Juggling schedules for my family of five is a constant source of stress. Every day I deal with calendars for three kids in three different schools, plus their extra-curricular activities and the constantly evolving work schedules of me and my husband. All the meal planning, grocery shopping, and general house upkeep seem never ending.
For years, my husband and I shared a Google Calendar. It’s helpful, but not enough. Which is why I was excited when my family received a Skylight Calendar to try out.
Two of my kids—now a teen and a tween, ages 15 and 12—are just starting to become better at managing their own schedules, and they’re old enough to engage with a connected, touchscreen calendar. Families with younger children may not get the same benefits from a device like this, which WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell learned when she tested the Skylight with her preschool-age kid. My kids are touchscreen natives, and my 12-year-old son took to it right away.
As soon as we got the Skylight, he unboxed and set up the 15-inch screen on a counter near the kitchen using the built-in stand. (It also comes in 10- and 27-inch sizes, and the two largest models can be mounted on the wall.) We all downloaded the Skylight app onto our phones and synced up to the main device.
The calendar can connect to existing calendar apps from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo. I am a Google user, and I helped my son import my Google Calendar to give us a base of scheduled activities. He set up a color-coded calendar for each kid in the family and moved their activities (from my already imported Google Calendar) to their individual colors. He also added a color for the household chores, like taking out the garbage and recycling, which are often up for grabs depending on who’s home. I loved this idea. It gave those duties their own category, even if I’m the one in my family still doing most of the heavy lifting.
One thing that surprised me was how excited my kids were to see everyone’s schedule. I didn’t realize that since they’ve gotten older they want to know what family activities I’ve planned so they can work around them. 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 glad to unload some of that responsibility, and they were happy to take it on.
While giving them access to the master calendar gives me some freedom, my Google Calendar also has personal notes, which are now visible to everyone in our family. For example, they can see the note I made to remind me to shop for my son’s birthday gift. I may need to rethink my note-taking habits as I adjust to using the Skylight app so that I can retain some privacy.
One of the first things my 12-year-old said when he looked up Skylight’s tools was that we won’t forget our grocery list anymore, since there’s one in the app. For a long time, our shopping list had been a piece of paper stuck to the fridge, and relying on it often led to annoying mishaps, like me forgetting to buy bread and having to go back to the store, or bringing home way too many bananas. Now, we all have the Skylight app on our phones, and everyone can add items to the grocery list from anywhere. Anytime one of us (mostly me) is near a grocery store, we (I) can see the list and pick up whatever’s needed.
Wall Flower
Some of the Skylight’s features are behind a paywall; a Plus subscription ($79 a year, or $8 a month) unlocks things like the platform’s meal-planning tool and its AI-powered assistant named Sidekick. I found great utility in the Sidekick assistant. After 15 years of entering the kids’ multiple school and activity calendars and dates by hand, I love that Sidekick can import events from a photo of a piece of paper, or from a forwarded email, and add the activities directly to my calendar. Scanning a paper schedule doesn’t generate a perfectly accurate calendar event (neither does forwarding an email), but it gives me a starting point and cuts down on the effort it takes to enter everything manually.
With Sidekick, my family can also scan printed recipes with the phone’s camera and add them to a database, where they can then tap the recipe title to add the dish to our weekly calendar. When I’m in the kitchen, the recipe is then easy to access on the 15-inch screen or in the Skylight app.
Initially, my 12-year-old had fun scrolling through our family’s recipe book—a collection of physical pages mostly made up of recipes we’ve found online and printed—then scanning favorites into Skylight and adding the recipes he wanted me to make to the weekly calendar. Mostly, it’s easier to just assign a meal to a day of the week without a recipe. For example, I don’t follow a recipe when I make a stir-fry (I just make it up each time) but it’s a meal that is consistently on the menu each week.
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Skylight
Calendar 2
I also got excited when, after I assigned a recipe to a day of the week, the app asked if I wanted to add its ingredients to my grocery list. It worked well when I wanted to make kale chips because that recipe has only a few ingredients. But it was kind of annoying when I wanted to make minestrone soup; it added every little ingredient, including a dash of salt.
One thing that frustrates me is that the calendar doesn’t have a battery, so I can’t sit on the couch and work on the Skylight’s 15-inch screen unless I’m near an outlet and have the device plugged in. I end up making changes on the mobile app more frequently than on Skylight’s touchscreen. My husband uses the screen to review activities and tasks on our to-do list, but he uses his phone to enter new information. And my kids mostly use the app on their phones rather than on the 15-inch touchscreen.
My husband discovered that Skylight has a phone widget (available on iOS and Android), so we both added it to the front screen of our phones. We both like that the widget makes it easy to glance at today’s schedule without opening the app.
Family Circle
In addition to testing out Skylight, I downloaded a couple of other shared household calendars and took a quick look for comparison: Jam Family Calendar and Family Wall. Both of these are software-only, so we just used them on our phones.
Jam Family Calendar has similar features to the Skylight Calendar, such as a color-coded calendar that imports from Google, a to-do list and a grocery list, and is relatively intuitive.
Family Wall also has similar features, but it offers a family budget, a contact book, a meal planner, digital storage for important documents, a family chat function, and a map where family members can find one another’s locations (if they enable location sharing). My husband loved Family Wall’s Countdown to Special Days function, because he has a hard time remembering people’s birthdays.
Overall, these family calendar apps are great because our responsibilities are centralized and easier for every family member to access. My kids are more tuned in to the magnitude of it all, and they’ve taken on some responsibility for balancing their own schedules.
I still open my Google Calendar out of habit and the fear that I’ll overlook something. But as time goes on and I keep tweaking the various tools Skylight offers to fit our family’s needs, I’m hopeful I’ll rely on it more and more. Now, if only one of these apps could also do a load of laundry.
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