Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you organize life with your partner?

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!)

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We 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.

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

We have a shared Google calendar called "Family" where we put family events for ourselves and the kids.

Then we use Google Keep for quick TODO lists and shopping lists.

For recurring events (admin, payment reminders, car maintenance, etc.) we use Asana projects. Or we create an Asana project to plan our trips, which are usually very individualistic.

We also have Asana templates for checklists and packing lists.

Google Drive to store scanned documents, admin paperwork and docs and spreadsheets for various long-term notes.

A lot of people we know think that this might be overkill and that we are crazy for setting up a "complex" system like this. Truth is, we never forgot anything and never have to worry either. This frees up our minds to "work" on more creative things.

My wife never used systems like this before and she now recommends it to all her friends and family.

That'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.

We 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.

We 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.

Notion has been a solid A- for shared to-dos, bookmark lists, recipes, trip planning details, etc, which covers most of our shared lives. The main issue with Notion is that mobile syncing can be very slow when we're out in the world, so using it to distribute a shopping list while we're at a grocery store, for example, has been unreliable.

For actual scheduled events, we just share our personal Google calendars with each other and invite each other to mutual events. No issues there.

The largest technical issue currently is just organizing personal media in a reasonable way. We're in the in Apple ecosystem so shared albums have generally worked for photos and videos, but it's clunky at best and doesn't cover other media or documents.

For the most part we just talk things over. But we use Microsoft Todos (Which replaced Wunderlist), to share shopping lists for big item purchases, important tasks that can't be done immediately and might get forgotten and travel destinations that we can check off the list each year.

We also share a spreadsheet to plan monthly expenses. Finally I am looking for a better app for financial management. Currently we use Spendee, but want something simpler, but it seems all apps in this category cater specifically to the top 5 currencies or want to do things like sync to your bank, none of which are supported in my country, hence, the spreadsheet.

We are pretty non-technical in our partnership. We do have a shared Apple calendar, but I'm the only one who maintains events. My wife is on her iPad all the time, so she sees it, but her phone is never on, so (as I would like to) we don't text. Virtually everything is done face to face. We might have gotten more technical when our children were growing up and we had a more complicated schedule, but by the time smartphones were widely available they were just about out of school and things became simpler.

My SO is a full-time student and I'm 100% remote, with my desk in our bedroom and their desk in the living room. Our desks used to be in the same room, but only for a day. We'd both had separate meetings going on at the same time and realized it wasn't possible at all.

Usually in the morning we'll ask the other if they "have anything going on that day (i.e. have to be at school from noon to 2pm)" or "if they have any meetings". We like to keep each other in the loop.

The only shared resource is a whiteboard on the fridge. It has immediate lists (ie: Phoned 3 plumbers, these are quotes for work to be done and phone number.) and immediate purchase lists (milk, eggs, prescriptions) and immediate ToDos (call Aunt Tracey re:insider trading).

Small whiteboard means it gets cleared and refreshed frequently.

I schedule myself a week at a time, and she prefers a month at a time. So before I schedule anything I speak with her. My family now contacts her to plan holidays however.

I knew I shouldn’t have trusted those stock tips from Aunt Tracey…

A whiteboard on the fridge is what we use too because it’s something we see several times a day without fail which has been a huge help for my ADHD too.

We tried shared systems like Notion and found we spent more time tinkering with the things instead of using the things.

We both use macOS/iOS so we use various shared notes for things like grocery lists or memos, and shared calendars.

We each have our own personal Keepass database for our personal accounts and then a shared Keepass database for stuff we both might need to access. We save this database in iCloud Drive and use Strongbox to use these on iOS/macOS.

All of our documents are scanned and saved in a shared iCloud folder, and both computers are regularly backed up to a RAID 1 NAS by Time Machine.

I 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!

We 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.

Calendar on the wall all in the kitchen that we write all the appointments on. And the app AnyList for a shared grocery list

The most important bit is that whatever she does on a computer, she saves it into the Syncthing'd folder that I set up to copy into my persistent storage system.

Regardless of organization, search, and coordination, step 1 is making sure the data is saved. There's always time to shuffle it around later.

since 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.

Shared Google calendar of course

we use settle up for money, Apple notes for shared wishlist and occasionally for shopping.

that's about it.

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