For years I ran restaurants, sixty to eighty hours a week, and Josef ran the school side of our house. He did everything for the kids. Backpacks, forms, practices, field trips, all of it. When I moved to a nine to five, I wanted to do all of it, and I loved it.
Then the kids got older, and every question started with "Mom, when" or "Dad, where." When is this due. What's for dinner. Do I have practice tonight. Is it my night for dishes.
None of those are hard. They just add up. With five kids, it's a lot of them, all day, and it takes a lot of mental energy.
In a restaurant, nobody asks the manager when their shift is. It's posted, and everybody knows where to look. I run large projects for a living, and I thought, I can make this easier at home too. So we built the same kind of system I used to build in restaurants.
At 8 every morning, each of our kids gets a text with their own day in it. What's on their calendar, which chores are theirs, and any assignment that's missing, from the school emails I get.
Josef and I get one too. Ours has everybody's events and anything due on the list we share, whether that's a field trip form or turning the sprinklers off.
Nobody types any of it. The phone reads what's already in it, puts it together in a text, and sends it.
I don't have to answer the questions. Every text comes from the same calendar and the same list, so we're all working from one source of truth.
The morning text is two shortcuts, one for the adults and one for each kid. They run on one phone, so only one person in your house sets them up. They're in the Automation Kit. You add each one from a link and fill in your own names and times.
The missing assignments line comes from School Mail Triage, which reads the school's emails and is sold separately. Without it, the text still sends, with the calendar and the chores.