Why the shared calendar fails

Almost every family arriving at coordination has already tried this. A shared calendar, or a group chat, or a spreadsheet somebody set up with real enthusiasm in March. By June it is out of date and everybody has quietly gone back to texting one person.

Four reasons, and none of them is the tool

It requires everybody to maintain it, and the load is not shared. One person enters ninety per cent of the items. That person is already the one doing ninety per cent of the coordinating, so the calendar has added a task to the most loaded person rather than removing one.

It shows events, not ownership. "Doctor Tuesday 2pm" does not say who is driving. So the calendar is full and the actual question, who has this, is still unanswered, and somebody still has to ask.

It exposes everybody’s whole life. Sharing a calendar to coordinate care means sharing every dentist appointment and every private thing on it. People respond by keeping a second calendar, at which point the shared one is fiction.

Nothing notices when it is wrong. A stale calendar looks exactly like an accurate one. There is no moment where it announces that nobody has updated it in six weeks, so families keep trusting it well past the point where it deserves trust.

What the family actually needs to know

Three things, and a calendar answers only the first:

• What is happening, and when.
• Who has it. A name against every item, not a shared assumption.
• What has nobody. The most valuable of the three, and the one no calendar will ever show, because an item nobody entered does not exist.

Why the group chat is worse

Families that abandon the calendar usually fall back to a group chat, which feels lighter and is a worse instrument for this. A chat has no state: an agreement made on Tuesday is forty messages up by Friday and functionally gone. It has no ownership, because a message is addressed to everybody, which means it is addressed to nobody. And it mixes coordination with conversation, so the commitment to collect a prescription sits between a photograph and a joke. Everything genuinely useful about a chat is social, and everything it is being asked to do here is not.

What has to be true instead

Coordination that survives contact with a busy family has to do the noticing itself. Somebody should be told that Thursday has no driver without having to go and look, and availability should be usable without publishing anybody’s diary. Family Observatory is built around exactly those two constraints, because they are the two that killed the spreadsheet.

The general principle is broader than any product: a coordination system that depends on people remembering to check it has moved the work rather than removed it.

The second calendar problem

Watch for the moment somebody starts keeping their own copy. It happens quietly, usually because the shared one is wrong often enough to be untrustworthy, and it is the point at which the arrangement has failed without anybody announcing it. From then on there are two versions of the truth and the shared one is a courtesy. If you find yourself checking the family calendar and then texting to confirm, the calendar has already stopped working and everybody is being polite about it.

When the calendar is genuinely enough

Two people, one supported person, stable needs, both parties in the same town. That family does not need anything more and should not buy anything. The shared calendar starts failing at roughly the point where the number of people involved exceeds the number who can hold the whole picture in their head, which in practice is about three.

Related

• Who is in charge
• When siblings disagree
• The long-distance sibling
• What the category means