Skylight Calendar Review – the $499 digital family organiser

So you need a way to organise your family, post it notes and verbal reminders just aren’t cutting it. Perhaps the Skylight Calendar would work for you.

This is most certainly a niche product, and if you think $499 is a crazy amount to pay for a digital screen that’s used only for organising your family and perhaps a few digital photos then swipe away, move on.

But for a busy family, trying to keep track of kids sport, after school appointments, the early starts, birthdays and a busy Mum and Dad work schedule then this is pretty impressive.

I come at this from two very different perspectives. My wife designed and made a fantastic weekly planner that’s a huge magnet you put on the fridge to use whiteboard markers to update your family’s week and we still use that today.

But we also have a very strong and strict use of a Google Shared calendar – highlighting things the whole family should know in our digital diaries.

You see, I live and die by my diary. If it’s not in there, it’s just not happening.

That made setting up Skylight Calendar a breeze. It simply synced our Google Calendar, I could even choose an additional Google calendar from our shared set, in this case I chose our MLB LA Dodgers schedule so that’s front and centre of our Skylight Calendar.

For a $499 device, I would have liked a better screen – this one seems a touch dull and not impressive at angles, but then in reality you don’t want it to dominate a room – so perhaps I’m overthinking it.

I mucked around with the additional non-calendar features like Chores and Meal planning, but that required a whole family change. We already have a chore system and meal planning (the Fridge Magnetic organiser) so couldn’t quite transition over to the Skylight calendar.

What’s perhaps most useful out of the box is the inclusion of both a counter top mount and a wall mount for the Skylight Calendar. We’ve been running this on the Kitchen counter and it’s been a great glance to remind kinda deal.

I didn’t use the photo frame feature, which allows you to essentially email a photo to the screen, because I really think it’s best use is as a calendar for our family.

But meal planning to me seems like the next step for us, migrating to a digital process might just work.

Chores though, with teenagers, that’s a lost cause.

Honestly, if our kids were younger, this would be a great way to create a process of chore setting, and awareness of schedule via the calendar. But with teenagers, all of whom have our shared calendar on their phone, it’s a bit less important.

If managing the time, place and events that rule your family is critical – I reckon the Skyline Calendar is a great addition to your home.

Web: JB HiFI, Amazon, Skylight