Ben Lang didn’t expect to receive so much hate just for being organized. For the past three years, he and his wife, Karen-Lynn Amouyal, have been using Notion, a popular software tool, to optimize their home and relationships. Their version of the tool, commonly used by businesses to manage complex projects, works like an enhanced Google Doc, with sections for a shopping list, to-do lists, and upcoming trip details.
More unusual is a section that Mr. Lang, a venture capitalist who previously worked at Notion, created on principles (“what is important to us as a couple”). Another section, called “Learnings,” describes things the couple has discovered about each other, such as their love languages and Myers-Briggs test results. There is a list of friends they want to schedule dates with. They also keep a record of memories from their date nights. Lang, 30, was so proud of the creation that last month he began promoting a template of the setup to other people. “My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our daily lives,” he wrote in X. “I turned this into a template, let me know if you’d like to see it!”
The Internet responded with venomous indignation. “People have told me my wife is cheating on me, people have told me I have a dead body in my basement, people have told me I’m autistic,” she said.
But their approach is not entirely unusual, especially among people who work in the tech industry and want to manage their personal lives the same way they manage their professional lives. For a class of young workers, it is rational to apply the tools of the business world to their relationships and families. It is thought that companies have objectives and systems to achieve them. They get things done.
Anastasia Alt, 35, uses Kanban boards (a visual tracking system where tasks progress from left to right) on Trello, a project management tool, for “literally everything.” This includes working on Yana Sleep, her new e-commerce company, but also planning trips and events with her partner. The two also have a dedicated workspace on Slack, named after a combination of their last names with a logo created with AI software Midjourney. She acknowledged, jokingly, that some of her systems were “a little psychopathic,” but said she has always been an optimizer.
Alt said the Slack workspace also has emotional benefits for their relationship: freeing up their text messages and in-person conversations for fun things.
“I’m glad, when the workday is over, that I don’t have to deal with 20 minutes of semi-urgent logistical matters before diving into takeout and hanging out with our dogs,” he said. “Sitting down in person and discussing a schedule together is less quality time than sitting down in person and, you know, telling jokes.”
A #gratitude channel, where the couple posts messages of gratitude or appreciation for what the other person is doing, has become a repository of memories they like to look back on, almost like a photo album, she said.
Lessons from business
Relationships are work, but no one wants to admit it.
But this particular flavor of life hacking often causes observers to collectively recoil. In his opinion, it threatens to take the romance and spontaneity out of life. He feels cold.
“There’s a phenomenon where the more you try to manage your life, the more you run the risk of draining it of vitality,” said Oliver Burkeman, author of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.”
And yet, the overwhelming crush of modern life, with daily to-do lists, schedules, notifications and digital logistics, can seem so endless that any solution that offers to optimize even the smallest task (or most meaningful relationship) seems like a lifesaver. that it’s worth it. grabbing.
Emily Oster, an economist and parenting expert, rose to popularity by promoting a data-driven approach to managing pregnancy, including in her latest book “The Unexpected.” She also wrote a book in 2021 called “The Family Firm,” which advises using a “business process” to make family decisions about, for example, extracurricular activities or buying her child a phone. Some critics have attacked her approach for the same reasons they reject a Notion model for married couples: It can seem distant.
Dr. Oster said the problem is not systems like hers, but not having difficult conversations about priorities and principles. Her spreadsheets and other tools are designed to prepare people for the life they want, she said.
“Bringing conflict to the surface on purpose is something we generally don’t like to do,” he said. “It’s also hard to do at work, but it’s even harder to do it with someone you want to go to sleep with at night.”
Dr. Oster said the lesson she takes from the business world to her personal life is to make thoughtful and deliberate decisions. “I don’t think there’s a limit to how far you can go,” she said.
She is not alone in that thought. Even amid the backlash to Lang’s template, more than 2,400 people liked it enough to download a copy, with the option to pay up to $25.
‘They long for a solution’
Claire Kart, 40, was among those who bought the template, in part, she said, because she was amused by all the jokes about it. But also, with two children under 3, the lure of a better, more productive, more organized way of life at home was irresistible.
Kart, a marketing executive at a cryptocurrency startup, already has some optimization systems in place along with her husband, the founder of a startup. They use Google’s Keep app to share a shopping list and Google Calendars to manage their schedule. She has put together color-coded Google Spreadsheets for Christmas gifts and vacation planning. (She calls herself the family’s creative director, as well as chief investment officer. Her husband is the chief financial officer and chief technology officer.)
Kart said systems like his were necessary to divide household management tasks. One person can have it all in their head, he said, but “dividing and co-owning that work” leads to “coordination frictions.”
Like Alt, he believes the systems free up his limited in-person time for more meaningful conversations. “Using that really weird moment to talk about the shopping list feels really lonely,” he said.
Since her second child was born a little more than a year ago, Kart and her husband have been “downsizing,” she said, using a project management phrase for doing less. “We’re in survival mode,” she said. “Just cooking dinner feels like a victory.”
Mr. Lang’s model could help, he said. The only problem so far? She’s been too busy to prepare it.
A smaller subset of people have always used technological tools in their personal lives, but the practice has become more widespread in recent years. Mei Lin Ng, co-founder of family technology company Hearth, said one of the reasons previous attempts to create family-friendly technology failed was that consumers were not as open to it. Her company’s product, a 27-inch screen that families can mount in their homes to display schedules, assign homework and help kids with morning and bedtime routines, which became available last year, is being adopted by digital native millennials.
“Consumers are really ready for something like this,” he said. “They are longing for a solution.”
After Ms. Alt told her friend and fellow optimizer, Ryan Matzner, about her couples’ Slack, he immediately started his own. It was a bit of an uphill battle to get his fiancee, Kate McKenzie, on board (she’s a medical school student and prefers analog tools like a paper planner), but now they’re using Trello, Slack, and a shared Google calendar to plan. their wedding.
Matzner, 39, co-founder of a product development agency called Fueled, realized he had been avoiding responding to Ms. McKenzie’s text messages because her thread had become a to-do list.
So they dumped all their admin tasks into Slack, which has expanded beyond wedding planning to everyday life with more than 40 channels, including #house-party, #travel, and #ludwig-the-car.
Being hyper-organized and efficient is a natural consequence of having a very active work and social life, Matzner said. Send calendar invites as you make plans and save new friends to your city contacts (searchable whenever you’re in town), as well as a note if it would be fun to invite them to dinner. He wishes someone would create a “personal CRM” (customer relationship management, the kind of system sold by companies like Salesforce), since none of the options he’s tried are completely satisfactory.
Being the organized person in a relationship can cause friction. Kate Reznykova, 27, a venture capital investor, used to frequently answer random queries like: “How do we log on to the Internet?” of her partner throughout the day, which tested her patience. She recently began using Mr. Lang’s Notion template to establish a “shared source of truth” for these types of questions. “If I get a text, I say, ‘Go to the page, it’s all there,’” she said.
Mr. Lang was amused by the attention his online template attracted. There were memes about rising divorce rates in San Francisco, about “kicking out” your wife, and about requiring your partner to submit a “purchase order approval form” to spend money. He published his joke version, with quarterly objectives and annual relationship reviews.
He and Amouyal used Notion to plan their wedding (a life event that, anecdotally, seems to turn many couples into project managers) and decided to keep it after their honeymoon. The most hated part of his template, the date night registry, was simply a way to follow all the marriage advice he kept hearing, he said. They all told her how important it was to keep the connection strong as life gets busier and more complicated. Why not create a journal of all the fun things you’ve done together? The huge reaction was a surprise.
“I thought some people would respond and think it’s cute,” he said.