Every day, information about my kids’ events jumps out at me from about 7 different directions: an email from the swim team parent; a reminder on ClassDojo from the kids’ teachers; a notification on the soccer team app. Sometimes it’s a PDF or spreadsheet attached to an email. Sometimes it’s a list buried in a message thread. Sometimes it’s a cheery AI-generated image full of dates and times that I can’t click on.
Parents (often mothers, according to research on division of household labor), are manually translating all of these communications. What does that look like? Searching the PDF to find a start time. Cross-referencing an email with last week’s schedule to guess whether it changed or not. Wondering whether “practice” means the usual location or the other one. Forwarding a message to yourself because it had a string of dates in it.
Companies have noticed this chaos, and they have benevolently offered us parents a solution: AI tools that will, for a monthly fee, read everything in our various inboxes and convert them into a calendar. This pitch makes a lot of sense at first glance: someone is spending their time decoding all of the input, and now there’s a way to automate that. All we have to do is surrender access to all our inboxes.
Think about what’s happening as more and more parents turn to these tools: hundreds of parents, all feeding the same school schedules and practice times into separate AI apps. The same information, processed over and over, because no one upstream is sending the information in the format we need. There’s now another industry built around cleaning up an organization-made mess, and we’re asking families to pay for it.
We are collectively treating this as a personal logistics problem. But it’s an organizational design problem with a personal cost, paid often by moms and billed nowhere. This is not how information has to travel. It’s a choice: made and remade every time an organization shares information as a spreadsheet or graphic instead of a calendar event.
The good news? The solution is simple.
If an organization needs to share information about something that has a date and time, that information can be packaged as a calendar event: a file that says, here is the thing, here is when, here is where, here is what you need to bring. One click to add it to whatever calendar software a family uses: Google, Apple, Outlook, any of them. The standard that makes this possible, iCalendar, has existed since MY mom was keeping my calendar. Many platforms that organizations already use can generate iCalendar files. It can even be linked from that cheery digital flyer.
Some organizations genuinely face capacity constraints — volunteer-run leagues, understaffed programs, schools with one part-time administrator. That's real, and it matters. It's also not a reason to stop asking.
Voluntary change, organization by organization, is slow, and lasting improvement will likely require platforms to build better defaults. But plenty of organizations can start now, and some already have. Clear communications may even support their goals, including timely attendance and less time fielding questions from confused parents. We shouldn’t have to buy workarounds to get information in a form we can use.
My request this Mother’s Day is not complicated: I would love for my kids’ organizations to send me a calendar invite when they tell me about an event.
That would be a better gift than earrings.