Can Office Tools Help Couples Optimize for Domestic Bliss?

Efficiency is Nana Guenther’s love language. It is also her profession. The thirty-seven-year-old Torontonian spent a decade in corporate accounting before realizing that her true calling was process automation: streamlining her clients’ existing systems and separating the tasks that need person power from those that might just as well be managed by a computerized solution. When Guenther and her husband, Phillip, became the parents of one boy in 2019 and a second three years later, she saw that her domestic life was in need of her professional expertise.

“Two demanding careers, two boys under three. It was just way too much chaos, and I realized we needed to operationalize our home life,” she says.

So that’s what she did. First, she automated the family schedule and moved all household management conversations to Fantastical, a calendar app that allows her to prioritize and colour-code duties. Guenther and her husband use Microsoft To Do to manage their grocery list; Google Drive is for important documents and domestic information (the dishwasher manual, children’s clothing sizes), and monday.com is for tracking development goals.

Guenther recently got a promotion, and she used the extra income to outsource meal prep and laundry. “I would honestly hire someone to put on my shoes and socks,” she says. She’s kidding, but also unapologetic. She has spent enough time in Mommyland (on Instagram and IRL) to know that society takes a dim view of women who would rather delegate household responsibility—a perspective she rejects for its inherent sexism, yes, but also “it’s just poor resource management.” A systems approach to home life allows Guenther to save time for the things that matter most to her: professional ambitions and bedtime snuggles.

For a chartered accountant who gets off on banishing redundancies, tech integration on the home front is a natural instinct. For Lindsay Zier-Vogel, a novelist I met through a Facebook writers’ group, adopting workplace solutions was a bigger stretch. Her husband, Adam, used the project management app Trello at the office and suggested it might help keep home life running smoothly. But Zier-Vogel was devoted to her old-school paper to-do lists and trusty Sharpie.

For a while, she held firm, and then came the “swimcident” of 2019. Adam was in charge of registering their kids for after-school swimming lessons on the City of Toronto website—a highly competitive free-for-all process that has brought even the most Type A parents to their knees. “It was two minutes to go on registration morning, and suddenly he’s asking me, ‘Where are the kids’ codes? What is a family pin?’ It was just a disaster,” Zier-Vogel recalls. Their boys missed out on swimming that season, and mom was finally ready to reassess her luddite loyalties.

Today, the couple manages larger projects like renos, holidays, and summer camp on Trello. They share a schedule and running to-do lists on Google Keep and use the iPhone Notes app to store info for recurring events: packing lists for their annual cottage rental and sign-in info for city programs (they haven’t missed a swim registration day since).

“Before, we were reinventing the wheel every time, whereas now, either one of us can access the list of what our son needs for baseball practice and nobody has to think about it,” Zier-Vogel says. Mental energy is both a prized commodity and a finite resource, she adds. “I want to use it working on my novel, not trying to remember if one of us remembered to buy rice.”

Every Saturday, she and Adam brew coffee for a scheduled state of the union, like a weekly check-in at the office, where only PJs are encouraged. It’s time carved out for the administrative aspects of home life—what’s barrelling down the pipeline but also longer-term objectives. “I swear the number of times we have used the term ‘workback schedule’ in our conversations about home life is ridiculous,” Zier-Vogel laughs, “but it really helps.”

And if all of this doesn’t quite sound like the stuff of Rockwell paintings and #relationshipgoals, the implementation of workplace tools and practices—the “HR-ification” of domestic life, as the internet has taken to calling it—at home is a solution more and more couples and families are landing on as they struggle to manage the maelstrom of modern life. Those solutions include Slack channels for visibility, interactive spreadsheets to coordinate ballooning schedules, productivity trackers to stay on task, and AI-enabled apps to manage all of the above.

The logic is pretty simple: the software and practices that have allowed us to keep workplaces running smoothly for years can just as easily be applied to “The Family Firm.” The phrase is the title of economist Emily Oster’s 2021 bestseller, which espouses a “data-driven” approach to the domestic enterprise. Life is busier than ever these days; the once clearly drawn boundary between work and home has gone the way of the Sony Discman. So why not onboard the colleagues and direct reports who are likely to be sitting around your dinner table?

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You don’t have to look too far back into history to see how and why domestic harmony spun off the rails. We can blame intensified demands over the past few decades, but there is also a glaring supply issue: “Before women entered the workforce, there was a fairly clear delineation within couples—where men worked outside of the household and women worked in it,” says May Friedman, a professor of social work and fashion at Toronto Metropolitan University who wrote her dissertation on mommy bloggers and the changing face of motherhood.

Obviously, this was a flawed model from a gender-equity perspective, “but on the plus side,” Friedman notes, “it recognized that keeping a household is a full-time job.” Today, around 80 percent of Canadian mothers work outside of the home, but that highly anticipated sequel to the gender revolution—the part where men were supposed to enter the domestic sphere to the same degree—never did materialize. Women in heterosexual relationships still manage 71 percent of domestic labour.

“I swear the number of times we have used the term ‘workback schedule’ in our conversations about home life is ridiculous.”

Looking back, Zier-Vogel sees how her Sharpie method wasn’t just keeping her children from fall activities—it was also keeping her partner from fully participating in their collective objectives. She took both parental leaves and thus became the one best versed in how to meet the needs of their new and extremely demanding roommates. Even when she went back to work, that didn’t change much. She agrees that she became the “shefault,” borrowing a term from Eve Rodsky’s 2019 relationship tome Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (And More Life to Live).

As a consultant advising Fortune 500 companies on philanthropy, Rodsky helped her clients operate more efficiently, but after she and her husband became parents, she fell into the same old gendered traps with regard to domestic responsibility. Fair Play opens with a seemingly innocuous text she got from her husband asking her why they didn’t have any blueberries at home. (Instantly defensive, she thought: Why couldn’t he get the blueberries?) She channelled the tension into conversations with other mom friends, asking for examples of tasks they perform behind the scenes for their families.

The “Sh*t I Do” list became the “Sh*t I Do” spreadsheet with over a thousand entries: potty training, field-trip parenting, grocery shopping, picking up after the pet that they also take to the vet and the groomer. And that ultimately became Fair Play, a book with an accompanying set of playing cards—each representing a task owned by one partner. The idea is to first recognize the labour that gets done and then redistribute it within the household. “What gets measured gets managed,” goes the old business-world axiom—why not apply that hyper transparency to the home?

A bestseller off the jump, the book became even more relevant during the pandemic, when an uptick in domestic responsibility drove a lot of women to their breaking point. Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine produced a Fair Play documentary in 2022. That year, New York magazine profiled “the marriages hanging on by a $19 deck of cards.” In Facebook groups and on Reddit threads, Fair Players discuss their wins and losses using Rodsky-approved jargon: “CPE” (conception, planning, execution) describes a core tenet of the Fair Play method, where being responsible for a task (say, a kid’s after-school sport) means managing every aspect of said task, from research and registration to game days and equipment needs (and doing it without a reminder from your partner).

In her own research, Rodsky found that men are often willing executors: they cook family meals, attend games, run last-minute errands as directed but rarely participate in the time-consuming and highly tedious planning and administration that hold everything together (or “the mental load”). This made me think of a conversation I had with a friend a few years back about a fight she had gotten into with her spouse after she watched him crack open a new 500-page political memoir as they got into bed. She thought about how long it had been since she had read for pleasure, and the realization left her in tears.

“What’s wrong?” her husband asked with genuine concern, and when she explained, he assured her that he would up his contribution to their home life. “Just tell me what to do,” he said, and suddenly her tears turned to rage: “I don’t want to be in charge of the to-do list!” she yelled back. I thought it was such a relatable and powerful articulation of a massive systemic issue that I told her she should write a book. Fair Play came out a few months later.

Of course, there are caveats. This entire conversation is more steeped in gender stereotypes and heteronormativity than an episode of The Bachelor. We all know (or are part of) straight couples who function outside of traditional gender roles, or same-sex couples who elude gendered relationship dynamics for obvious reasons. In her book, Rodsky uses terms like “primary breadwinner” and “primary cardholder” as workarounds. She champions her methods even for roommates and notes that her Fair Play interview group included same-sex couples—many of whom reported the same issues around inequitable division of labour at home and the resulting stress and resentment.

Fair Play argues that when one person assumes full CPE responsibility for something—kids’ dental care, mortgage payments, garbage—the other person can save time and brain power. Maybe even carve out some “unicorn space” (another Rodsky-ism): reclaimed hours to pursue interests and passions outside the home. And it works—at least it can.

Alyssa Davies joined a choir and a running group—the kinds of just-for-me commitments that felt out of reach when she and her then husband sat down with the Fair Play deck two years ago to bring structure to their more laissez faire form of domestic management. “We would get to Wednesday every week and just be drowning,” says the thirty-four-year-old from Calgary. They kept a spreadsheet broken into short- and long-term horizons (a family trip to Disneyland in five years, taking up golf in ten) and have developed jargon of their own.

The couple is now separated, but they still use many of the same techniques to plan their kids’ lives. Research consistently shows that goals are more likely to be achieved (by just over 40 percent, in some studies) when we write them down. That’s why your boss sends you an email rather than casually mentioning annual earnings targets between episodes of Ted Lasso.

Research also shows that marriage, in its current incarnation, isn’t working. Three full-time jobs divided by two adults equals total system malfunction, and with kids, the math gets even murkier. It’s a problem, from a sociological perspective, but in Silicon Valley, it’s a gap in the market worth seizing on. Modern domestic strife is untenable, but no matter—there’s an app for that.

“FAMTECH” is the Silicon Valley–friendly buzz term that encompasses everything from the venture capital–backed start-ups on the one end to the plethora of pastel-coloured marriage-meeting templates sold on Etsy on the other. There’s Uber but for nannies; smart diaper pails (that detect odour and send alerts via an app); a family dog that is actually a robot. It’s a big umbrella, but the common goal is updating old systems to hack modern life.

Michael Perry was twenty-nine when he sold his digital assistant app Kit to the Canadian global e-commerce giant Shopify. By the time he left the company in 2020, he was a new dad on a mission to improve the lives and outcomes of parents the same way Shopify did for entrepreneurs. “It was this realization that every single job has changed drastically at the hands of software over the last few decades,” Perry says, “but not parenting. The job is harder today than it’s ever been, but there has been no investment to keep up with that.”

“Just tell me what to do,” he said, and suddenly her tears turned to rage: “I don’t want to be in charge of the to-do list!” she yelled back.

He’s not wrong. Last August, the US surgeon general issued a public health advisory that being a parent may be hazardous to your health. The findings emerged from a survey in which two-fifths of parents reported being “so stressed [they] can’t function.” More than half of respondents with children under eighteen described their stress as being “totally overwhelming.” It’s economic insecurity, it’s social media, it’s school shootings, but it’s also the culture of achievement and high expectations that has turned child rearing into a three-ring circus.

In 2021, Perry raised $3.5 million (US) in seed funding to launch Maple, an app that allows parents to synchronize and automate the daily grind: interactive scheduling, AI-generated meal plans, and trip itineraries. The app recently added a shared family email (Maple Inbox) so that messages from school, doctor’s appointments, and birthday invites are visible to both parents. Perry believes that tech has the power to alleviate domestic strife by addressing the broader inequities underpinning it. When Maple launched in 2021, only 5 percent of users were two-person accounts. Today, it’s 60 percent—an indication, he explains, that his app is helping rebalance the division of household labour.

Vania Sukola isn’t so sure. As a psychotherapist who often works with couples, she says that frustrations around home-life management often connect to deeper issues that can’t just be uploaded and colour-coded: “It’s about breaking attachment patterns, delving into past traumas, and understanding how our own upbringings and experiences influence ideals.” One partner might say, Well, my mom always did the birthday parties, or the two individuals may have very different feelings around debt or the disciplining of a child. Most couples don’t address these fundamentals when they should (before entering into a lifelong partnership), Sukola says. It’s no wonder they’re adopting workplace language and tools to facilitate the kind of cost/benefit analysis that has yet to be normalized in our home lives: “These can be effective methods—in terms of coping mechanisms, obviously preferable to wandering through your life in a haze of booze. But it’s still just a Band-Aid.” A flimsy fix plastered over a deeper wound. Or maybe a full-on delusion.

We talk about time as “the most precious resource,” but often just as a way to make our capitalistic, productivity-obsessed inclinations more palatable. The pitfalls may present most clearly in parenting culture (see: surgeon general’s warning), but the pressure to optimize is everywhere. It’s how we approach labour, but also how we approach leisure. Being a reader connotes not just curling up with a good book but additional hours spent on #bookstagram, updating your Goodreads profile, and getting ready to host next month’s book club meeting (a project management task worthy of a Trello board, if ever there was one). If you’re a runner, you’re probably on an app that shares your routes and best times within an online community.

“Whatever you do, you’re supposed to be doing it at 11. There’s no chill anymore,” says May Friedman, the academic who wrote about mommy bloggers. “Even so-called self-care has to be regimented, invested in, and performed on social media.” The idea that further integration of tech into our lives is the way out of this moment strikes Friedman as somewhat absurd. Tech is how we got here.

Tat Read was recently gifted a $400 Skylight, an iPad-sized digital calendar that syncs up schedules and promises to “lighten the mental load.” If that seems like a lot, so is her daily reality, with three kids under ten and a teenage stepson. She is a techie and would love to automate more aspects of their life, but that would never work given the more low-fi tendencies of her husband, Joe. “He has a phone, but he never uses it—he’s just not into technology.” So now they have a state-of-the-art digi-cal in their kitchen that she updates remotely from her phone, and Joe uses a paper calendar.

Read is the self-professed CEO of her household. She manages much of the conception and planning, while Joe is key on execution. I explain the idea of CPE and how what she’s describing would be considered a cardinal sin by the Fair Play zealots. “Well, sure, that makes sense,” she says, “but I’m talking about actual people, my actual life. I think it doesn’t make enough room for leaning into and being appreciated for our strengths.”

She explains how, for example, her husband walks their son to school in the morning. They have in-depth conversations about the world and what’s out there and the meaning of life. Joe is a trained mathematician, with one of those infinite spiderweb kind of brains. “He’s pretty useless when it comes to a lot of the administration, but he’s teaching them philosophy and astrophysics, so I’m not going to complain.” More than that, Read says, “he is the emotional anchor of our family.” I’m not sure there’s an app for that.

And I’m not sure that the whole promise of tech to rebalance gender inequality isn’t just good marketing spin. Recently, I popped in to visit friends and noticed a Skylight in their kitchen—resplendent in candy-coloured cataloguing on appointments and deadlines. Later, I asked my friends (a straight couple) if the gadget was helping with home organization. The wife talked about how it helps keep the kids on track, update shopping lists, and so on. The husband thought I was asking about a window in their ceiling.

Meanwhile, the Fair Play deck that I purchased when I started working on this story is still sitting unwrapped in the corner of my living room. I wanted to use it. My partner and I are both self-employed and manage home and parenting life pretty equally, but it’s still a shit show most of the time. We tried a family Slack channel (just the two of us, since our daughter is four), which helped us plan for a trip and successfully enrol in swimming lessons (slow clap). But pretty soon, we lost the plot (and then forgot the passwords). Aren’t all life-saving organizational tools best suited to the already organized?

“He’s pretty useless when it comes to administration, but he’s the emotional anchor of our family.” I’m not sure there’s an app for that.

Nana Guenther is a natural-born taskmaster, and her quest to operationalize her home life leans significantly into her existing strengths. For those of us hanging on by a thread, tech just doesn’t feel like a practical prescription. Besides, shouldn’t we be talking more about eradicating the disease? Increased legislation around parental leave, flexible workplace policy, and the dialling down of parenting culture all feel like areas that could use more attention. The backlash is evident: from Gen Z’s embracing of slow life (a pushback against the tyranny of hustle culture) to the trad wives (women unapologetically rejecting the gains of feminism to serve their husbands and bake sourdough). Both movements romanticize a life “off the grid” while also existing and proliferating largely on social media.

So, sure, it’s easy to poke fun, but aren’t we all less explicit examples of this same kind of dissonance: desperate to spend less time with our phones but lining up for the latest gadget? We want to slow down and practise mindfulness—and then feel guilty for ignoring umpteen push notifications from the meditation app that costs $12.99 a month. We outsource and identify redundancies, all so that we can devote ourselves to the things we truly care about . . . and then lose hours scrolling through videos of [insert your particular poison here]. Priorities can be tracked and time-stamped, but deciding what’s important is still a matter of person power.

For now, the best tech innovation in my home is a bucket that sits at the front door to leave our phones in.