Does a shared family calendar reduce the mental load?

A calendar displays. It does not find anything out.

So when a household sets one up, the sequence is always the same. Both parents agree it is a good idea. One of them, the one who already knew all the dates, spends an evening entering them. For two or three weeks it is genuinely helpful. Then the entering stops, because it was only ever one person doing it and that person has a job, and within a month the calendar is out of date, which is worse than not having one, because now there is a thing that looks authoritative and is wrong.

Nothing has moved. One parent has taken on an additional maintenance task and the other has gained a screen they can check. That is not a shared load. It is the same load with a reporting layer on top.

It is worth slowing down on what "just put it in the calendar" contains, because written out it stops sounding like one action.

Take a single trip letter. To get it into a calendar somebody has to:

• notice it, among the text, the app notification, the newsletter and the copy

in the book bag, which is four copies of the same message and is normal

• decide that it is a thing that needs to exist in a calendar at all, which

many messages do not

• read the date and time out of a paragraph of prose, and work out whether

"Thursday" means this week or next

• work out which child it applies to, and whether the older one has something

clashing

• notice that it needs a packed lunch, which is not a calendar event but is a

Wednesday night task

• notice the payment deadline, which is a different date from the trip
• decide which parent is covering the drop off, which requires knowing both

work diaries

• then type it in

Seven of those eight steps are the mental load. The typing is the last one and it is the only one the calendar helps with.

This is why "be more organised" does not work as advice, and the parenting expert Anita Cleare made the same point to the BBC, calling it the efficiency trap. You cannot organise your way out of a workload whose cost is in noticing and deciding rather than in recording.

The research that prompted the recent coverage measured exactly this distinction.

Ana Catalano Weeks at the University of Bath and Leah Ruppanner at the University of Melbourne asked 3,000 United States parents who handles the household tasks that require mental effort, as opposed to physical effort: keeping track of when the sheets need washing, remembering what in the fridge has to be eaten. Mothers handled 71 per cent of them, against 45 per cent for fathers. On the daily jobs the gap was wider still, 79 per cent against 37 per cent, while fathers took more of the tasks that come round rarely, 65 per cent against 53 per cent. The paper is A typology of US parents' mental loads, in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The number to hold on to is the first one. Seventy-one per cent of the thinking. Not seventy-one per cent of the jobs. A calendar addresses the jobs.

Three tests, and a calendar has to pass all three.

Events arrive without being typed. This is the one that decides it. If a human has to read a message and enter an event, the calendar has not taken any work, it has relocated it. Anything that fills itself counts: a subscribed feed, a forwarded email that gets read automatically, a school system that publishes dates directly.

Neither parent is the publisher. If one of you owns the calendar and the other consults it, you have built an information service with one member of staff. Both of you should be receiving, not one of you distributing.

It survives a bad week. Every household has a fortnight where nobody maintains anything. A calendar that is only correct while somebody is tending it will be wrong exactly when you most need it, which is the week everything went sideways.

Most family calendars, on a phone or on a wall, pass the second test and fail the first and third. That is not a criticism of the apps. It is what a calendar is: a place to write things down.

There is a real answer here, and it is narrower than the advice usually suggests, which is why it works.

The fixed dates can be automated today. Term dates, INSET days, half terms and often the sports and music calendar are published by the school in advance, and a growing number of schools offer them as a calendar subscription, an address you add once so the dates appear on both phones and stay correct if the school moves one. How to subscribe to a school calendar feed walks through it for schools that use SOCS, which is common in independent schools, and the same principle applies wherever a school publishes a feed.

Do that and you have removed a genuine category of work: nobody has to type the INSET days, and nobody has to be the person who knew about them.

What a subscription will not give you is the other four fifths of the year: the trip letter, the payment deadline, the club that filled up, the form that needed signing, the parents' evening booking window. Those arrive as prose, in email and app messages, one at a time, and they are what the back to school checklist is made of.

Do these in order, because the third one is wasted without the first.

First, make sure the messages reach both of you. Ring the school office and ask which of you is recorded as the first contact, which messages go to that contact only, and whether both of you can be set to receive everything, including texts. A shared calendar downstream of a single inbox will always be filled by whoever has that inbox. The school admin only one of you can see explains why that field decides more than any agreement you make at home, and why did you become the default parent lists the other accounts that need the same treatment.

Second, subscribe to the dates the school already publishes. That is the part that fills itself, and it is free.

Third, look at what is left, which will be the letters and the deadlines, and decide honestly whether either of you is going to type them in. If the answer is no, do not build the calendar. Use the term survival sheet or the weekly family planner on paper, which at least fails visibly rather than looking authoritative and being three weeks stale.

The reason Cyril exists is the gap the third step describes. It reads the school's own emails, portals and calendar feeds, pulls the dates and the deadlines out of the prose, and puts them in front of both parents without either of you doing the noticing. That is the part a calendar cannot do, and it is the seventy-one per cent.