Photo credit: Frank Bernasek Photography
I was having dinner with some relative strangers, discussing managing our overscheduled lives, when I casually said, "I'm still married because of Google Calendar." The woman next to me erupted in peals of laughter. I was not joking.
My husband and I have been married for over 18 years. For many of them, the fight behind every fight was over the division of labor or mental load. Then, over time, those fights happened less frequently. Yes, this was in part due to therapy and increased self-awareness. We also capitalized on technology to help offload giant swathes of cognitive labor.
A literature review from 2023 of 31 peer-reviewed articles acknowledged that "there is still no uniformly accepted definition of mental labor in the context of unpaid work," and proposed the following definition: "Mental labor related to unpaid work in the household and childcare is cognitive work that consists of managerial activities aimed at achieving communal goals (e.g., goals related not only to the individual, but also to the family, partner, children), which are directed toward a future outcome and goes undetected and unseen as a component of unpaid work."
When the term mental load entered the zeitgeist, I immediately recognized it. I also struggled to define the concept for my husband, so I appreciated content like this reel from relationship educator Jimmy Knowles, or musician and comedian Farideh's satirical song "Make a List."
A joint calendar cannot mitigate the enduring aspect of mental load, but it helps create some visibility and structure around medical appointments, extracurriculars, and holiday plans with the in-laws.
I would love to say sharing a calendar was a stroke of intentional genius, but the truth is it was a knee-jerk reaction born of desperation and frustration. I was acting as the de facto project manager for our household, and I was over it.
Our joint calendar emerged in January 2016. Over the course of the past nine years, it eventually became something my husband relied on as much as me.
"It just made sense, and it worked. I'd say it evolved, but I'd say it evolved fairly quickly," my husband told me when I asked how we managed to take this from a me-task to an us-task.
Now Google Calendar is sacrosanct. If it goes in there, it is happening, and we are each responsible for managing our own awareness of it.
Often unpaid labor, both physical and cognitive, gets lumped together, and I think offloading some of the physical labor helped create better habits around mental labor. My husband does the dishes, same goes for kids' school paperwork. As he took on more, and I let go more, it became easier for us to continue along this new path.
Since my husband and I both take ownership of our shared calendar, I am no longer solely responsible for foreseeing and managing scheduling conflicts, school calendars, or scheduling childcare. Our calendar has become a shared brain space, mitigating the need for me to delegate what needs to be done. Adulthood feels a little less unrelenting because a handful of common tasks no longer live rent-free in my mind.
"It wasn't in the calendar!" my husband balked one night when I mentioned an imminent meeting I was headed out to attend. It was then that I realized how successful this little app had been for us. Not only were we both responsible, but I was so liberated from the mental load that I found the freedom to drop the ball.
Now, if we could just find a way to also manage communication from the dozens of newsletters, emails, and group chats from our kids' schools and activities.
