Why I built Gantry
It started as an obsession with organizing tasks, probably because I didn't feel organized at all.
I read every productivity book I could find. Not because I wanted to get more done, but because I wanted to keep my head above water. In hindsight that's a little funny, because this was before I had kids, or really any responsibility beyond an entry-level programming job.
But I took the insights from those books and looked for where they overlapped or fit together, and a system started taking shape in my head.
The system I couldn't buy
I tried to live by that system using a handful of different tools, and ran into two problems.
For some categories, nothing tracked them the way I needed. I put up with quirks and workarounds, or fell back to pencil and paper. For the categories that did have a tool, each tool covered one or two of them, so answering the simple question "what do I need to do?" meant checking seven or eight different places.
So I did what software engineers do. I started building.
Piece by piece I pulled those categories into one place, so I could plan a week or a day around what mattered right now, without having to think about the things that didn't matter yet. Every piece I added taught me something about how tracking and scheduling actually work, where different kinds of obligations overlap and where they diverge.
I've been using some version of that tool for fifteen years. For most of them I assumed my system was too convoluted to be useful to anyone else. Everyone has a system. Why would anyone want mine?
Two things changed my mind.
What changed when we had kids
The first was that the number of things I was tracking grew, in a sneaky way.
A baby makes you start tracking a lot at once, but almost all of it lives in a compressed timeframe: hours, days, maybe weeks. Short intervals are easy to build habits and routines around.
Then the intervals stretch out. You still feed your kids several times a day, but the pediatrician gets farther apart. They start needing a dentist, an eye doctor, haircuts. School. Activities. At some point I realized I was managing several people's schedules instead of my own, and that the long intervals were the ones slipping. A habit can carry a daily task. Nothing carries the things you only do every six months.
When both parents track everything
The second thing was noticing that my wife and I were both tracking the same things.
In some ways that's a feature. If one of us forgets, the other probably remembers. But it costs more than it looks like it does.
It's duplicated mental and emotional effort, and that effort is scarce in a household where both parents work full time. Honestly, it's scarce in every household.
It reminded me of something we worked out when our oldest started crawling. If we were both always watching, neither of us ever got a break, or even the ability to give one thing our full attention. So we made it explicit: if one of us was cooking, that person was not watching. Naming who had it meant the other person could actually put it down for a few minutes, and everything felt more manageable.
Tracking works the same way, and duplication isn't the whole cost. There's a communication tax too. When nobody owns an area, every detail needs an explicit handoff, and the limited time you have to enjoy each other's company goes on logistics instead of anything more interesting.
And when a handoff doesn't happen, you get diffusion of responsibility. If everyone is responsible, no one is. Balls get dropped. "I thought you were going to do that." That dynamic builds resentment even when the chores are split evenly.
The name for it
I didn't have a term for this when I started. Mental load hadn't entered the public conversation yet. But that's what the tool had been doing the whole time: carrying the parts of the load that a computer can carry perfectly well.
What Gantry is
Gantry is the current iteration of everything I've learned in the last decade and a half, aimed at one thing: hand the computer the parts of the mental load it can hold, so you keep your attention for the parts it can't.
The difference from the version I built for myself is that this one is collaborative, because the communication problem turned out to matter as much as the tracking problem. One place both adults can see, so ownership is obvious and handoffs stop being conversations.
It keeps one-off and recurring work together, and for each recurring thing you decide whether it runs on a fixed schedule or comes due a set time after you last did it. Trash day is fixed. The filter, the dentist, the eye exam are not, and most tools only understand the first kind.
Whether you're a single parent doing this alone, coparents running two households around one set of kids, a family where one parent works and the other carries more of the load at home, or a household like ours where both parents work full time, it's built for you. And if it works for parents, it works for anyone: someone living alone, like I was when this started, roommates splitting up the housework, couples without kids.
Where things stand
I'm building Gantry on my own, including these posts. It isn't released yet. I'm writing about household systems in the meantime, partly because writing sharpens the product, and partly because the ideas hold up whether or not you ever use my app.
Join the waiting list below and I'll tell you when it's ready. Early members get first access and a discount at launch.
If you'd rather just tell me how your household handles this, or where you think I've got it wrong, I'd like to hear it: support@trygantry.com. I read everything.
Stay on top of what matters
Join the waiting list for early access to Gantry, plus a personal discount code.