I built moj because I was the one losing track

Why another family planner?

Because every other one defeated me. I am a father of three, and my problem was never the wanting. It was the typing. Adding an appointment means: open the app, type a title, pick a date, pick a time, assign a person, save. By then somebody has walked into the room twice.

After three days I gave up, every time. And a shopping list that is only half kept is worse than none at all. You stop trusting it and still buy the milk twice.

So moj does exactly one thing differently. It takes a sentence. “Gym bag for Mo on Thursday” is the whole effort — sent over WhatsApp, typed in the app or spoken. The filing is moj’s job.

How many days until my birthday?

That is the question we get most often. And “in May” is not an answer to it. Children want the number.

With me it is the other way round. Something a person could use keeps occurring to me: in the supermarket, in the car, while brushing my teeth. Two hours later it is gone again. A gift idea is a five-second thought and does not survive being typed into a form.

Both are built in. The birthday calendar shows the number of days. And a gift idea you send lands with the person it is for — hidden from that person, without anybody having to remember to hide it.

Why are council meetings in a family calendar?

Because my partner wanted to know which evenings I am out. I am a municipal councillor in Mödling, my home town. The sittings and committees fall on single evenings spread right across the year. None of them stood in a calendar she could open.

The other way round, she wanted to enter her own working days. Then I can see when she is there and when she is not. That is the same wish from the other side: look it up instead of having to ask.

So in moj every appointment belongs to somebody, and the week view has a column per person. Not so that anyone is checked up on, but so that nobody has to ask.

Who carries all of it in their head?

In most families it is one person. They know when the parents’ evening is, that the trainers are getting too small, what is on at the weekend and what is missing from the fridge. That is work. And it is invisible, because it is written down nowhere.

moj is meant to make it visible first and then share it out. When the shopping list is on everybody’s phone, the shopping is done by whoever is out anyway. A glance before the shop replaces the phone call. And when the appointments are there for everybody, nobody has to be reminded.

That is the whole point. Working together as a family, instead of one person carrying it all.

Who builds this?

There is one person behind moj: me, Julien El-Bahy, from Mödling near Vienna. No company behind it, no investors, no advertising. moj came about on the side, for my own family. I use it myself every day. Who runs it in the legal sense is in the imprint. What is stored and what is not is in the privacy notice.

I build two other things as well, both private projects:

• wohnwahn – Home hunting across Austria, every location rated by price, climate, noise and commute.
• Lumina – Free SEO tools that run in the browser, without an account and without an install.

If something is missing or something does not work, write to us. On a project this size the mail is read by the person who wrote the code.

What is deliberately missing?

Quite a lot. No household accounts, no WhatsApp groups, no writing back into somebody else’s calendar, no import from other apps. Every one of those limits is something we decided. None of them is a gap. An app that promised everything would be exactly the app I failed at before.