Turn a spare screen into a family wall

The problem with a family calendar is that only the people who open it see it, and the people least likely to open it are usually the ones it most needs to reach. A screen on the kitchen wall fixes that: everyone walks past it, every morning, without deciding to look.

You can buy a screen made for this. You can also make one from something already in a drawer, and find out whether your family will actually look at it before you spend anything.

What you need

• A screen. An old laptop, a tablet, or a monitor or TV plugged into a computer. Older is fine: it only has to show one page.
• Power. Leave it plugged in. A wall screen that goes flat by Wednesday is a wall screen nobody trusts.
• A place everyone passes. Near the kettle, the fridge or the door you leave by. Not the spare room.
• A page that shows the day, large enough to read from across the room.

Setting it up

1. Put it where it will be seen, at eye height if you can. A laptop on the end of the worktop works; a tablet on a stand works; a monitor on the wall works best.
2. Stop it sleeping. In the device’s power settings, set the screen to stay on while it is plugged in, or for as long as it allows. On a laptop, keep the lid open.
3. Open the family’s day full screen, and leave it.
4. Give it a week. If people start reading it on the way past, it is working. If nobody does, you have found that out for nothing.

Turn it off at night if you would rather; the evening is when nobody needs it.

What to show

Less than you think. A wall works when it can be read in two seconds:

• today, with what is on now and what is next;
• who is doing what, so the job has a name next to it;
• tonight’s dinner, which answers the question everybody asks;
• what is coming up: birthdays, the party on Saturday, the car insurance.

Leave off anything private. A wall is seen by visitors and children too.

Doing it in Equal House

Equal House has a Family Wall, on the free plan: a full-screen, read-only view made for this.

• On a computer, sign in at app.equal.house in a browser and open More → Family Wall. It is a day overview: a large clock, today’s timeline with a line for now, a lane for each person showing what is theirs and what is done, what is next with a countdown, tonight’s dinner, a slowly scrolling list of what is coming up (birthdays, parties, renewals), and the week ahead in seven columns. Put the browser full screen (F11 on Windows, or Control-Command-F on a Mac) and leave it.
• On a tablet or phone, open More → Family Wall in the app. It shows today: the agenda, who is doing what and where the household stands.

Both show the Fairness Score and Bric, who looks sleepy in the evening and cheers once when the day’s jobs are all done. The wall refreshes itself, so a job ticked on a phone shows as done a few minutes later. Back to the app (on the computer) or the cross (on a tablet) takes you out.

The help pages have the details: the Family Wall on a tablet and the Family Wall day overview on a computer.

A spare screen or a wall display?

A display made for the job, such as Skylight, is a better object: a touchscreen sized for the wall, a mount, nothing to set up. If the budget is there and you know your family will use it, it is a good buy. Our Skylight comparison sets out what it costs in the UK.

A spare screen is the cheap experiment. If the family reads it, you can buy the proper one knowing it will be used. And if the wall makes it obvious that the same name is next to most of the jobs, that is a different problem, and a screen will not solve it: see what a Fairness Score is.