I was in a meeting on a Tuesday morning when I remembered that Eli's prescription was almost out. Not almost out as in I'd have a few days to deal with it — almost out as in there were two pills left and I hadn't called the pharmacy because I kept thinking I'd do it when I had a minute and I had not had a minute.
I couldn't call the pharmacy from the meeting. The meeting was the kind where someone would notice if I picked up my phone. So I spent forty minutes with one part of my brain on the agenda and the other part doing the math on whether two pills got us to tomorrow afternoon, what time the pharmacy closed, whether Marcus could pick it up if I handled the call.
Marcus did not know any of this was happening. He was somewhere having a meeting about something else entirely.
That's the working mom version of the mental load problem. It's not just that there's a lot to manage. It's that there's a lot to manage and you're trying to manage it from inside a full-time job, mostly invisibly, while everyone around you sees someone who's paying attention to the meeting.
The apps that existed when I went looking for help were mostly built for someone who was home most of the time. The logic of them was: here's a better way to organize your household. Which is helpful if the problem is organization. My problem is that I have forty-five minutes of free time on a good day and the household still runs through me as the single point of knowledge.
What I actually needed was three specific things.
Fast capture. When I think of something in a meeting — the prescription, the thing Marcus is supposed to do before the weekend — I need to get it out of my head in under ten seconds without opening a full app and navigating to the right list. Voice or quick-add works. Anything that requires more than two taps doesn't get used because I don't have the bandwidth.
Reminders that don't go through me. The thing about asking Marcus to do something is that the ask itself is labor. Knowing what to ask, figuring out the right time, phrasing it in a way that doesn't come out like a directive at the end of a long day. If the task can just show up on his side without me being the delivery mechanism, that's a completely different dynamic. He sees it, he does it, I find out when it's done.
Shared visibility while I'm not home. There have been afternoons where I'm at work and something is happening at home that I'd handle differently if I were there, but I can't be there, and I'm finding out about it an hour later via a text from Marcus asking what he should do. If we're both looking at the same picture of the household, the "what should I do" question becomes answerable without calling me.
I've tried a lot of apps. Most of them are good at the organizational layer — keeping one person organized who is already managing everything. That's a real thing and it's useful. But it's not the working mom problem.
The working mom problem is load distribution under time pressure. You can't be the single source of household knowledge when you're also doing a full job. Something has to give, and it shouldn't be your attention at work or your evenings with your kids.
Orbyt is what I use now. It has the shared task picture, the assignment piece so things arrive on Marcus's side without me routing them, and enough of the household context that we're both working from the same information. It's still in beta at orbythq.com, but it's solving the right problem.