From RevOps to Home Ops, Apparently

When I left my job, I pictured a period of restorative spaciousness. I would go on walks. I would read books in the daytime. I would become the kind of person who casually ordered an affogato on a Monday afternoon.

Instead, I accidentally became the Chief of Home.

It turns out our home was already a small organization. It had recurring tasks, shifting priorities, multiple stakeholders, and an unusually snack-dependent user base. What it did not have was anything resembling an operating system.

In my old life, I worked in Revenue Operations. I was paid to notice where information got lost, where ownership was fuzzy, and where a process relied too heavily on one person remembering everything. Then I came home and ran a system entirely dependent on one person remembering everything. The person was me.

I knew the soccer registration date. I knew which child had pajama day on Thursday, that we were nearly out of toothpaste, that the passport had to be renewed, and that a birthday gift was sitting in a virtual cart somewhere. I also knew none of these things were individually difficult. Together, they created a low electrical hum in my brain that never fully turned off.

I thought I needed a better chore tracker.

Naturally, I started building one.

This was partly practical and partly an excellent way to avoid folding laundry while still feeling professionally adjacent. I made a place for recurring chores. Then I added one-time tasks. Then due dates, categories, notes, and small next steps for the tasks that were technically one item but spiritually a minor government program.

But the more I used it, the more I realized the list was not the problem. The problem was the feeling of holding the whole list at once.

A normal to-do app sees twelve tasks and says: here are your twelve tasks. My brain already knew that. What I wanted was something to say: these two things matter today, this one would be helpful, and the rest are allowed to stop shouting.

A softer operating layer

That idea became Home Rhythm. Home Flow is the home-cooked app that started it — Robin Sloan's term for software built for one household, not for scale.

Home Flow helps me get the invisible work out of my head and onto a humane plate for now. Home Rhythm is the larger experiment: this writing, the app, and a place to think about modern family life, mental load, AI, and the strange ambition of wanting life to function better without turning everyone I love into a quarterly objective.

I am interested in AI here, but not as a magic efficiency machine. I do not need a robot to produce seven optimized weeknight dinners and a color-coded family mission statement. I need help sorting the messy inputs of real life. I need something that can notice the form in the email, turn it into a next step, and understand that a Tuesday with two activities and a tired five-year-old is not the day to reorganize the pantry.

Of course, the experiment does not always go smoothly. Just recently, in a Codex workflow I'm experimenting with for digesting school emails, I asked it to look through the inbox and tell me the camp pickup details for my son. It confidently and calmly told me that "the email didn't specify the standard pickup time," as if the matter had now been settled and I could simply leave him there forever. This is roughly where AI is for me right now: useful, not magic. It can help gather, summarize, and reason through the mess, but it still needs a human nearby to say, "Thank you, but the child does in fact need to be retrieved."

Mostly, I want to see whether better systems can create more ease without creating more system to maintain.

So, what am I doing here?

I am building small things and testing them on my actual life. I am writing down what works, what absolutely does not, and what the whole experiment reveals about the invisible machinery of a family. Every household runs on its own weird logic. This one is mine. I am writing it down in case it makes someone else's a little easier to see.

There will be chores here, certainly — and the occasional discovery that the towels were apparently part of a larger operating system. But I am not trying to become the CEO of my home. I would like to be a person who lives in it.