Before we got a Skylight, our schedule was spread across at least five calendars: two personal, two work, plus a handwritten one I’d started because apparently five systems felt safer than four. Mostly it meant I was trying to remember what lived where, whether I’d told my husband about something, and what I was probably forgetting.
We got our Skylight in late 2024. Almost two years later, I’d buy it again. For most of that time I barely used anything beyond the calendar, and honestly, the calendar alone was enough to make it worth having.
It sits where we see it. We each have a color-coded profile, and I use separate profiles for birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, and holidays. My husband relies on it too, so I’m not trying to keep several versions of our schedule straight in my head.
How we use the calendar
I’m still the planner in our house. A touchscreen did not change our personalities. It did give us one shared place to look. Birthdays and anniversaries repeat, trips and holidays have their own colors, and the calendar is visible without either of us remembering to open an app first.
My work calendar can’t sync outside my company, so I still manually add anything important. That’s not ideal, but I have to put the information somewhere anyway. I’d rather put it in the place we both actually use.
For calendars that can sync, Skylight currently supports Google, Outlook, Apple, Cozi, and Yahoo. Its standard features also include color-coded profiles, Custom Lists, tasks, and the mobile app. Plus is currently $79 a year and adds things like Magic Import, meal planning, rewards, and the photo screensaver.
I have Plus. For a long time, I couldn’t have told you exactly what I was paying for. I liked the calendar, it worked, and I mostly ignored the rest because learning an organization tool can become its own organization project.
Check Before Buying
The thing that finally got me into Lists was not a desire to become more organized. It was the amount of ketchup in our house.
I like things put away, but once I put something away I can forget how much of it we already have. We ended up with multiple open ketchups and enough tomato sauce to suggest I was preparing for something. I did not want to solve that with a detailed home inventory because I know exactly how long I would maintain that.
Instead, I made a Skylight list called Check Before Buying. If something is on it, we have enough. When it’s running low, it comes off Check Before Buying and goes onto Grocery. After we buy it, it can go back.
That’s it. No quantities. No “new / running low / out” statuses. No database of everything in the house. I just need enough information in front of me to check before I buy another thing that is already hiding in a cabinet.
Skylight’s Custom Lists and Grocery list are standard features, and the Grocery list can move items into an Instacart order. Skylight also says Custom Lists can be transferred to apps such as AnyList. I’m much more interested in those handoffs now because retyping the same information somewhere else is exactly the kind of tiny step I’m trying to get rid of.
The physical organization side matters too. I can put things away so the room feels less visually busy without expecting a cabinet to remind me what’s inside it. That visible-versus-hidden problem is part of what I’m working through in The house is too much.
How Echo fits into the setup
I also already had Echo Dots and an Echo Show around the house (paid links). Voice helps with a different part of the problem: getting something out of my head when stopping to find my phone, open an app, and type it feels like enough steps that I might not do it.
I’m not going to give you a made-up Alexa-to-Skylight setup guide. I haven’t verified that exact technical handoff well enough to tell someone else how to reproduce it. In my house, the useful part is that I can use voice for capture and Skylight for information I want visible again. If I can verify a cleaner direct handoff, I’ll add the actual instructions.
This is also why I’m less interested in finding one perfect organization system than I used to be. The calendar can handle the shared schedule. Skylight Lists can handle the small amount of household information I want visible. Voice can make capture easier. Physical storage can keep the actual stuff contained. I don’t need one product to do all of it.
What still annoys me
There are still features I don’t use, my work events still need manual entry, and Plus costs $79 a year. The setup only works for me if maintaining it stays easier than the problem it replaced.
That’s also where planners tend to lose me. A planner can be great and still require me to remember it, open it, update it, and come back to it. I’m keeping those experiments together under The planner failed. Again., while Everything has too many steps is where I’m collecting the things that are useful mainly because they remove a step.
Would I buy it again?
Yes. Probably immediately, which is irritating considering how much they cost.
I own the original 15-inch model. The current 15-inch Calendar 2 starts around $300 depending on the configuration, and you don’t need Plus for the basic calendar, color coding, Custom Lists, tasks, or mobile app. Plus is $79 a year.
We don’t have kids, either. We have jobs, appointments, birthdays, trips, plans, and two adult schedules that regularly attempt to occupy the same Tuesday. I bought Skylight because I wanted one calendar. I still think that alone was worth it for us. Using Lists and the other tools around it has just made the screen more useful than the calendar I originally bought.
If you’re looking at one for the same kind of setup, this is the Skylight Calendar I use and recommend (paid link).