Minneapolis, MN · Issue of September 9, 2026
A decade as an operations manager in logistics before concluding that the hardest supply chain she had ever run was her own kitchen.
I managed operations at a logistics company for ten years — routing, scheduling, the arithmetic of getting a thing from one place to another on time — and then I went on maternity leave and discovered that the hardest supply chain I had ever run was the one between my kitchen and a school gate two miles away. I cover routines, the mental load and household systems, and I do it with the vocabulary of somebody who has genuinely built a process map for bedtime. Three kids. One spreadsheet.
The dentist's address, the school's early-release day, the code for the lockbox and the name of the man who fixed the furnace all live in a scrolling thread nobody can search. We asked twelve households where their information actually is.
Helen Moriarty3 min
Every household runs on information held in one person's head. This is the twelve-page version of that head, in the order that matters — and the argument for spending one Sunday building it.
Helen Moriarty4 min
Everyone agrees the mental load is real and nobody can produce it on paper. So we gave one mother a pocket card and asked her to write down every single thing she noticed about the running of her house for seven days. Here is the list, and here is what her husband's list looked like.
Helen Moriarty3 min
Fourteen households let us look at what they had genuinely used a chatbot for over three months. It was not the things the advertisements show. It was forms, scripts, translation, and one job nobody predicted.
Helen Moriarty3 min