You have a capture problem.

No, and it's worth being straight about that. Nothing here connects to a calendar, reads email or messages, or gathers anyone's plans — and no tool can promise nothing gets missed, because the usual failure is information never reaching the system at all. What it does is help you design the capture habit and find the clashes in what you've entered, including the ones a calendar can't see.

Then the calendar isn't the problem. Events arrive by school letter, a class group chat, a note in a bag, an email and a remark at pickup — most are lost before any calendar is involved, and a better app does nothing about that. The fix is one capture point, always to hand, used within a minute of hearing something, however scrappily. Tidying up happens once a week; capture happens immediately.

Because calendars record events and almost never their prerequisites. The costume is needed on Tuesday for a Friday event; the form is due Wednesday for a trip in a fortnight. Each prerequisite needs its own entry on the day it has to be done, not on the day of the event — a note buried inside Friday's entry only gets seen on Friday, which is exactly too late.

Add a who's-taking-them field to every entry. Two events overlapping with one driver is the clash a calendar never flags, because neither entry is wrong on its own — making it explicit is what surfaces it on Sunday rather than at half past five on Thursday. And ask about lift-sharing more than you do: people avoid asking because it feels like an imposition, while most parents are glad to be asked.

Start by naming what the work actually is: noticing, capturing, deciding and remembering — not looking. That's why reading a shared calendar isn't sharing the load, and why a system where one person enters everything has redistributed nothing. The workable split is both adults entering their own commitments and each owning specific recurring areas, rather than one person allocating tasks, since allocating is itself the work.