Seven Custom Lists I Use on My Hearth Display (and How to Make Them)

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When I was in college, I bought one of those grocery list notepads that used to be popular. The notepad felt genius: it was a pre-populated list for the most common groceries any responsible adult might need, along with blank spaces for items I wanted to add. A grocery list notepad was an improvement from a scrap sheet of paper or relying on memory, but I eventually ditched the notepad and switched to using the Reminders app on my iPhone. And I used the Reminders app to manage my grocery list for years, until I recently deleted my Reminders list and started using the new Grocery list with my Hearth Display.

The Hearth Display is a family management tool most commonly used for its shared calendar, family routines, and to-do lists. (If you're unfamiliar with the Hearth Display, you should read my review about how it improved how I manage my family.) In October, Hearth unrolled its custom "Lists" feature, allowing families to create customizable lists outside of its basic To-Do.

How to create custom Hearth lists

The Hearth app begins on the Calendar view by default. To create custom lists for your Hearth, go to Lists > Plus sign, and then choose the type of list you want to create: To-do, Grocery, or Custom. You can create list items from there, assign them to specific users, and add notes, if needed. (I often add addresses and product URLs in the Notes field, for example.) If you want your list available on your Hearth—that is, visible on the Hearth Display and not just in your Hearth app—toggle the "Show on Display" option when you create your list.

Once you create a List and check off tasks, you should keep those completed tasks in the "Done" field if you plan to reuse them again. For example, my Grocery list is often going to be the same, so I only permanently delete items that I don't plan to buy often. And the "Done" list is collapsible, so I hide it to keep the list from being cluttered.

Remember to use privacy settings for your Lists

I use privacy settings for clarity more than protecting sensitive information: Managing multiple lists can be confusing for kids, so I only show three lists on my Hearth Display (To-Do, Groceries, and Shopping List) and limit visibility for the rest. Still, you can imagine lists that you might want to hide, like gift lists, tasks for a surprise party, or adults-only planning for you and your partner.

New lists are private by default—meaning that they're only visible to you on your Hearth app—but if you want a list to show up on the Display for others to use, be sure to toggle the "Show on Display" option on the "New List" creation menu (Lists > Plus sign > List > "Show on Display").

To change the privacy settings on an existing list, select the list on your app, select the three-dot menu option on the top-right corner, open "Settings," and toggle the same "Show on Display" option. If your shared lists don't appear on your Hearth Display after a few seconds, refresh your display by dragging down from the top of your Hearth screen.

Nine Hearth lists I use with my family

You can make an unlimited amount of lists on a Hearth Display, but I only use nine: two default lists and seven custom ones.

• To-Do (default)

• Groceries (default)

• Shopping List (custom)

• Watch List (custom)

• Back to School (custom)

• Family Travel (custom)

• Home Maintenance (custom)

• Spring Cleaning (custom)

• Christmas Traditions (custom)

My goal is to create custom lists for recurring habits or events, and to spend less time thinking about each of them in the future. The Shopping List and Watch List are updated on an ongoing basis—whenever the kids mention non-grocery items they need for school, for example, or we see a trailer of a movie that comes out later in the year. The rest of the lists are seasonal:

The Back to School list covers school-related tasks that should be done every fall, aside from the obvious school shopping: things like updating emergency contacts, scheduling physical exams, adding dates from the school calendar, donating old clothes, revising our morning routine, planning extracurriculars, and discussing expectations for the school year.

I use the Family Travel list for trips, and it includes things like scheduling a mail freeze, confirming pet sitters, planning vaccinations for international travel, printing copies of travel documents, scheduling email auto-replies, emptying perishables from the refrigerator, and taking out the trash.

Home Maintenance and Spring Cleaning lists are for the kinds of small tasks that we want to handle ourselves on an annual basis, but it's best used for assigning tasks than remembering them. Coming up with spring cleaning tasks is pretty straightforward—you likely have your own priorities or can find a million cleaning lists on the internet. Instead, I focus on assignments so that responsibilities are clear and tasks are distributed in a way that makes sense. Each Hearth list item is assigned an owner.

I created the Christmas Traditions list this year when I was trying to come up with winter plans. You could obviously add this kind of list for any holiday important to you, and I might change it to "Family Traditions" rather than a specific holiday, but for now it includes activities like the New York holiday markets, ice skating, and the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.

How much does a Hearth Display cost?

The list price for a Hearth Display is $699. It's often discounted to $599 (as it is now, at the time of writing). The lowest price I've seen for a Hearth is $499 during their Cyber Week sale, so you can always wait until that time of year. Otherwise, plan to spend $600 for one. Be aware that you also need a subscription to use its full functionality, though: A Hearth Display subscription costs $9 per month or $86 annually. Without a subscription, a Hearth Display is limited to its basic calendar functionality, so I recommend being ready to pay for the membership.

Is a Hearth Display worth it?

Individual needs and budgets obviously vary, but the Hearth Display replaced my whiteboard calendars, chore charts, grocery list, and to-do lists, and it's become hard for me to imagine managing my family without it. I'm happy with my Hearth and what it brings to my family: better communication, organization, and accountability than we ever had before. For a fuller explanation of the Hearth and what it's like to use one, read my full review.