Setting up our Calendar Max

If you’ve ever struggled to keep your family’s schedule in sync—or just wanted a little less chaos in your mornings—the Calendar Max might be your new best friend. After seeing it pop up in a Mother’s Day promo, we decided to give it a shot. Spoiler: our living room wall makes me smile every time I walk by, and even our kids are excited to check what’s coming up next!

Our Previous Calendar Solution

Much like most families with both parents in full-time employment, my wife and I kept our calendars (mostly) sync'ed by emailing invites to each other. Every time there was a new event, work trip, kid activity, school activity, etc., we were emailing 3 different calendars. This mostly worked, but we ran into periodic issues:

• An email address wasn't added, leading to an accidental calendar mis-match between work and personal calendars for one of us
• An update to a calendar appointment was needed, but the parent trying to make the modification wasn't the owner on the invite

Adding to this, my wife wanted a better way to plan the week as a family. The small screen on an iPad or iPhone just wasn't enough to see what all was going on at a glance, nor was it easy to see who was doing what.

Enter the Calendar Max

If you haven't seen one of the advertisments, the Calendar Max from Skylight is a large, wall-mounted digital calendar designed to help families stay organized. It syncs with popular online calendars like Google and Outlook, displaying all your events, appointments, and reminders in a clear, color-coded format. With its touchscreen interface and easy-to-read display, the Calendar Max makes it simple for everyone in the household to see what’s coming up and keep schedules in sync.

Yes, the marketing sold me on it. But, when it got down to implementing things, I ran into a few issues:

• If I synced both my wife and my personal calendars, we ended up with duplicates of all the invites due to our previous method of cross-invitations for all events
• Even syncing just one calendar meant I had to manually color-code all the events to different "profiles" on the Calendar Max
• The Skylight app does allow you to manage your calendar, but when you create events you had to pick BOTH the profile and the synced calendar. This seemed like a possible step to introduce issues since you could accidentally choose the wrong backing calendar for a profile entry.

Setting up Multiple Calendars and Profiles on the Skylight App

I wanted to make it super-easy for our family to color code all the envents on our calendar to know who was where. To do this, Skylight implements what they call Skylight Calendar Profiles. If you read through the help documents, you learn that profiles are not the same as calendars -- they are two distinct "objects" you manage in the Skylight App. To save you all the research, this is what you need to understand:

• Profiles relate to the members of your household (or any other types of event you want to track, like the trash days, etc))
• Profiles can have different or similar colors, useful if you manage events for one person on two separate calendars (like work and personal, or chores and sports)
• Calendars are synced as separate objects to your Skylight account, and then mapped to a profile
• Calendars can be from popular services like Google, Outlook, etc, or public Internet calendars

With that knowledge in mind, let's look at the process I went through to get things set up.

Creating and Sharing our Google Calendars

The first step was to share our Google Calendars. At the time, our kids did not have any Google accounts, nor did they have calendars anywhere (not even Apple calendars). We also needed permissions for my wife and I to see our kids' calendars. Here's what I did to get us set up and ready:

1. Registered both kids for a Google Account at Google Family Link, saving their username/password/passkey in our family password manager.
2. Logged in to each kid's Google account to view their Calendar.
3. In Google Calendar, when you mouse over the calendar name on the left side, there is a "3-dots" icon that you click to see a context menu. Click Settings and Sharing
4. Under the Shared With heading, I added the personal (Google) email address for my wife and I with the Make Changes to Events permission and clicked Send
5. My wife and I also did the same steps with our own personal Google calendars, granting each other "Make Changes" permissions.
6. On my own calendar, I also created a secondary calendar for "Family" events (which I shared to my wife) and also have a few subscribed public calendars (such as U.S. Holidays, Sports Teams, and our City Trash Pick-Up Schedule)
7. For my own calendar (the primary account I would use to sync the calendars to Skylight), I had to ensure all the calendars I wanted to view on Skylight were selected in Sync Settings

Fixing our Calendar Invites

This process took a few hours. We had to undo overlapping calendar invitations and assign each event to the correct calendar. I found this process easiest to do using the Google Calendar app on my iPad (though my wife did hers on her phone). Starting with the current week, and working our way into the future, we would open each calendar invite and modify the event to remove duplicate personal calendar invitations. Because we both work at companies with restrictive email policies, we can't directly sync our google calendars to our work calendars so we're stuck having to include work emails here. Conversely, we also went into our work calendars and removed the multiple personal email invitations for things like Work Trips, all-day On-sites, etc. Now we simply create the event on our work calendar and then email our own personal email address ONLY.

However, as we unraveled the personal calendar entanglements, we were also able to move the "owners" of those invites to each respective calendar. In other words, rather than my calendar owning the invitation for my son's soccer practice, his calendar owned it. This is an important step that plays into the Profile setup later...

Syncing the Google Calendar to Skylight

With all the calendar invitations fixed, I went into the Skylight app on my phone and clicked on Synced Calendars. This was pretty self-explanatory, but I opted to sync in a Google Calendar (with 2-way integration) and logged in when prompted. The interesting part here is that I've only synced Skylight with MY Google calendar, but since I can view and/or modify all the related calendars we need to see, there was no need to add additional calendars.

Configuring the Profiles in Skylight

Within the Skylight app, I clicked on the Profiles button and started adding Profiles for everyone in our family. I also added a profile for "Family" events and a profile for all the other calendars I planned to sync to the Calendar Max (Sports Teams, Garbage Day, etc). The trick here is that as you create and name the profile, you select a unique color AND the appropriate linked calendar from Google. For example:

Hopefully that makes sense! If not, feel free to ask questions below.

The Net Result Going Forward

With this configuration completed, the Calendar Max is now showing all of our calendar events color-coded by family member. When we're away from the house, we can easily see a similar view using the Google Calendar app. We're also using the Google Calendar app to manage new events on a day-to-day basis. You may be asking "Why not just use the Google Calendar app?" Fair question, but as mentioned above we wanted a nice large-format view into the next few days so we could quickly plan in the morning. Additionally, it helps keep our kids in the loop as to what activities they have each day. The Calendar Max has quickly become our planning hub.

Final Thoughts

Was it expensive? In my opinion, yes. That said, we started with a 15 inch calendar that we bought from Costco. By purchasing it from Costco, I figured we could easily return it if we didn't like the experience. On top of that, the Costco purchase also included a free 1-year Calendar Plus subscription, which we've been using to experiment with the Routines and Chores functionality. I've also found that the easiest way to share photos to the Calendar (for photo screensaving) is to select photos in the photos app and then share them to the Skylight App (versus selecting photos in the Skylight App directly).

I'm definiely curious to hear your thoughts if you've been looking into the Skylight calendars. Leave a message below and hopefully the process outlined above will help get you to automatically synced/color-coded calendars.