Repeating appointments and round trips

The first week of a shared schedule is mostly typing. Somebody sits with the letters and enters everything, and it feels like a lot because it is. What matters is whether week six is also mostly typing. In Marlow it isn’t, if you use two things when you enter the appointment: repeat, and a ride back.

Take a parent on dialysis. Three mornings a week, same center, same chair, for the foreseeable future. Somebody at the door at seven and somebody back at the center around eleven, every time. Add physical therapy twice a week, a monthly blood draw and the eye clinic every six weeks, and entered one at a time that’s hundreds of entries, each with the same address typed again and two rides somebody has to remember to add.

Enter it once and say it repeats

Add dialysis as one appointment. Give it the center, the time, and say it needs a ride. Then say it repeats, and which days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That’s the entry. Every occurrence shows up on the schedule with the same place and the same ride, in the day, week and month views and in the plain list.

Physical therapy on Tuesdays and Thursdays is the same: one entry, on the schedule for the whole run. If you’ve got the clinic’s letter in your hand, the Plus plan lets you take a photo of it and Marlow fills in the date, time and place for you to check over.

Put a standing driver on it

Each occurrence of a repeating appointment still shows whether it has a driver. If nobody’s on it, every one of them is orange until somebody takes it, and the circle gets asked about each one as it comes up. For dialysis that’s three asks a week, forever, about a ride that’s been the same person since March.

So if the same person always does it, put them on the series as the standing driver when you set it up. Every occurrence opens with their name already on it and the circle isn’t asked. Monday can be your brother’s all winter without anyone tapping anything on a Monday.

A standing driver is a default, not a sentence. If your brother is away one week, he opens that ride and tells Marlow he can’t make it. That one ride goes back to needing a driver, where everyone can see it, and the rest of the series stays his.

Move one week, and only that week moves

Clinics call. The Wednesday session moves to Thursday because the center is short staffed, or physical therapy is off the week your mother has a cold. Open that one occurrence and change it. Only that one changes. The rest of the series stays where it was.

Marlow works out when your mother needs to be ready from the length of the drive, and it works that out again when the appointment moves, so her screen shows the new time without you doing anything more. If the center cancels a session outright, cancel that one, and whoever had the ride hears about it.

Say it needs a ride back

When you add the appointment, say it needs a ride back as well. In Marlow that’s still one appointment, with two legs, and each leg is taken on its own. The ride home is a ride somebody has to take, not a note on the ride there.

The timing is the reason. The drop-off is tied to when the appointment starts and the pickup to when it ends. On your mother’s screen the ride home counts down to the end of the appointment, not to the moment the driver has to leave, so nobody’s left waiting half an hour in a corridor. And the person is often different. Seven in the morning and eleven in the morning are two different asks.

The shape a settled circle takes

After a month, most circles look something like this.

The sibling with the early start does the morning drop on the way to work: seven at the door, center by half past, the same every time. The neighbor who’s home during the day does the pickup at eleven. Different person, different ride, and neither of them has to talk to the other about it, because the schedule shows both legs and who has each.

The sibling out of state takes nothing and sees everything. When Friday’s ride back is still orange on Wednesday, she’s the one who calls the cousin.

What makes this work is that the ride back is visible as its own gap. When “both ways” is a note, the morning driver is assumed to be doing the pickup, and the day that assumption fails is the day the center calls you at eleven thirty. How to split driving between siblings is the fairness side of the same thing.

What these two don’t do

A ride you take lands in your own Google, Apple or Outlook calendar, with a warning if it clashes with something already there, but nothing flows the other way. The series lives in Marlow, not in your work calendar. Marlow doesn’t book an outside ride when nobody in the circle can take a leg; that isn’t built yet, and when it exists it’ll be one flat fee for the round trip on every plan. And it doesn’t show the driver on a map. The ride back is a name and a time, which is what your mother needs and less than some families want.

If your parent has one appointment a month and one driver, none of this matters much. If she has three a week and the ride home keeps falling through, these are the two things to set up first. How it works has the whole loop, and setting up your circle is the ten-minute version.