The Parenting Performance Review

Quarterly reviews, calendar availability, collaboration tools: are our parenting and professional lives converging?

I’m working in the US this week, leaving my wife back home holding down the fort. I arrived at SFO a few hours early this morning—as is my dad-given right—to polish up an old essay on navigating the logistical minefield of parenting, searching for technological solutions to relieve the strain, and the growing “workification” of our lives at home.

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Illustration by Tony Johnson

Summer is done. Back on the school run schedule. Which means more logistical gymnastics and a new parenting choreography.

It’s getting them to school on time. Making sure the right things are packed for that day—their uniforms present and correct, the PE and swimming kits ready, all the flotsam and jetsam needed for a successful day securely zipped up in their backpacks. Extra clothes for the little ones, should any unforeseen (and often entirely predictable) issues arise. Don’t forget to pack water. In the cup they like. No, not that one. Daaaaaaaaaad! And snacks. Don’t fuck up and pack a snack that’s not allowed—or even worse, that they don’t like. Then it’s onto the after-school clubs, the extra-curriculars, the kids’ parties: two hours (if you’re lucky) of sugar-fueled hyperactivity, screaming for an outlet.

And that’s just this week. You do what you can. For those co-parenting from the same home, you’re tag-teaming: divide and conquer, or be conquered. Communication is key. Even more so if you’re co-parenting after a separation, as you try to align a patchwork quilt of calendars in an attempt to make it all work, like an astrologer predicting the fateful aligning of the planets.

The schools don’t make life any easier. We’re expected to stay on top of the fifteen new things that popped up this week, across three different apps, none of which are working as promised. Last year, our school told us they’ve created a new Google Site to “share some of the activities happening in the school”, another digital destination filled with a completely independent knowledge base. Of course it comes with its own login and password, some version of “the first two letters from your child’s surname, the last four letters from their first name, four random digits from their date of birth, a capitalised first letter from the city they were born in, their favourite colour from two years ago, and three characters from the shrug emoticon ¯\(ツ)/¯

Can someone please teach these schools how to use Notion? Or, at the very least, how to create a public calendar I can subscribe to, with all the holidays and important dates, rather than searching every few weeks for their schedule, hidden three layers deep on their website? Wouldn’t it be great to prevent the pain of hundreds of parents manually (and annually) inputting those dates into our own calendars? Here’s the definition of productivity pain: when your choice of digital tool actively harms my workflow. I’ve turned down more than one job offer in the past because I’d have been required to use a PC. But I might be pushing it if I suggest changing schools because they use a homework app I don’t like.

Here’s your gun. Here’s your badge.

From time immemorial, when you started a new job, you were given the tools to do it. Once, it may have been a hammer, a spade, or a pen. But today’s tools are different. On your first day at work, you’ll have been given a laptop (probably Space Grey, maybe IBM black) pre-installed with whatever your company has decided is “the right tool” to do your job effectively. Depending on the age of your company—and the folks in charge—these machines will be in various states of mission readiness. Ever start at a job and they’re using a different email client? Hurts, doesn’t it? I’ll never forget the horror of a friend who left the digital agency we worked in together in 2011 to take a senior role in one of London’s top ad agencies, and was staggered to learn he’d now be spending the bulk of his day battling with Lotus Notes.

We’re entirely dependent on these apps at work—GMail, Excel, Figma, Final Cut, Keynote—and we’re becoming increasingly reliant on them at home too. We’re hacking tools created for the workplace—to help folks communicate, collaborate and change minds—and pushing their round pegs through square holes marked “family.” We try to keep things simple at home: a shared Google family calendar reduces at least half of our appointment-based stress. “If it isn’t in the calendar, it doesn’t exist” has become my mantra (and I’m not alone, as other dads have informed me over the years). Another friend runs a tight ship via their shared Google calendar, but his daughters have taken to planning their week on a paper calendar on the fridge. Sync issues, rearing their head in real life.

I receive at least one email a month from a new startup promising a “revolutionary new experience” that will alleviate the pain of parenting. After a brief look under the hood, it’s always the same: some combination of calendar integration, a to-do list, shopping and recipe management, and a light sprinkling of AI, all yours for a tenner a month. Some parents are taking matters into their own hands: a friend informed me that he runs two separate Slack instances with his wife—one for their business and the other for their family, comprising 15 channels in total, along with an Asana board to manage tasks. They’re considering streamlining it, as Slack becomes more aggressive with paid upgrades, and the Asana board starts gathering digital cobwebs.

Is it odd to think about “collaborating” with your significant other, or with older children? That language is the oxygen supply of these apps. Slack tells us their app is “where work happens.” Asana promises a place where you can “manage projects, focus on what’s important, and organise for seamless collaboration.” And only Jira can help you “focus on outcomes, and not admin.” Exactly the skills required to keep the family running on time.

Collaboration might only be the beginning of working styles encroaching on home life. Soon we’ll be scheduling daily stand-ups over breakfast, defining SMART parenting goals, and signing off on annual budgets. I’m not looking forward to the quarterly performance reviews. I’ve been pushing for a promotion for a while, and my chances aren’t looking great.

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Let’s hear it from you on … managing life logistics

Currently, my own methods to stay organised are very much a WIP - currently there are a series of Kanban boards for family, me, house, and finance - with the hope that they will contain what I need to do and all the information I need (ie the account details for all our utilities).

For the family, it’s another paper calendar for key dates, and a shared Reminders list for shopping - this is actually really great to add stuff when you run out of it and check when you're at the shops, on more than one occasion my wife has had great fun adding things as I go round too...

More interesting by a long way is that we’re starting to show my son a lot more things visually. He has the days of the week printed out and on his magnetic blackboard, and then he has a little ‘Polaroid’ picture for where he’s going to be each day. This worked great until we showed him we were going on holiday tomorrow two days ago, and he’s had tantrums every morning when he realises he’s off to nursery.

Turns out patience is a little harder to teach 😂 — Jon

Our primary way is a paper calendar hanging off the fridge. It has multiple columns for each family member. Due to our erratic work schedule (with occasionally long days and nights), it was nice to have a paper calendar to see any clashes and ensure the toddler is covered. We put nursery booking on it, swimming classes, baby dates with friends and holidays. In terms of zoo and aquarium visits, it is more often a solo parent and toddler event. — Yao

Pretty much a calendar, a wing, and a prayer here. — Neil

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3 things to read this week

1. “The Growing Cohort of Single Dads by Choice” by Faith Hill in The Atlantic. If it wasn’t already abundantly clear from the essay above, it’s hard enough with two parents, and I have no idea how single-parent families do it. The Atlantic recently covered the growing trend of men who are choosing to have children through adoption or surrogacy, without waiting for the perfect life partner. They are supported by organisations like Men Having Babies, which originally were created to help same-sex couples have children, but in recent months have seen around a quarter of event attendees as single men, and “the fact that single men are deciding to start families on their own, some of them paying extravagantly for egg donation and surrogacy, might also say something about just how important fatherhood is for many men today.”

2. “ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners” by Maggie Harrison Dupré in Futurism. A look under the hood at the quarrelling couples weaponising large language models inside marriage battlegrounds. Another mark in the “AI is driving our dystopian future” column: “Spouses relayed bizarre stories about finding themselves flooded with pages upon pages of ChatGPT-generated psychobabble, or watching their partners become distant and cold — and in some cases, frighteningly angry — as they retreated into an AI-generated narrative of their relationship.”

3. “Their Schools Banned Phones. Out Came the iPods and Cassette Players” by Callie Holtermann in The New York Times. 2025’s most unexpected teen flex? Your da’s old iPod, stuffed with the classics. As the school smartphone ban has come into effect across New York State (and other locations, including our home state of Catalonia), teens have been searching for low-tech alternatives, raiding dusty drawers and plastic boxes teeming with what they see as archaic technology. We’ve seen this in our house too: my son wears my old iPod Shuffle as he struts around bopping to Hot Chip’s “I Feel Better,” and my daughter has developed a deep connection with my iPod Classic and its iconic Cover Flow UX, which (imo) has never been bettered.

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One thing to watch with the kiddos this week

The YouTube channel Brick Technology has become a recent hit across the web and for good reason. In this video, watch them build increasingly complex LEGO vehicles in an attempt to scale ever-growing walls. If that has got you thirsty for more, watch them destroying LEGO towers or sinking LEGO ships (with a homemade Technic wave machine).

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Good Dadvice

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