Juggling schedules to My family of five is a constant source of stress. Every day I deal with the calendars of three children at three different schools, plus their extracurricular activities and my husband and I’s ever-evolving work schedules. All the meal planning, shopping, and general housekeeping seems never-ending.

For years, my husband and I shared a Google Calendar. It is useful, but not enough. That’s why I was excited when my family received a Skylight Calendar to try out.

Two of my children, now a teen and a preteen, ages 15 and 12, are starting to get better at managing their own schedules and are old enough to interact with a connected touchscreen calendar. Families with younger children may not get the same benefits from a device like this, as WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell discovered when she tested the Skylight with her preschooler. My kids are touch screen natives and my 12 year old son took to it right away.

As soon as we got the Skylight, we unpacked it and set up the 15-inch screen on a counter near the kitchen using the built-in stand. (It also comes in 10- and 27-inch sizes, and the two largest models can be wall-mounted.) We all download the Skylight app on our phones and sync it to the main device.

The calendar can connect to existing calendar apps from Google, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo. I am a Google user and I helped my son import my Google Calendar to have a base of scheduled activities. Created a color-coded calendar for each child in the family and moved their activities (from my already imported Google Calendar) to their individual colors. She also added a color for household chores, like taking out the trash and recycling, which are often available depending on who is home. I loved this idea. It gave those duties their own category, even if I’m the one in my family who still does most of the heavy lifting.

One thing that surprised me was how excited my kids were to see everyone’s schedule. I didn’t realize that since they grew up they want to know what family activities I have planned so they can figure it out. Instead of asking me if they can go out with a friend on Thursday, they can easily check all of our schedules to see if it makes sense. I was happy to offload some of that responsibility and they were happy to take it on.

While giving them access to the master calendar gives me some freedom, my Google Calendar also has personal notes, which are now visible to everyone in our family. For example, you can see the note I made to remind myself to buy my son’s birthday gift. I may need to reconsider my note-taking habits as I adjust to using the Skylight app so I can retain some privacy.

One of the first things my 12-year-old son said when he looked up Skylight tools was that we won’t forget our shopping list anymore since there’s one in the app. For a long time, our shopping list had been a piece of paper taped to the refrigerator, and relying on it often led to annoying mishaps, like forgetting to buy bread and having to return to the store, or bringing home too many bananas. Now we all have the Skylight app on our phones and everyone can add items to the shopping list from anywhere. Whenever one of us (mostly me) is near a grocery store, we (me) can look at the list and pick up whatever we need.

wall flower

Some of Skylight’s features are behind a paywall; a Plus subscription ($79 a year or $8 a month) unlocks things like the platform’s meal planning tool and its AI-powered assistant called Sidekick. I found great utility in the Sidekick assistant. After 15 years of entering multiple calendars and kids’ school and activity dates by hand, I love that Sidekick can import events from a photo of a piece of paper or from a forwarded email, and add the activities directly to my calendar. Scanning a paper calendar doesn’t produce a perfectly accurate calendar event (neither does forwarding an email), but it gives me a starting point and reduces the effort involved in entering everything manually.

With Sidekick, my family can also scan printed recipes with the phone’s camera and add them to a database, where they can then tap the recipe title to add the dish to our weekly calendar. When I’m in the kitchen, it’s easy to access the recipe on the 15-inch screen or in the Skylight app.