school, the doctor). They can work for public awareness, too, as long as everyone checks them, or if they’re displayed on a screen somewhere in the home. Many families also rely on good, old-fashioned paper-and-pen or whiteboard calendars in shared spaces.

How will you update and coordinate the calendar?

The researchers identified a series of “scheduling and awareness activities” that you may want to consider:

• Batch updates: At the beginning of a new season or school year, someone adds all the new activities to the calendar

• Continuous updates: Family members update the calendar throughout the month

• Synchronizing calendars: Family members copy events between calendars (e.g., work and personal) to make sure everyone’s on the same page

• Awareness acquisition: Family members check the calendar (active) or get told about events (passive)

• Coordination: Family members discuss in advance, or on an event-by-event basis, who is responsible for each event. This will likely involve creating some decision rules, as well (e.g., one parent does school drop-offs every Tuesday).

For what it’s worth, a (very) informal survey of some friends and family members that I anxiously conducted this week suggests one popular method: sit down, either alone or with your partner, at the beginning of every week and write down the schedule to come.⁴

2. Divide and conquer

For many years, researchers have been studying the “physical” aspects of unpaid household work. This includes things like: driving your child to a doctor’s appointment, taking out the trash, going to the grocery store, and washing the dishes.

More recently—and, honestly, what took them so long?—researchers have started to recognize the “cognitive” or “mental” aspects of this work. This is the thinking, planning, and organizing that goes into household tasks. As with calendar management, research suggests this type of labor tends to fall disproportionately on women.

A recent systematic review defines “mental labor” according to five components. It involves: cognition (thinking and remembering), management (monitoring and reminding), communal orientation (tasks done for the collective good), anticipation (future planning and anticipating problems), and invisibility (often goes unnoticed, even by the person doing it).

Here’s what this conceptualization of mental labor means for us: when we’re dividing household tasks, we need to:

(1) Combat invisibility by being aware of what actually goes into each task

(2) Figure out who is responsible for each part of it.

Some couples split up the mental and physical components of certain tasks. For example, one person does the dinner “mental labor” (planning, remembering family food preferences, monitoring what groceries are available, etc.) and the other does the cooking.

Other families find it more helpful to assign entire tasks,⁵ with one person “owning” everything that goes into getting dinner on the table before your toddler starts screaming NEED BURGER MEAT.⁶

The division of labor can be a source of significant stress in many families, and when partners perceive an unequal distribution, it can spark resentment and emotional distress.

Communication about this is key. One research-backed way to approach this? Schedule regular check-ins with your partner—weekly or monthly meetings to discuss what’s going well (and express appreciation), as well as problem solve where needed.

3. Outsource when you can

You may remember the value of outsourcing from our discussion of “time affluence,” but it bears repeating here. Even with a perfect calendar system and flawless delegation of tasks, you may need some extra help—and research finds that when we spend money in ways that give us back our time, it increases happiness and life satisfaction.

As you’re getting organized and dividing tasks, decide which (if any) jobs will be outsourced. This is obviously dependent on the resources you have available to you, financial and otherwise, but here are some tasks you might consider outsourcing:

• Grocery delivery

• Laundry service⁷

• Some amount of childcare

• Cooking

• Cleaning

• Running errands

We’ve got this

As will be obvious to anyone who’s ever added an all-caps reminder to a shared family calendar, only to have it ignored by the rest of the family: these tips will not solve everything.

Managing family life, coordinating childcare and work and other responsibilities, is an incredibly complex task. It takes time and resources. It takes challenging conversations. It takes trade-offs, (sometimes) strong emotions, and frequent updates and revisions.

But this is a start. And please: if you have a system that’s working for you, send ideas my way. I’ll be here, at my laptop, staring at a spreadsheet.

What systems or strategies do you use to stay organized? We’re talking about it in the chat so please come join us!

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1. The heading for this section was meant to be sung to the tune of Physical by Olivia Newton-John, in case that wasn’t obvious.

2. We recently moved, and this, alongside lots of other changes (soon-to-be new baby, new school for one child, new work projects) has lead to an all-consuming focus on organization. Lots of frantic ordering of drawer organizers and shelf baskets happening over here.

3. If you are not happy with your current set-up, may I suggest approaching your partner with something like: “As the primary family scheduler, I feel we’ve fallen into a monocentric calendar system and would like to discuss an alternative polycentric system”?

4. My mom, at one point a full-time caregiver for six children spanning from preschool to high school, also reported doing this daily. Each night, she would write out a master hour-by-hour schedule for the following day, as well as individual schedules for any other caregivers who might be involved. An inspiration, truly.

5. This approach has been popularized with methods like “Fair Play,” where each member of a couple takes responsibility for the “Conceptualization, Planning, and Execution” of different household tasks.

6. No idea where my toddler learned the phrase “burger meat,” but can confirm that he will scream it repeatedly when a ground beef sauté is taking too long.

7. My husband and I started using a laundry service about a year ago and it has changed our lives. We set our laundry outside our door one day a week, and its get picked up, washed, folded, and returned to use 24 hours later. We live in a college town, so I’m pretty sure the service is designed for (and run by) college students. The good news is that this means it’s cheap. The bad news is that we’ve accumulated a number of oversized sweatpants and stringy crop tops that were accidentally included in our return bag.