I'm curious to learn how people set up daily things such as shared calendar, to-do's, knowledge base, etc. with their partner. Especially when one part of the couple is less technical. I have the feeling a lot of thought process and software products go into team management in a work context. Not sure this assumption is true but only few couples seem to have designed an explicit system to manage their personal life. I'd like to learn from the ones who think they implemented such a system successfully - what worked, etc. (under the caveat that every couple is different of course!)
Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#2since my partner is also from CS background but she has a different role and doesn't come across technical stuff as frequently as we do, so I make sure to send her good tech articles every weekend from hackernews, but in reality I end up explaining any good articles I come across myself & when I'm debugging a nasty bug, I make sure I take her help to a problem I already figured out to improve her thought process, moreover since we work in the same organization, this information she can later use to strategically plan considering how fragile our IT infrastructure is (I'm looking at Facebook, etc which went down here). It's not a perfect system, but I ensure she learns atleast 50% of what I learn, and she does vice versa because I'm very curious to look outside tech to learn how organization functions.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#3That's a very dynamic area to dive into. I'd try to understand the partner first by looking at their past and how they show they prefer to do things.
Technology affinity or attraction can be described as an interest reflecting the psychology of a specific portion of the greater populace. If your partner isn't part of that group, there's no point in working against their psychology in any case. It will create growth pressure which has the same effect as anxiety. Unless their gifts and interests are incorporated at a constant reinforcement level, it's a very big ask in a lot of cases.
Personally we have a very flexible system of check-ins that keep things running. I take care of the research and knowledge-base side but I'm good at that. She runs gobs of things that she's good at, that have little to do with tech. She keeps a calendar on paper (for home & family) but she has naturally good detail memory as a backup, etc.
But the dynamics of technology use go way deeper for her too. When we use software together it works best if I write or customize it. Her draw toward technology is on the ephemeral, locally scoped innovation side, where mine is on the broadly scoped contingency and systems stabilization side. So the tech that's fascinating to me looks more like a customized opportunistic stack. To her it looks more like various simple homebuilt apps or automatic emailers.
Good luck as you find the best way to run things for your partnership.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#4We do it the old fashioned way: We sit together every day at breakfast and dinner table and talk...
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#5I found running a Getting Things Done® (GTD) style system is useful - Write down what is on top of mind, make a complete list of all projects, do items that are contextually relevant, and at least once a week review everything.
The physical behaviors are more important any specific technology.
The critical piece for us is a new fresh whiteboard for each day. Write down all the items in play so everything is visible at once. Then prioritize. Most importantly - go do!
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#6We mostly use Google at home, and we have Family Sharing enabled. We have a family calendar where we put appointments, recurring payment reminders, and where we note info that could be useful when you look back (ie: gave a specific medication to one of our children, etc).
We also put and maintain our work schedule into it, that way it's easier to plan for vacations.
We also have a shared Google Drive directory with documents related to our home (tax documents, manuals for some appliances, even a document with all the colors used for painting the walls along with the color codes and the finish used).
For sensitive info, we have a Bitwarden "Organisation" set up with info like Health Card insurance, passports, SSN, driver's licence, etc) just in case one of us needs the info when filling up some paperwork.
Now my next hobby project is to build a decently sized ePaper-based calendar/organiser to display our family calendar and other info dynamically in the kitchen.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#7We do it the old fashioned way: We sit together every day at breakfast and dinner table and talk...
Same. It never occurred to me that technology would need to get involved.
We have a filing cabinet where we store important papers.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#8We use Microsoft To Do app on our Android phones. Most common use case is the shared grocery list. When I check off a thing I added to cart I hear a nice chime and she gets a notification. I get a notification when something new is added to list. Also use it for other stuff we plan on doing, when we are done we check it off and congratulated by that chime.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#9We do it the old fashioned way: We sit together every day at breakfast and dinner table and talk...
we do this at dinner as breakfast .. meh .. I like to stay in bed as long as possible before I have to take a shower and run to work ;P
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?
#10We don't have a shared calendar, but do have write access to each other's online calendars. If we have an event or something we want to do that might conflict with the other person's needs, we invite each other. SO is less technical but once they saw the value of knowing about events on the phone, they were sold.
We looked briefly at slack, but email is still the king of knowledge sharing. For more involved plans (vacations, etc) google docs are great.