Skylight’s touch screen calendar has my whole family on the same page

Juggling tables for My family of five is a constant source of stress. Every day I juggle the calendars of three kids at three different schools, their extracurricular activities, and the ever-evolving work schedules of my husband and I. All the meal planning, grocery shopping, and general home maintenance seems to never end.

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

Two of my kids — now a tween and a tween, ages 15 and 12 — are just starting to get better at managing their own schedules, and they’re old enough to handle a calendar connected to a touchscreen. Families with younger children may not get the same benefits from a device like this, which WIRED reviewer Nina Farrell learned when she tested the Skylight with her preschooler. My kids are touchscreen users, and my 12-year-old son picked it up right away.

Once we had the Skylight, he took out the 15-inch screen and placed it on a table near the kitchen using the built-in stand. (It also comes in 10- and 27-inch sizes, and the two largest models can be wall-mounted.) We’ve all downloaded the Skylight app on our phones and synced it to the main device.

The calendar can connect to existing calendar apps from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo. I’m a Google user, and I helped my son import his Google Calendar to give us a base of scheduled activities. He set up a color-coded calendar for each child in the family and moved their activities (from the already imported Google Calendar) into their individual colors. It also added color to chores, like taking out the trash and recycling, which are often up for grabs depending on who’s in the house. I loved this idea. It gave these duties their own category, even if I was the only one in my family who still did most of the heavy lifting.

One thing that surprised me was how excited my kids were to see everyone’s schedule. I didn’t realize that since they’re growing up they want to know what family activities you have planned so they can work around them. Instead of asking me if they can hang out with a friend on Thursday, they can easily check all of our schedules to see if it makes sense. I was happy to take some of that responsibility, and they were happy to take it on.

While giving them access to my main calendar gives me some freedom, my Google Calendar also contains personal notes, which are now visible to everyone in our family. For example, they can see the note I wrote reminding me to shop for my son’s birthday present. I may need to rethink my note-taking habits as I adjust to using the Skylight app so I can maintain some privacy.

The first thing my 12-year-old said when he looked up Skylight tools was that we won’t forget our grocery list anymore, since there’s one in the app. For a long time, our shopping list was a piece of paper stuck to the fridge, and relying on it often led to annoying mishaps, like forgetting to buy bread and having to go back to the store, or bringing home too many bananas. Now, we all have the Skylight app on our phones, and everyone can add items to their grocery list from anywhere. Anytime one of us (mostly me) is near a grocery store, we (me) can see the list and pick up whatever is needed.

Wall flower

Some Skylight features are behind a paywall; A Plus subscription ($79 per year, or $8 per month) unlocks things like the platform’s meal planning tool and its AI-powered assistant called Sidekick. I have found great use in Sidekick Assistant. After 15 years of manually entering the kids’ multiple school activity calendars and activity dates, I love that Sidekick can import events from an image of a piece of paper, or from a forwarded email, and add the activities directly to my calendar. Scanning a paper schedule doesn’t create a completely accurate calendar event (nor does email forwarding), but it gives me a starting point and reduces the effort of manually entering everything.

Using Sidekick, my family can also scan printed recipes using the phone’s camera and add them to the database, where they can then click on the recipe title to add the dish to our weekly calendar. When I’m in the kitchen, the recipe is easy to access on the 15-inch screen or in the Skylight app.