New Feature: Chores
We’re happy to introduce our most requested feature: chores! You can now schedule recurring chores, assign them to family members, and configure reminder alerts. This is a fantastic way to manage all those recurring household tasks and to get the whole family involved in running and maintaining your home.
New Chore Section
In-between the typical family’s busy schedule of grocery shopping, soccer games, meal prep, and one-off tasks, there’s still laundry to do every week, kitchens and bathrooms to clean, floors to vacuum, trash to take out — the list goes on! That’s why we’re excited to introduce the new Chores feature. It’s a great way to bring some structure and visibility into all those repetitive but important jobs.
The home screen introduces a link to the new Chores section along with all the scheduled chores for the upcoming week. Links directly to the Meal Planner and Calendar have also been added to this screen, making these sections even easier to access. The Chores section screen shows an ordered list of all your family’s chores based on when the next instance is due. You can quickly filter the list to see just the ones you created or are assigned to by clicking the My Chores filter in the header.
Scheduling
To support the different types of chores your family has, you can schedule chores to recur on a variety of flexible timeframes, including daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. You can schedule chores to be due when a certain amount of time has elapsed from the last completion (e.g. “water the house plants every 3 days”) or on a particular day of the week or month (e.g. “take the trash out every Thursday” or “pay the rent on the 2nd to last day of the month”). Just specify the earliest date the chore is due and then specify the recurrence rules.
Once a chore has been scheduled, you’ll see how much time is remaining before the chore is next due along with a countdown indicator that gives you a quick visual of how much time remains.
Like appointments, meals, and to-dos, chores appear on the day they are due in the Home screen week summary as well as in the Calendar section.
Chore Assignment
To get everyone involved in helping around the house, you can optionally assign chores to one or more owners. The owners can be any family member, not just those that are users of the app. That way, even younger members of your household can pitch in.
For chores with multiple owners, assignment automatically rotates based on who last completed the chore. The owner that completed the chore least recently appears as the next owner. Upcoming instances appear on the Calendar with the appropriate owner based on the rotation.
Completing and Skipping Chores
Chores can be marked as completed or skipped. To complete or skip a chore, you can click on the checkbox in the chore list, swipe left on the chore in the chore list to reveal actions, or click on the chore to view more chore details and actions.
When you mark a chore as completed, you can specify who completed it, when it was completed, and add notes. Given that chores have no end date and recur forever, there may also be times when you don’t need to complete the chore but instead just want to skip a particular instance. For example, if you’re on vacation, you don’t need to take out the garbage and hence could skip that chore. Skipping a chore resets its timer or skips past the particular instance selected if the chore is due on specific days.
All activity for a chore, including all completions and skips, are viewable in the Chore Activity History. If someone made a mistake completing or skipping a chore, they can delete or edit the particular action by swiping left.
Alerts & Notifications
Notifications and alerts on chores help ensure no one misses an important due date. You’ll receive push notifications for important changes to chores (e.g. if the schedule or owners were changed) and reminder notifications before a chore is due. You can customize when the reminder alert is sent for each chore.
Bug Fixes
This release also includes several bug fixes. We fixed a bug in the Chat screen where the indicators for what messages haven’t been read yet, including the unread message count, were not updating. We also fixed an issue with the last activity date for Health & Activity events.
