This week, I’m talking with Kim Nguyen of Skylight -
Now, real quick, before we jump into the rest of the introduction, I just wanted to mention that Skylight Calendar has sponsored the show in the past, but this this episode itself isn’t sponsored.
With that said, in this episode, we discuss the Skylight Calendar in depth. We delve into how we can use digital tools like the Skylight Calendar to help families create easier coordination and reduce the stress associated with scheduling. Kim shares her insights on distributing the mental load, empowering kids, and fostering confidence through structured scheduling and visual reminders.
Be sure to check out the Skylight Calendar
William Curb: You want to do a quick introduction and tell me a little bit about Skylight and Skylight Frame.
Kim Nguyen: Hi, William. My name is Kim Wynn, and I'm head of marketing for Skylight Calendar, and we're here to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart. My eldest daughter was diagnosed with ADHD when she was in elementary school, and it's been quite a journey helping her find the right tools and strategies to manage her ADHD. And like many parents in my situation, when we first received the diagnosis, we were filled with a mix of emotions like confusion and concern, but also determined to find the best way to support our daughter. And over the years, we've tried various tools from planners to whiteboards. But what we realized was what she needed was something more interactive, something that can become a constant in her daily routine without feeling like a chore.
William Curb: Yeah, so it is a product I have at my house now, and it is a very cool little digital product to have like a on-demand calendar that's very visible.
Kim Nguyen: Yes, at Skylight, we're all about creating tools that seamlessly fit into family routines. You know, with my personal experience in mind, I saw the immense potential of our calendar in helping families like mine. It offers predictability and structure, which as I've learned can be game changers for someone with ADHD.
You know, with Skylight Calendar, we began scheduling our family activities, chores, and meal plans. Having these visual reminders, which she can check anytime, helped reduce her anxiety significantly. You know, it took away the element of surprise or uncertainty from her day. She wakes up, she checks her schedule and feels empowered knowing what's ahead. It's not just a tool for her, but for our whole family too. And the beauty of Skylight is that it fosters communication and understanding, so helping to bridge gaps and making our life a lot smoother.
William Curb: Yeah. And I mean, calendars are for me like one of the biggest game changers in managing ADHD and like really using my calendar has been because I think I know what's on my calendar and I am constantly surprised. Like yesterday, I had a meeting. I'm like, OK, I get ready for this meeting at 10. And then I looked and like, this thing's at one. How did I miss that by three hours?
And I think it's also great. One of the things that's super helpful with me having Calendar too is when my day gets changed up a bit, I know when I can put things in and I can take things out. Would I like sit down and write out a to-do list? I'll put a ton of things on there. But when I try and then move that to the calendar, I get really like forced to see that I cannot do all of those things that I just wrote down because there is only so much time in the day and it's having the ability to have a calendar of friends. OK, this is what I need.
Kim Nguyen: Yes. I mean, I think another really benefit that sort of came out of this is the ownership and the accountability that the Skylight Hunter gives, not just for kids with ADHD, but anybody is that handing over the reins of letting them control their schedule, adding their chores, adding their tasks, gives them a lot more independence and just a feeling, a sense of like, I own this. This is within my control and giving them that ability to do so. Really, I think opens up their sense of just like independence and feeling great and really confident about themselves. So that's what we do in our household is like, I have my kids select their own chores and put in their own chores so that every day when they know what they need to do, they are the ones that actually put the chores in. It's just that me telling them that they need to do this, but handing over that ownership to them is really empowering.
William Curb: Yeah, my oldest just turned eight and a half, which she has been very insistent on her half birthday recently, but has recently been like really wanting to have that independence of basically everything. But scheduling is also very important then because she wants to be able to see friends and do all of the things and then also know about the things that she's signed up for because she does not remember when her best friend's birthday party is going to be. And then she wants to meet to look at my calendar all the time, having a outside thing for her to be able to look at. It's great.
Kim Nguyen: Yes. With the Skylight calendar, life is not static. It's dynamic. Things change and it gives the ability to be interactive with your schedule, interactive with your chores and your tasks. And so as soon as we flipped over to this system, it became much more easy for people to track things, you could update it and it gets people engaged. That's another thing. You know, like the whiteboard looks great when you first start it, but then things happen, things change as you start to like make edits and stuff like that. It was a hot mess, you know, a weekend to the month. You're like nobody ever looked at anymore.
Smears are happening. Things were getting crossed out and people weren't updating it regularly. But, you know, Skylight calendar with the mobile app, you can make changes when you're outside of the home. You know, I was at a store grocery shopping and I got to notice that one of the kids schedules had changed rather than, you know, waiting to tell them or, you know, go home and do it. I would just update the information on the app and it would automatically appear on the Skylight calendar at home. And so everything was being communicated in just a couple of easy steps.
William Curb: I think that's a really key point for any tool that we use with neurodivergent. It's like the ability to use it because obviously I've had calendars all my life when I have just like paper calendars that never worked for me. It worked for me for a couple of weeks. And then after that, it was just blank for the rest of the year. And so I think having these tools that make it easy to use them is really important because you're only going to get out of your calendar what you put into it.
Kim Nguyen: You're absolutely right on that, William. I think that getting anybody in your family to be engaged and bought into this, that's the key to having it be useful.
William Curb: As much as I like to help with the scheduling and stuff, I always am finding things where I'm like, why is the school only emailing you about these things? And I'm like, I signed up for these emails. How did I not get put on this list? It's assumed that mom is going to do everything, which is not great, but giving them having a tool to make it easier for everyone to disseminate all this information that is going to the one place. Very useful.
Kim Nguyen: Yeah, no, I'm not ashamed to admit that I have had kids stranded on baseball fields or left in daycare because I forgot to coordinate with, you know, a pickup or forgot to tell my son that he was going home with his friend's mom. And so he was expecting me or his dad to come pick him up. So any sort of calorie system to kind of create that sort of harmonious and sort of seamless coordination is going to be really important to any kind of like busy household with multiple family members, especially young kids who, you know, may not drive themselves or, you know, who kind of rely on an adult to take them to their after school activities and things like that.
William Curb: I think this is also great for the we've mentioned like how it can be helpful for ADHD kids, but with ADHD parents too. Again, I use the calendars a lot and it is because I cannot remember what goes on my calendar without having it written down and looking at my favorite example is on Mondays we have late start school. I'm like, does it start at 10:30 or 10:45 every week? I have to double check to make sure that I'm going to be doing drop off at the right time. And I need this visual information. I need easy way to check.
Kim Nguyen: And especially young kids who don't have phones yet.
William Curb: Yes
Kim Nguyen: You know, they can still participate in their scheduling and the management of running a household in the chores piece of it without having a phone. Because one aspect of ADHD that I don't hear a lot of people talking about, but I certainly have seen this, which is the hyper focusness of the flip side of ADHD. Right. You know, ADHD is traditionally thought about as lack of focus, distraction, you know, scattered or whatever. But the flip side of that is the hyper focusness that sometimes happens when they are so focused on a particular task or activity, they lose sight of time or whatever they're at. And so with, you know, something like a skylight calendar, you can have very clear time blocks that you can set aside. Like, OK, if you want to work on this particular activity or watch this show or whatever it is, we'll time block it for you. So you understand that there are some boundaries with which this activity exists.
And then transitioning from that to the other activity is also an important part. And we would actually schedule buffer time in between activities to give them that transition time that we know is also a very difficult thing for kids with ADHD is when they transition from one activity to another. They don't switch their flip. The light switch doesn't turn on and off like that from one activity to the other. Right. They need a little bit of that transition period. So we would build that in for her when she knows that she has to only complete something for a specific time. There's a little bit of a rest period or a little bit of buffer. And then we transition to the next activity.
William Curb: Yeah, I think time blocking is a great idea and building in those transitions because decisions are hard and it is easy to be like, I'll just go on to the next thing. And then be like, why is this not going well? Oh, because I need a little bit of time to get into things.
Kim Nguyen: There's a term that I really love that my daughter's school counselors and her teachers of use was just scaffolding, which is really a great way to think about these types of tools. And I would say like the most important lesson we learned was to involve her early in the process and have her take ownership over her routine. I think we often have a tendency to dictate to our children. But when they take ownership, it helps them feel more in control and empowered, which ultimately increases everyone's chance of success. You know, in the past, it's kind of laughable to say, but we've used whiteboards, taped paper calendars, desk planners and even sticky notes, but they never get updated. It doesn't invite interactivity. And oftentimes it gets just too messy to even look anymore. So that's why we recently switched over to a digital calendar display that sits front and center on our kitchen counter that is accessible and easily updatable so that it is much more effective and user friendly.
William Curb: Yeah, I think scaffolding is a great tool in just that it is great to have something to build off of because so like I was saying earlier, I have not enough white space in my day bad. But I have too much white space. It's also like, what am I doing? How am I going to get this to work?
Kim Nguyen: But I think that things like this could be very individualized. If you know that you're a person who can only accomplish three things a day, that's all you need to schedule yourself for. Right? You're like, nope, I can't do more than three. And that's the max I'm going to tell myself that I have to do accomplished today for someone like you who doesn't like maybe the white space very much. And you like to make sure that, you know, every part of your day is accounted for. It also works to the important thing there is to understand what your style and how you want to manage your day.
William Curb: For a lot of people I see the issue being is that they don't want to change styles once they pick something, even if it's not working. And so it's a lot of being like, hey, using your calendar is a lot about trial and error, figuring out what works for you. If something isn't working, it's worth exploring to be like, Hey, maybe I could do this differently.
Kim Nguyen: There's a common experience among people with ADHD is like, if it's not in front of me, it doesn't exist.
William Curb: Yeah.
Kim Nguyen: Oh, out of sight out of mind type of thing. It's kind of a funny story is like, you know, we have to have everything displayed in refrigerator, like right front and center.
William Curb: Yeah.
Kim Nguyen: Anything that's drawer or behind something. No, like, nobody can see it. Nobody even knows that it's there. So everything has to be very front and center. That philosophy really kind of applies a lot to just our daily lives too. But more specifically and more for kids with ADHD is like, if it's not in front of them, it's not something that their eyes can visually see that it doesn't exist.
William Curb: And it's so easy to get off track too, when you're trying to figure out what you want to do. And this is one of the things I always have fun with my kids is like being like, okay, you need to go do this certain thing. And they leave the room and immediately forget what it was that they were supposed to do. And because it's like, okay, you need to go upstairs and get socks. And then 10 minutes later, it's like, do you have your socks? No, but I've made a new Lego structure.
Kim Nguyen: Yeah. I think that there's such a stigma around ADHD. And like, my perception is that it's much more widely accepted and certainly much more prevalent than we all thought before. I feel like everybody has some degree of ADHD at some point. And I think that building confidence in kids, especially in a young age is crucial.
And we were fortunate to have the diagnosis very early in her life. And so that we were able to kind of give her that scaffolding and the tools to help her build the confidence, because I think nothing is a bigger confidence killer than is to feel like, why didn't I do this? Why can't I do this? Why am I watching people around me accomplish these tasks faster, sooner, better than I am? What is wrong with me? Right. And so knowing and accepting who you are, and then recognizing that there are tools that can help you get to the same place that everyone else does is a huge confidence builder.
William Curb: Yeah. It's like if you have two people, one person takes the stairs, one person takes the wheelchair ramp, as long as there is one there. Because I know that's not always the case for people. But when we realize we have to just do things differently, we can still do them.
Kim Nguyen: Exactly. You know, one of my favorite sayings is like, how do you eat an elephant? Well, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Right. And I think that tools like the Skylight Calendar really kind of gives you that ability to kind of break down big tasks into smaller chunks, so that it doesn't overwhelm you and it feels very doable and digestible.
William Curb: Yeah. Are there specific things that you see that make people more successful with the Skylight Calendar or calendars in general?
Kim Nguyen: Yes. Again, I think that moms traditionally hold the family organization schedules and tasks. Right. So the beauty of the Skylight Calendar is that it allows her to distribute that mental load to other members of the family so they can share in the running of the household and the scheduling and the organization. So the biggest benefit and key to success with the Skylight Calendar is sharing that responsibility to other members and having your kids input their own chores and checking their chores off every single day, having them see their schedules. I mean, if they're not of age yet, so they can read it right, but they can see, like, oh, they have a play date with their friend after school. So having them kind of like see that for themselves that they don't need to ask mom 100 times a day, what am I doing today?
What am I going to see, Billy, is part of the benefit of having that offload of that mental load to them so they can visually go and see, oh, the independence and the confidence that comes with like, hey, I created this task list or I now have these chores that I know I need to do. And then at the end of the day, once I check it off, I feel good about myself. I feel accomplished.
The anxiety that I feel about the uncertainty of what I need to do and where I need to be is gone. So I think those are huge benefits that this Skylight Calendar offers, not just for families with ADHD, but with any family who has multiple members of a family who need to contribute and live in a family unit. Absolutely.
William Curb: Kids want to please us. They want to succeed. And it's just about giving them the tools so that they can do that.
Kim Nguyen: Yes. I mean, I think sometimes it might be easier for parents to be like, oh, I just want to take care of myself. It's just easier. I don't want to have to explain it or worry about it. But we can give kids more credit than that is like, they want to contribute. They want to feel like they're a valuable member of the family. And this is a crucial tool to do so, giving them the ownership of the reins to kind of, hey, you know what you need to do today. Now it's on you and having them take that responsibility and onto them.
That's absolutely something that kids would want.
William Curb: Yeah.
Kim Nguyen: I mean, it's just the old age adage that, you know, I don't want to fish for you. I'm going to teach you how to fish. Letting go of a little bit of that control and knowing that it's going to be taken care of is something that I think parents need to learn over time. Right. And I think tools like the Skylight Calendar are great tools to kind of give a little bit of that ownership away, but still be there to know that things aren't going to fall through the cracks because it's not like you're completely, you know, absent about it. But you get to see what's happening and you get to be able to have a conversation with other family members of what needs to be done in a much more productive way.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. It would have been so great if I had learned that skill earlier in life so that when I went off to college, I already knew how to do it.
Kim Nguyen: I mean, I think calendaring an organization is a lifelong, you know, pursuit. I don't think it's something that people would just be like, oh, I've done it and I'm good for the rest of my life.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely.
Kim Nguyen: I want to share an inspiring story I heard today from one of our customers whose 10 year old son was diagnosed with ADHD. You know, he was being treated by a child psychologist for anxiety, particularly around food and eating. And the psychologist suggested that they have more family meals together. And for one reason or another, they couldn't make it happen on a regular basis. So typically what happens is her husband, who is a chef, makes a kid friendly meal for their son at five o'clock. And he and his wife eat together later at seven o'clock. Well, ever since getting the Skylight calendar, she says, they started to schedule family dinner time along with what they were eating so her son could see ahead, anticipate when they were all expected to eat together as a family. She said that ever since getting the calendar, they have not missed a family meal together.
And I think the big difference here is that an event was planned and visible for everyone to see ahead of time, eliminating any question of what was happening or any surprises. You know, she said her son doesn't handle ambiguity or uncertainty very well. So a calendaring tool has really helped reduce his overall anxiety. So she said his typical schedule is that he wakes up in the morning, he checks his schedule, checks his chores, knows exactly what to expect for the day and does stuff on time on his own initiative.
And in fact, she went on to say that Skylight has been so effective at managing his anxiety that his psychologist has discharged him. So I think this is just a great heartwarming story to highlight the power of structure and predictability can be quite profound, especially for individuals with ADHD. Knowing what to expect and when can really alleviate a lot of the stress and anxiety, especially for children who crave routine and certainty. And for this particular family, the Skylight calendar really acted as a bridge of communication for the family, fostering both understanding and unity. So by visualizing and planning out their events, it helped this young boy anticipate his daily routines, providing a lot of comfort and structure.
And it was really wonderful to hear how such a tool can bring a family closer together and have such a positive impact on his well being. But I think more importantly, you know, the story really speaks to a broader point that is often that it's not just medication or therapy when it comes to managing ADHD and associate anxiety. Sometimes it's about simple tools and strategies that cater to the individual's needs. And in this case, the clarity and predictability that the Skylight calendar offered were quite transformative. And I'm always inspired to see how technology when used thoughtfully can generally make a difference in people's lives. And I think it's a great reminder for us all that whether we have ADHD or not, about the value of structure, planning and clear communication in our lives.
William Curb: Yeah, being able to share calendars, like once I move to digital calendars and being able to like share them is like, Oh, yeah, this makes things so much easier.
Kim Nguyen: Exactly. I mean, I used to have a calendar that we use on our phones specifically. But again, the key with a Skylight calendar, though, is that it allows kids who don't have phones to participate.
William Curb: Yeah
Kim Nguyen: It comes like this central hub of the family that now everybody can participate regardless of whether they have a phone or not.
William Curb: Absolutely. Is there anything you'd like to leave the audience with?
Kim Nguyen: You know, while it was not specifically designed for individuals with ADHD, the Skylight calendar has really become an invaluable tool for households managing ADHD by offering that visual interactive and easily updateable scheduling solution. So we talked a lot about some of the challenges that individuals with ADHD face. Well, Skylight calendar really addresses many of those challenges by providing a clear central place for routines, appointments, and responsibilities. And I think more importantly, though, the digital format really eliminates the clutter and the mess associated with paper calendars while making its placement very accessible, like on a kitchen counter that ensures its constant visibility and top of mind. I love the interactive nature that it helps encourage involvement of the family members and really allowing individuals with ADHD to take ownership of their schedules and fostering a sense of empowerment and increasing independence. So I do believe that for ADHD households, Skylight calendar really isn't just a scheduling tool. It really is a great bridge to better daily functioning and autonomy for everybody.
William Curb: Awesome. Well, I think people will get a great benefit about hearing about calendars and I'm sure many people are going to want to go check this out. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
Kim Nguyen: Thank you, William, for your time.
This Episode's Top Tips
Digital calendars can help families stay organized by displaying events, tasks, and reminders.
Calendar can help empower children to take ownership of their schedules and responsibilities. The Skylight Calendar in particular, allows kids to input their own tasks and check them off, promoting independence and accountability.
It is important to distribute the mental load of organizing family schedules and tasks among different family members. By having a system that allows multiple inputs, it helps share the responsibility of family scheduling.