We received ours five to seven business days after our Thursday morning meltdown. We had identified our problem — essential information for our household was being shared only in snippets of conversation or haphazard Google calendar invites instead of one central place — and searched for a solution with a monthly installment payment.
The Skylight Calendar, which can cost $170 to $630, depending on size, all with an optional $79 annual subscription fee to unlock special features, would make our scheduling conflicts impossible to ignore. The company took $30 off some of its calendars for Mother’s Day.
Our various appointments, early-morning calls and evening drinks would be beamed 24 hours a day, in all their color-coded glory, from the Skylight’s commanding position in the middle of our hallway.
About 888,000 families own a Skylight, its co-founder Michael Segal, who has two children under 2, told me. The Hearth, one of the first entries into the category of supersize calendars that you can hang on a wall, was created by three working mothers and is itself a supersized version of the Skylight. It sells for $700, with a $9 monthly fee, though the company also ran a sale for Mother’s Day, offering 15 percent off for Mother’s Day (an Instagram ad caption read: “Let Hearth plan, so Mom can play, too.)
The idea behind the product, said Susie Harrison, one of Hearth’s co-founders, was to “externalize the primary caregiver’s brain, and put that into a system that everyone could see.” On the call, Ms. Harrison apologized for her glitchy phone service; her son was sick, and she had escaped to an upstairs room to chat for a few minutes.
I wanted to know how other families used their calendars, and spent the next few weeks talking with the tools’ power users and skeptics: most partnered, all straight, with family budgets that could comfortably include a digital calendar. They were all ages 35 to 50, in the thick of raising young kids and juggling career demands.
