Set up a routine and tick it off

A routine is the part of a day that repeats: teeth, one book, lights out. You write the steps once, and every day they appear as something to tick off.

The point is the handover. A parent who has not seen a child since Thursday can look at what was ticked, rather than sending a message asking whether the cream went on.

Write one

1. Open Routines.
2. Select Add a routine.
3. Give it a name, choose who it is for, and add the steps.

A routine can be for one child, for several, or for the whole family. Leave the children unselected and it belongs to everybody in the family, which is right for something like a bedtime that runs the same way whoever is in the house.

Steps are separate lines on purpose. “Bath, cream, pajamas” as one step is one tick for three things, and half done is the state somebody actually hands over in.

Say when it happens

Rather than a clock time, a routine is usually tied to a moment in the day: Before bed, With breakfast, After school, Bath time, evening, and so on. There is also At a set time if a particular hour is what matters, and Any time today for something that only has to happen.

An anchor travels better than a time. “Before bed” means the same thing in both houses, where 7:30 means one house’s bedtime and not the other’s.

Tick things off

Today’s routines are listed under Now when they are due, with each step its own tick box.

Ticks are per child, per step, per day. Two children on one bedtime routine are tracked separately, so one being done does not quietly mark the other.

A tick is attached to the step rather than to its position in the list, so editing a routine later does not move yesterday’s ticks onto different steps.

Keep one to the parents

A routine can be marked private, and private means every helper, without exception.

This is stricter than it is for an event, and deliberately so. A private event is still visible to the helper it is assigned to; a routine has nobody to carve out. The case it exists for is something like a medication that a sitter has no business reading.

A private routine is hidden completely rather than shown with its detail blanked. A card reading “private routine, 3 steps” would tell a helper something is being kept from them about a child they are looking after, which is worse than silence.

Who can see and change them

Everybody in the family can see the routines and tick them off, helpers included. That is the whole point of them.

Writing routines is part of Coparia Plus. Reading them never is, and a family whose plan changes keeps the routines it already wrote: the board still draws, the boxes still tick, and nobody caring for a child that evening is told anything is missing.

See also what anybody looking after your children should know, for the standing facts that are true every day rather than the things that repeat.