A family planner on your computer

Most family planning happens on a phone, in the gaps: a reminder typed at the school gate, a tick on the way out. That is right for the small things. The bigger ones, such as laying out next week, working out who is doing the Thursday pick-up, or planning the meals and the shop, are easier with a big screen, a keyboard and the whole week in front of you.

A family planner on your computer is not a second system. It is the same plan, seen at a size where you can think about it.

What a computer is better for

• Seeing the week at once. A phone shows a day, or a list. A computer can show seven days side by side, with the hours down the side, so the clash at 5pm on Wednesday is obvious before it happens.
• Moving things about. Dragging a meal from Tuesday to Thursday, or looking down a list of jobs and handing three of them over, is quicker with a mouse.
• Typing. House notes, the boiler code, the recipe Grandma dictated, a long list of what the children need for camp.
• Doing it together. Two grown-ups at one screen on a Sunday evening, looking at the same week, is a planning meeting that takes ten minutes instead of a running argument that takes all week.

What stays better on a phone

• Reminders and notifications. They arrive on the phone in your pocket, which is where they are useful.
• Ticking things off as they are done, wherever you are.
• Children. A child’s own board belongs on a phone or tablet they can hold.

So the useful split is: plan at the desk, live on the phone. As long as both are the same plan, nothing has to be copied between them.

A weekly ten minutes at the computer

1. Look at the week as a grid. Who is away, who is working late, which day is the busy one.
2. Look at the split. If one of you has most of the week’s work, hand some of it over now, while it is still a plan rather than a grievance.
3. Plan the meals, and let the shopping list fill itself from them.
4. Write down anything one person knows and the other would need: a new club time, the dentist’s number.
5. Close the laptop. The rest of the week runs from the phones.

Doing it in Equal House

Equal House runs in a web browser at app.equal.house, signed in with the same account as the phone app. It is the same household and the same plan, and Pro is one subscription for the household on every phone and computer: £29.90 a year, or £2.99 a month.

On a computer it is laid out for a big screen:

• Tasks as a list with the chosen job open beside it, and a strip at the top showing this week’s split between the grown-ups and the Fairness Score.
• The calendar as a week grid, with an all-day row, a line for now, a mini month and the search across a year.
• The meal planner as a board of days and meals, with meals dragged between days and the plan’s shopping beside it.
• The shopping list in aisles, side by side.
• People, Documents, House notes, Pets and Parties in the sidebar, each as a list with the chosen one open beside it.
• “/” to search the menu and every setting, from anywhere.
• The Family Wall, a full-screen overview of the family’s day for a spare screen. See turn a spare screen into a family wall.

What it leaves to the phones: reminders and notifications, the app lock, and Kid Zone, which only opens on a phone or tablet. A phone that opens app.equal.house is sent to the app instead.

The help pages cover signing in on a computer, what is different from the phone and buying Pro in the browser.

The point of it

The plan matters less than whether the work in it is shared. A big screen makes that easier to see, because the whole week is in front of you at once, and so is who is doing it. If the split looks wrong, the computer is a good place to fix it: see how to divide chores fairly between partners.