It’s the middle of the afternoon. I’m ahead with my workload of the day and ready to organize the rest of my day. My wife is at work, so I know I’ll be the one picking up our son from karate practice. And that’s when an increasingly recurring question pops up in my head: what time does karate practice finish today? Once again, I find myself reaching the halfway point of the afternoon without knowing at what time to pick up my son.
I reach for my phone and text my wife the question, the same question I had asked her 2 days ago and twice again the past week. It’s not the first question I asked her today. However, in my mind, a different question forms: why don’t I know this already?
Why is the pickup time so important?
I know I’m supposed to pick up my son but the time when I do it changes my day considerably. If practice ends at 5pm, my day looks one way. If it ends at 6pm, it looks completely different.
Leaving my son there is not an option. Although I know he’d be taken care of, I don’t want him to feel alone as he watches his friends being picked up by their parents. I’d also prefer to avoid the additional cost of after-school care.
When pickup is at 5:30pm, I cannot accept a 5pm meeting. If we arrive home at 6:30pm, I need dinner figured out before I leave. Traffic conditions also change, making travel times longer later in the day. This, along with all other professional and personal commitments I must juggle, makes pickup time a much more important issue than what it may look like at first glance.
The problem is that the answer keeps changing
Knowing the usual pickup time isn’t enough. It keeps changing. One day there’s a field trip and the children return to school late, pushing karate practice back in the day. Another day there’s a school event like a book reading which, again, pushes practice back. Sometimes the gym is not available for class at the usual time. Sometimes the instructor himself needs to change the schedule.
It’s not that the information itself is difficult to remember. The issue is that it’s dynamic and changes frequently. And, when it changes, it’s not that easy to find out what the updated pickup time is.
The problem isn’t that the information doesn’t exist. The problem is that I can't reliably access it when I need it.
My brilliant system: asking my wife
How do I find the critical piece of information I need? By asking my wife. I shoot her a text message with the question and wait for a reply. Maybe she replies immediately. Maybe she’s busy and takes a while to reply,
building my anxiety as time passes.
Why would she have this information while I don’t? Maybe she saw it at the bulletin board when she dropped our son at school in the morning. Maybe the teacher told her at that moment. Or perhaps she scoured through WhatsApp groups or Google Classroom to find that information for me.
When I ask my wife questions like this, she effectively becomes the household’s search engine. My system transfers the cost of my information problem to her, burdening her with another responsibility. This is neither fair nor efficient.
What I’ve tried and why I failed
I don’t want to place this additional burden on my wife. She already has a lot going on. That’s why I tried to retrieve the information I needed by myself on several occasions.
The first place I look at is past text messages. Maybe she already told me and I simply forgot about it. Then I try to login to the school’s online platform and check for any announcements there, but this kind of information has a habit of never reaching that platform. Then I check our shared calendar, the one that’s hanging on the fridge. It does mention a doctor’s appointment next week but nothing about karate practice.
Storing information is not the issue here. There are plenty of ways to do it. The main problem is ensuring that information is easy to retrieve and readily available for both of us right when we need it.
Asking my wife to tell me more isn't the answer
I must make one thing clear: this isn’t my wife’s fault. It’s not her duty to keep me informed. The problem is that the system, in its current form, is flawed. It’s not a matter of lack of communication; it’s a matter of information availability.
The way our system currently operates has 3 major gaps:
- My wife shouldn’t need to remember I need the information
- She shouldn’t have to send it to me
- I shouldn’t have to ask for it
In these 3 gaps, there’s a clear human element that’s susceptible to failure:
- What if my wife doesn’t know I need the information?
- What if she forgets to send it to me?
- What if I forget to ask her?
These 3 obstacles often stand in the way of me getting the information I need, when I need it.
There must be a better way
What if there was a way we could easily store and access information whenever we need it? I’m talking about something with the following characteristics:
- Centralized
- Current
- Easy to use
- Available to both parents and even other caretakers like grandparents
- Updated when circumstances change
- Always available
I don’t want another calendar or text message. I want the information to reach the right person before it becomes a question.
This is probably bigger than karate
Pickup time after karate practice is just one out of the many challenges families must coordinate. I’m talking about school events, doctor appointments, extracurricular activities, errands, school supplies, meals, medication and many more.
I'm starting to suspect that many of the little frustrations of family life aren't really failures of memory or communication. They're failures of the systems we use to run our homes. That's what I want to figure out.