Pets, plants, and everything else that needs doing on a schedule

Pet Care gives each pet its own list of care activities, configurable per animal, feeding, medication, potty breaks, walks, grooming, each with its own interval. Anyone in the household can log with one tap, and the list is colour-coded: green on track, amber due soon, red overdue. Each pet and activity keeps a full history.

The colour is doing the work here, and it is worth understanding why. A list of times requires reading and arithmetic, which nobody does on the way out of the door. A red row is legible from across a kitchen, and it is legible to a child, which is what makes it possible to hand a responsibility over rather than keep supervising it.

Plant Care is the same design applied to plants: any care activity per plant with custom intervals, the same green, amber, and red urgency, one-tap logging with optional notes, and a full history. Water every five days, feed monthly, rotate weekly.

Two habits make either of these stick.

Put it where it is already being looked at. A wall tablet in the kitchen turns this from an app somebody remembers to open into a thing that is simply visible, which is most of the difference between a system that works and one that was a good idea.

1. Configure fewer activities than you think. Feeding and medication for a pet, watering for a plant. An accurate system covering two things survives; an aspirational one covering nine gets abandoned in a fortnight and takes the two with it.
2. Set the interval to what actually happens, not to the ideal. A plant marked for watering every three days when it genuinely gets water weekly will sit red permanently, and a permanently red list is one nobody looks at.

If a pet or a person is on a course of medication, the general-purpose care log is the wrong instrument, because the consequence of a double dose is different in kind from a double feed.

Medication Tracker is the specific one, and the rule that matters is the same in both cases: log it at the moment it is administered, not afterwards from memory, and never in advance because you are about to. The near-miss in every household that has had one is the dose recorded as intended and then interrupted.

Almanac records recurring seasonal events, one observation per year each. First frost, first bloom, first robin, when the tomatoes went in, the winter the boiler died.

This is the quietest app in the catalogue and it has an unusual property: it is worth nothing in year one and increasingly valuable every year after. By year four you can answer questions no other record answers. Is this late. Do we always lose the basil in the same week. When did we actually plant them last time, as opposed to when we think we did.

It is deliberately one entry per event per year, which is what keeps it from becoming a gardening journal nobody maintains. Recording six things each spring is a five-minute habit that compounds.

Map My Garden Viewer is the read-only companion for households where one person keeps the garden in the iOS app: an interactive map of beds and plants with care notes and photos, synced automatically, in front of everyone else in the household. It resolves the specific annoyance of one person knowing where everything is planted and everyone else weeding it.

The seasonal jobs a house needs have exactly the shape of plant care, and most households track them nowhere at all.

Home Maintenance is the register: the boiler service, the gutters, the smoke alarms, the filters. The pattern that makes it work is the same as the plant list, which is that an interval plus a visible last-done date removes the need for anyone to remember.

Once the house is in the same rhythm as the pets and the plants, something useful happens to a Saturday morning. There is one list of what is amber, and it covers the dog, the ferns, and the gutters, so the household is looking at one question rather than three.

The care that breaks is the care that happens while you are away, and the reason is that the instructions live in the head of the person who is not there.

Routines holds the sequence properly: what the morning looks like, what goes in the bowl and how much, which plants get water while you are gone and which do not, what the cat does at nine that is normal and looks alarming.

Write it for a neighbour rather than for yourself, which mostly means including the things that are too obvious to mention. Where the food is kept. That she will convincingly claim not to have been fed. Which door must not be left open. A house-sitter with a written routine and a colour-coded care list can do a week without a single message, and that is the actual test of whether any of this works.

Nobody asks whether the dog has been fed, because the answer is on the screen. The plants are watered on a schedule rather than in bursts of guilt. The house's seasonal jobs are in the same place as everything else, so they stop being a thing one adult carries alone.

And the part that matters over years rather than weeks: an almanac that starts telling you things. The date the frost came, four years running, is a piece of knowledge about the place you live that nobody sells you and nothing else records.

• Pet Care
• Plant Care
• Map My Garden
• Almanac
• Maintenance
• Routines
• Medications

Every app in the library is included with the household plan. Install the ones this guide uses and skip the rest.

• How the private household hub works
• How to make a family command center with an iPad or an old tablet
• A chore system that does not require constant parent reminders