Ben Lang didn’t expect to get 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 household and relationship. Its version of the tool often used by businesses to manage complex projects functions like an extended Google Doc, with sections for grocery lists, to-do lists and details of upcoming trips.
More unusual is the section created by Mr. Lang, a venture capitalist who previously worked at Notion, on principles (“what’s important to us as a couple”). Another section called “Learning” outlines things the couple discovered about each other, such as their love languages and Myers-Briggs test results. They have a list of friends they want to meet up with. They also keep a diary of memories of their nightly encounters. Mr. Lang, 30, was so proud of the creation that last month he began advertising a template of the setup to others. “My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our daily lives,” he wrote to X. “I’ve turned this into a template, let me know if you want to see it!”
The Internet responded with furious outrage. “People told me my wife was cheating on me, people told me I had a corpse in my basement, people told me I was autistic,” he said.
But his approach isn’t 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. It makes sense for a group of young workers to apply the tools of the corporate world to their relationships and families. Businesses have goals and systems to achieve them, of course. They do things.
Anastasia Alt, 35, uses Kanban boards – a visual tracking system where tasks progress from left to right – in Trello, a project management tool, for “literally everything”. This includes working at Yana Sleep, her e-commerce startup, but also planning trips and events with her partner. The two also have a dedicated Slack workspace named after a combination of their last names with a logo created using Midjourney AI software. She jokingly admitted that some of her systems are “a bit psychopathic,” but said she’s always been an optimizer.
Ms. Alt said the Slack workspace also has emotional benefits for her relationship: It frees up their texting and private conversations for the fun stuff.
“I’m glad when the work day is over that I don’t have to deal with semi-urgent logistical stuff for 20 minutes before diving into eating takeout and hanging out with our dogs,” she said. “Sitting down in person and making 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 appreciation or recognition for what the other person does, has become a repository of memories she likes 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 makes observers recoil. According to them, this threatens to remove romance and spontaneity from life. It feels cold.
“There’s a phenomenon where the more you try to manage your life, the more you risk squeezing the vitality out of it,” said Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
Yet the crushing overload of modern life, with daily to-do lists, schedules and notifications, and digital logistics, can feel so endless that any solution offering to optimize even the smallest task—or the most meaningful relationship—seems like a lifeline worth grabbing.
Emily Oster, a parenting expert and economist, has become popular by promoting a data-driven approach to pregnancy management, 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 getting your child a phone. Some critics have attacked her approach for the same reasons they shy away from Notion’s template for married couples — it can feel disjointed.
Dr. Oster said the problem isn’t in systems like hers — it’s not in difficult conversations about priorities and principles. Her spreadsheets and other tools are designed to set people up for the life they want, she said.
“Deliberately revealing a conflict is something we don’t usually like to do,” she said. “It’s hard to do it at work, but it’s even harder to do it with someone you want to sleep with at night.”
Dr. Oster said the lesson he takes from the business world into his personal life is to make thoughtful, considered decisions. “I don’t think there’s a limit to how far you can take this,” she said.
She is not alone in this thinking. Even amid the backlash to Mr. 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 Carth, 40, was among those who bought the pattern, in part, she said, because she was amused by all the jokes about it. But also, with two children under the age of 3, the lure of a better, more productive, more organized lifestyle at home was irresistible.
Ms. Cart, a marketing executive at a cryptocurrency startup, already has some optimization systems in place with her startup founder husband. They use Google’s Keep app for a shared grocery list and Google Calendars to manage their schedule. She has intricately color-coded Google Sheets for Christmas gifts and vacation planning. (She calls herself the family’s chief creative officer as well as chief investment officer. Her husband is chief financial officer and chief technology officer.)
Ms Carth said systems like hers were needed to separate household management duties. One person can keep it all in their head, she said, but “separating and jointly owning that work” leads to “coordination friction.”
Like Ms. Alt, she believes the systems free up their limited personal time for more meaningful conversations. “Using this really rare time to talk about a grocery list feels lonely,” she said.
Since her second child was born a little more than a year ago, Ms. Carth and her husband have been “restricting the scope,” she said, using a project management phrase for doing less. “We’re in survival mode,” she said. “Just making dinner feels like a victory.”
Mr. Lang’s template can help, she said. The only problem so far? She was too busy to organize it.
A minority of people have always used tech tools in their personal lives, but the practice has spread in recent years. Mei Lin Ng, the co-founder of family tech startup, Hearth, said one of the reasons previous attempts to create technology for the family failed was that users weren’t as open to it. Her company’s product, a 27-inch screen that families can mount in their homes to display schedules, assign chores and help children with morning routines and bedtime routines, became available last year. is embraced by digital millennials.
“Consumers are really, really ready for something like this,” she said. “They crave a solution.”
After Ms. Alt told her friend and fellow optimizer Ryan Matzner about her couples’ Slack, he promptly started his own. It was a bit of an uphill battle to get his fiancee Kate McKenzie on board—she’s a medical 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.
Mr. Matzner, 39, co-founder of a product development agency called Fueled, realized he had avoided responding to text messages from Ms. McKenzie because their topic had turned into a to-do list full of tasks.
So they outsourced all their administrative tasks to Slack, which expanded beyond wedding planning into everyday life with more than 40 channels, including #house-parties, #travel, and #ludwig-the-car.
Being hyper-organized and efficient is a natural result of a very active work and social life, Mr. Matzner said. He sends out calendar invites as he makes plans and saves new friends in his contacts with their city—searchable any time he’s in town—as well as a note about whether they’d be fun to invite to dinner. He wishes someone would build a “personal CRM” (customer relationship management, the kind of system sold by companies like Salesforce) because none of the options he’s tried have been entirely satisfactory.
Being the organized person in a relationship can lead to friction. Kate Reznikova, 27, a venture capital investor, often gets asked random queries like “How do we get on our internet?” from her partner throughout the day, which tests her patience. Recently, she started using Mr. Lang’s concept template, to establish a “shared source of truth” for such matters. “If I get a message, I say, ‘Go to the page, it’s all there,'” she said.
Mr. Lang was heartened by the attention his pattern attracted online. There were memes about San Francisco’s divorce rate skyrocketing, about “kicking out” your wife, and about requiring your partner to submit a “purchase order approval form” in order to spend money. He published his own a joke version, with quarterly goals and annual relationship reviews.
He and Ms. Amouyal used Notion to plan their wedding — a life event that seems to turn many couples into project managers — and decided to keep going after their honeymoon. The most hated part of his template, the date night diary, was just a way to follow all the marriage advice he kept hearing, he said. They all told him how important it is to keep the relationship strong as life gets busier and more complicated. Why not create a journal of all the fun things they did together? The overwhelming response was a surprise.
“I thought a few people would respond and think it was cute,” he said.
