The Skylight Touchscreen Calendar Has My Whole Family On One Page

Juggling schedules my family of five is a constant source of stress. I deal with it every day calendars for three children in three different schools, including their extracurricular activities and the ever-changing work schedule of my husband and I. Everything food preparationgrocery shopping, and random housekeeping seems never-ending.

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

Two of my children—now ages 15 and 12—are just starting to master their schedules, and are old enough to use an attached, computerized calendar. Families with young children may not get the same benefit from a device like this, which WIRED writer Nena Farrell learned when she studied. tried Skylight and his school-age son. My children are hands-on generations, and my 12-year-old son reacted immediately.

Once we got the Skylight, he unwrapped it and placed the 15-inch screen on the counter next to the kitchen using a built-in stand. (It also comes in 10- and 27-inch sizes, and the two larger models can be wall-mounted.) We both downloaded the Skylight app on our phones and connected it to the main unit.

Calendar can integrate with existing apps from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo. I’m a Google user, and I’ve helped my son import Google Calendar to give us a background of scheduled events. They set up a calendar with colors for each child in the family and moved their activities (from my Google Calendar that was already posted) to their colors. They also added a variety of household chores, such as trash removal and recycling, which are often taken on depending on whose house it is. I liked this idea. It gave those jobs their own category, even though I’m still in my family and doing a lot of shipping.

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 the family tasks that I have planned so that they can take care of them. Instead of asking me if he can hang out with a friend on Thursday, he can check all of our schedules to see if they make sense. I was happy to release some of that responsibility, and they were happy to hold it.

Although giving them access to the main calendar gives me freedom, my Google Calendar also contains my notes, which are now visible to everyone in our family. For example, they can see a note I wrote reminding me to buy a present for my son’s birthday. I might have to rethink what I write about when I start using the Skylight app to keep things private.

One of the first things my 12-year-old son said after looking at the Skylight app was that we’ll never forget our grocery list again, since there’s one in the app. For a long time, our shopping list was a fixed sheet of paper on the fridge, and relying on it often leads to frustrating problems, like me forgetting to buy bread and going back to the store, or bringing home too many bananas. Now, we all have the Skylight app on our phones, and anyone can add items to the menu anywhere. Every time one of us (mainly me) is near the grocery store, we (me) can see the list and pick up whatever is needed.

Wall flowers

Some of Skylight’s products are behind a paywall; a Add registration ($79 per year, or $8 per month) unlocks things like a meal planning tool on the platform with its AI assistant called Sidekick. I found the Sidekick assistant very useful. After 15 years of entering many school children’s calendars with events and dates by hand, I like that Sidekick can import events from a paper image, or from an email sent, and add the events to my calendar. Scanning a paper schedule doesn’t make for the most accurate calendar event (not even sending an email), but it gives me a starting point and reduces the effort required to manually enter everything.

With Sidekick, my family can also scan recipes printed with the phone’s camera and add them to the database, while they can also click on a Recipe title to add a dish to our weekly calendar. When I’m in the kitchen, the cooking is easy to find on the 15-inch window or on the Skylight app.