I built moj because I was the one losing track

Why another family planner?

Because I failed with every other one. I am a father of three, and my problem was never wanting to. 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 come into the room twice.

Every time, I gave up after three days. And a shopping list that is only half kept up is worse than none at all. You stop trusting it and end up buying milk twice anyway.

That is why moj does exactly one thing differently. It takes a sentence. “PE kit for Mo on Thursday” is all the effort it takes. You send it on WhatsApp, type it in the app or say it. moj does the sorting. Which sentences work is on a page of its own.

How many days until my birthday?

That is the question we hear most often at home. And “in May” is no answer to it. Children want the number.

For me it is the other way round. I keep thinking of things someone could use: in the supermarket, in the car, while brushing my teeth. Two hours later the thought is gone. A gift idea is a five-second thought and does not survive a form.

moj has both built in. The birthday calendar shows the number of days. And a gift idea you send is filed with the person it is for. It stays hidden from that person, without anyone having to remember to hide it.

Why are council meetings in a family calendar?

Because my partner wanted to know which evenings I would be out. I am a local councillor in Mödling, my home town. Council and committee meetings fall on single evenings throughout the year. None of them were in a calendar she could open.

In turn, she wanted to add her own working days. That way I can see when she is around and when she is not. It is the same wish from the other side: to look it up instead of having to ask.

This is why every appointment in moj belongs to someone, and why the week view has a column for each 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 not written down anywhere.

moj is meant to make that work visible first, and then to share it out. When the shopping list is on everyone’s phone, the person who is out anyway does the shopping. A glance at the list before going into the shop replaces the phone call. And when everyone can see the appointments, nobody needs reminding.

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. There is no company behind it, no investors and no advertising. moj started as a side project for my own family. I use it myself every day. The imprint says who runs it in the legal sense. The privacy notice says what is stored and what is not.

I also build two other things, 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 does not work, write to us. On a project this size, your email is read by the person who wrote the code.

What is deliberately missing?

Quite a lot. No budget tracker, no WhatsApp groups, no writing back into somebody else’s calendar, no import from other apps. Each of those limits was a decision. None of them is an oversight. The page what moj cannot do gives each one with its reason. An app that promised everything would be exactly the kind of app I failed with before.