Couples lean on project-management tools to ‘optimise’ relationships

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. His version of the tool, commonly used by businesses to manage complex projects, functions like a souped-up Google Doc, with sections for a grocery list, to-do lists and details of upcoming trips. 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.

For a class of young workers, it’s only rational to apply the tools of the corporate world to their relationships and families. Businesses have goals and systems for achieving them, the thinking goes. They get things done. Relationships are work, but no one wants to admit it. But this particular flavor of life hacking often causes observers to collectively recoil. It threatens to take the romance and spontaneity out of life, in their view. It feels cold.

“There is a phenomenon whereby the more you try to manage your life, the more you risk squeezing the vibrancy out of it,” said Oliver Burkeman, author of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.” And yet, the crushing overwhelm of modern life, with daily to-do lists and schedules and notifications and digital logistics can feel so never-ending that any solution offering to optimize even the tiniest task — or most meaningful relationship — looks like a lifeline worth grasping for.

Emily Oster, a parenting expert and economist, rose to popularity by promoting a data-based approach to managing pregnancy, 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 instance, extracurriculars or getting your kid a phone. Some critics have attacked her approach for the same reasons they recoil from a Notion template for married couples — it can feel detached.

Dr. Oster said the problem is not systems like hers — it’s not having difficult conversations about priorities and principles. Her spreadsheets and other tools are designed to set people up for the lives they want, she said.

“Surfacing conflict on purpose is something we don’t generally like to do,” she said. “It’s hard to do at work, also, but it’s even harder to do with someone you want go to sleep with at night.” Dr. Oster said the lesson she takes from the business world to her personal life is to make thoughtful, deliberate decisions. “I don’t think there is a limit to how far you can take that,” she said.

A smaller subset 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 the family tech start-up, Hearth, said that one reason past attempts to create technology for the family have failed was that consumers 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 kids with morning and bedtime routines that became available last year, is being adopted by digitally native millennials.