Household

Why one app?

You could run a family on a shared calendar, a notes app and a group chat. Lots of families do. This is what one app gives you that those don’t.

Why I built it

I suddenly found myself running everything in our house, with two teenagers and all the driving, forms and food that come with them. I was checking my email, then my calendar, then one app for this and another for that. It was maddening. I wanted one place for all of it.

Now we have one. My partner adds something and I see it. The chores are in the to-dos. The shopping is there. It already makes life easier, and it’s the app our house runs on.

Everything except messaging. Most families already have messaging sorted, and building our own would add a lot of risk for very little gain.

Dan, who makes Household

One person stops carrying it all

In most homes one person keeps the week in their head: who needs to be where, what’s running low, what’s due. It’s usually Mum. Researchers who study this find the remembering and the checking land mostly on one parent, and that the more of it someone carries, the more likely they are to be stressed or burnt out.

Put the week somewhere everyone can see and that work stops being invisible. People look instead of asking you, and a job can be handed over with a name on it. An app won’t divide the work evenly on its own. It does put the work where the rest of the family can see it, and someone can then take a piece of it.

Everything about a plan is together

A netball game is more than a time in a calendar. There’s when to be there, who’s driving, the uniform to wash and the snacks to buy. Spread that across a calendar, a notes app and a chat thread and you’re checking three places, hoping nothing slipped.

Here they sit together: the event, the driver, the jobs and the shopping. Today shows what’s on and what’s due on one screen.

Kids join in on their own phones

Kids are likelier to keep plans up to date when they can add them themselves. Each child signs in on their own phone, sees what the family has on, adds their things and taps to say they’ve seen the ones that are theirs. You stop relaying messages.

Teenagers get a lot of notifications. One study followed 200 of them and found half were getting 237 a day or more. So Household sends few of its own: each person picks which reminders reach them, and a parent can pick for a younger child.

Some things stay with the parents

Share a calendar and everyone on it sees everything. Marking an event “private” doesn’t help, because anyone who can edit the calendar can still read it. That matters when the event is a birthday present, a doctor’s appointment, or a conversation you haven’t had yet.

Anything marked “parents only” here never reaches a child’s phone.

Jobs have a name on them

Most to-do apps can’t share a list with a family, put one person’s name on a job, or bring it back next week. A job here carries a day, a time and a name, and bins night returns on its own once someone ticks it off.

It spots problems for you

An ordinary calendar knows only the events on it. Household reads each person’s whole week, so it can tell you when:

  • someone is booked in two places at once
  • there isn’t enough time to get from one place to the next
  • the person driving won’t be home that day.

No ads, nothing sold

Plenty of free apps are paid for by adverts and by collecting data. One study of more than 20,000 Android apps found trackers even in the ones made for children. Household carries no adverts and no tracking, and your family’s information is never sold. The privacy page has the details.

When you might not need it

If two adults with a shared calendar and a shopping list are managing fine, keep what you have. This is for the houses where the week got bigger: more people, more places to be, kids with plans of their own, and someone at home who’s tired of holding all of it.

Where this comes from