At work, we have an overwhelming selection of tools to help us keep organised and communicating, often with in-built automation to remove the grind.
But when it comes to family life, there are far fewer options that actually reduce the mental load. Instead, we end up bodging together a mix of tools like Google Calendar/iCal, WhatsApp and family apps like FamilyWall and Cozi.
But these require manual entry, which takes time, energy, and concentration to ensure nothing is missed. Then, we have to communicate this information to the rest of the family. Perhaps this is why 45% of parents still rely on physical planners to stay organised.
It doesn’t make sense. Why are we still relying on mental checklists, basic calendars and WhatsApp chats for something as critical as our kids’ education and happiness?
The Problem: Over-Reliance on One Parent
For most families, the burden of home admin falls on one person, often the Mum. The system isn’t built for shared responsibility, so even when both parents want to split the load, the information flow makes it impossible.
- Work teams routinely use shared calendars yet most families don’t and instead rely on individual calendars, inviting whoever needs to know each time they create a new entry creating unnecessary extra work.
- Businesses use automation so why are parents still manually tracking and organising everything?
- Work usually has standardised, well-formatted communications with important information clearly highlighted. Why do parents have to dig through emails and poorly formatted attachments to find the next INSET date?
Instead of a streamlined system, we have school emails mixed in with personal and work emails, WhatsApp groups that feel like information overload with too many notifications as parents chatter, and portals and apps with forgotten passwords that we can no longer access. There’s no single place to keep track of everything, and this disjointed approach makes it impossible to share the mental load fairly.
The Hidden Cost of Managing Home Admin
Home admin isn’t just a series of small tasks. It’s an ongoing mental burden that competes with our professional lives.
- Interruptions drain focus: At work, switching between tasks reduces productivity. At home, juggling school admin alongside work and hobbies means constant interruptions, reducing efficiency and increasing stress.
- Unequal division of labour: Because school communication isn’t structured for shared responsibility, it defaults to one parent managing it, often with one parent never even receiving it. Even in homes where both parents work full-time, this invisible labour falls disproportionately on women.
- Emotional weight: The fear of missing a school event, forgetting a payment or letting a child down adds an emotional load that never really switches off.
How Parents Are Still Managing the Load
Despite the number of digital tools available, many parents still rely on outdated methods to stay organised. Our research found that 45% of parents still use a physical calendar for family organisation, highlighting the lack of seamless, automated solutions that truly lighten the load.
The Limitations of Existing Solutions
Parents aren’t short on apps, but they are short on solutions that actually reduce mental load:
- Traditional family organisation apps (e.g. Cozi, FamilyWall) lack automation, often compounding the mental load rather than reducing it. Parents have told us that these apps become just another thing they have to manage, adding to their mental load rather than lightening it.
- Family AI assistants (e.g. Milo, Goldee) aim to reduce mental load by providing shared accounts, but they still require manual input of all relevant information, lack meaningful integrations, and often fail to address the complexities of family life with one parent still being the default organiser.
- School systems (e.g. Arbor, Tapestry) are designed for schools, not parents, leaving them with clunky, inaccessible user interfaces.
- Generic AI assistants (e.g. Copilot, Gemini) offer automated services within specific ecosystems (e.g., Microsoft, Google) but lack task-specific training for family scenarios. These tools can produce inaccuracies, requiring users to verify the results, creating them with more work.
Additionally, solutions don’t always work seamlessly across ecosystems, e.g. households with both Apple and Android devices, leaving families struggling with disjointed solutions.
It’s Time for Change
We’ve automated work. Why not home life too?
Parents shouldn’t have to act as personal assistants for their own families. We need tools that lighten the load, not add to it. That’s why I am building Kiki: to bring the same level of efficiency we expect at work into home life.
- Extracting key dates & information from emails and messages and adding events to your calendar in one tap.
- Summarising information in an easy-to-read format.
- Syncing it to your preferred calendar so you don’t have to change what you already do.
- Flagging urgent or time-sensitive messages so nothing gets missed.
- Connecting with any school or club that uses email to communicate with anyone in the family, so you’re not reliant on school-specific apps or who receives the email.
This isn’t just about convenience. It’s about levelling the playing field so school admin doesn’t always fall on one person.
What’s one area of home admin that you’d love to see automated?
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