Whether you’re coordinating three digital calendars, keeping a color-coded planner or curating notes on your fridge, your calendar ends up acting as a mirror of your life. Not only is it a place to store all your plans, goals and hopes for the future, but also your anxiety and endless to-do’s.
Our calendars often become another high-pressure productivity tool, blocking off our leisure time and eliminating the chance to improvise, exhale and remember that we like the lives we’ve built. Beyond that, digital calendars don’t play nice with one another, home calendars don’t travel with you, and too often, they end up becoming the burden of just one family member (ahem, mom).
Ok, now that we’ve outlined what is not working about our calendars, let’s talk about what the calendar should make possible.
Privacy and Personal Sanity
One of the biggest gaps we saw in shared family calendars was privacy. Just by coordinating with your spouse, kids, daycare, grandparents—the list goes on—do you need to sacrifice your own personal space? What if you don’t want your nanny to see a therapy appointment? Or maybe you work in an industry where your meetings and patients are highly confidential. (We do!) We put privacy first in our calendar app, giving everyone in the family a personal space that stays that way.
We also don’t want your calendar to become a time-suck that fills your phone with notifications and keeps you from enjoying your life. We aim to streamline what you see as much as possible, get you off the app quickly, and offer a Daily Forecast that lets you see your day at a quick glimpse, so you can get back to enjoying it.
Family Life Beyond the Picket Fence
How many of our lives look like a stock photo of a family? Very few of us! We want to show how groundbreaking and diverse modern families are, and design a product with all of us in mind. Your ambitions don’t stop in your kitchen, so why should products represent your life that way?
We want to create a community of real, modern families who live outside of the typical definition of families, and design our product to empower all the ways we’re unique.
Dreaming and Forecasting
Nobody should need to take a class to use our calendar, or set aside 30 minutes a day to keep it managed. We’ve built in as much intuitive functionality as possible, from voice notes to handwritten notes to AI, so everyone in your family can easily participate in keeping the calendar up-to-date. We also tried to avoid making it feel like another chore, and instead designed it as a place to dream and plot out your biggest hopes.
Jump on Idly because you want to plan a mountain getaway this fall, or teach everyone a second language on the go, not just because you need a place to drop all your chore reminders. Our goal is to help you enjoy life’s “Idly” pleasures, and that includes the ones you’re still starting to envision.
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We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to craft our beta app with your peace of mind front of mind. But this is just the beginning for Idly. We hope to continue the conversation with all our users and potential users. We want to listen to your needs, frustrations and ideas, and continually infuse them into the app we’re building. Because we’re redefining the calendar, our job is never done. There’s always something to improve, and new people to serve.
We hope you’ll be part of our beta test, but more importantly, our community. We’re all parents who are trying to keep it all in balance, and we deserve more time to celebrate the messy imperfections that make life so special. So join us, and don’t be a stranger.
