One year ago, we got off airplanes and built remote-friendly systems, we stopped taking lunch meetings as Zoom became a household name, and families around the world traded classrooms for remote learning platforms. We adapted because we were forced to, and along the way, many of us have found more efficiency, transparency, and time back in our schedules. We’ve done what technology has always helped us do: be adaptable and resilient.
We’ve done this because our work is important, and so are our teams. We never considered relying on old systems – because we knew the best way we could work together was by adopting new ones.
But in the middle of it all, we stopped to think... If we're willing to do this for our teams at work, why aren’t we willing to do this for our most important team: our family?
As every part of our lives evolve, families continue to rely on the same tool: a physical family calendar. Typically it lives in or near the kitchen and it gets erased and rewritten almost weekly, often with the same repeated information. It usually doesn’t look very pretty and it certainly doesn’t solve all our organization woes. But it remains a staple solution because it does one thing really well. It’s visible.
Every parent knows the amount of planning, scheduling, and organizing for a household equates to that of a small business – and yet somehow we’re still relying on whiteboards, grocery lists taped to the fridge, and chore charts to manage our responsibilities.
That’s why we’re building Hearth Display.
As we look toward our futures, we see both families and meaningful work. And we want to create solutions that help parents do both well. Hearth is the first of its kind display that combines a beautifully designed screen with all the tools needed to manage a family home.
Hearth is the first of its kind display that combines a beautifully designed screen with all the tools needed to manage a family home. Hearth removes the need for bulletin boards, acting as a digital planner and ‘family chore chart’ that is visible to everyone.
As we’ve seen at work, good project management tools have a few things in common. They:
- ensure nothing gets forgotten or missed,
- create transparency to ensure more equitable workloads, and
- increase the visibility of project deadlines and responsibilities.
Hearth Display makes these things possible for families. We fundamentally believe the reason moms still carry the weight of organization and planning is because the current systems lack transparency, equity, and visibility.
We saw this firsthand growing up. We had working moms who somehow managed to make it all happen, even with those systems. We watched our moms manage work and still show up to soccer games and dentist appointments, teach us healthy habits, and remember our favorite Friday night dinners. But the truth is, our moms ‘did it all’ because there wasn’t a better alternative. They didn’t want to compromise in their careers and refused to compromise in their roles as mothers, either.
And things haven’t changed much. Women are still bearing the lion’s share of both the mental labor and physical household chores whether they are working outside the home or not.1 And during the pandemic, women have lost more than 5.4 million jobs – with women of color faring the worst. Moms have had to choose between the impossible: care for children who were learning at home or continue earning an income for their families. While these decisions rest on the shoulders of all parents, it’s clear they still remain a mom’s burden to bear, and this has only intensified over the past year.2
We know our moms never question whether or not it was all worth it. But we also know better solutions exist because we use them every day at work. Better systems create opportunities for collaboration – they help people delegate, negotiate, and fairly share the work. We believe applying those same principles at home can help families communicate better, reduce negative friction and anxiety, and increase memorable moments.
After all, parents only have a finite amount of time with their children under their roof. And if we can help families communicate better to help tip the scales in favor of positive interactions over negative ones – that’s a world we want to help create.
Just as a hearth is often central to a home, Hearth Display is a unified home base and the first-ever family operating system.
We’re on a mission to simplify modern family life and make parenting more like true teamwork – not just task lists and nagging but real collaboration and partnership. So that as moms, we won’t be stuck using the same systems we grew up with. And we know we’re not alone: more than half of millennials haven’t had children yet, and we know they’ll want a better solution for their future families, too.
A Hearth family is a family that plays as a team, and we’re excited to enter the game.
