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Best Digital Wall Calendars

We evaluated the Skylight Calendar, the Hearth Display, and more to see if they could help us keep our busy schedules straight

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the Skylight Calendar Max, the 24" Cozyla Calendar+ 2, Amazon Echo Show 21, the Hearth Display Digital Wall Calendars.
Clockwise from top left: The Skylight Calendar Max, Cozyla Calendar Plus 2, Amazon Echo Show 21, and Hearth Display each offer different benefits.
Photos: Angela Lashbrook/Consumer Reports

Life is busier than ever. Kids engage in more extracurricular activities than they did 20 years ago, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Research shows that moms spend as much time engaging in child care activities as they did decades ago, despite being more likely to have jobs than they have in years past. And regardless of whether you’re a parent or not, your schedule may have gotten a bit more complicated in the past few years: White-collar workers averaged 10 meetings a week in 2023, up from 8 meetings in 2021, according to research published in Harvard Business Review.

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So if you’re having trouble managing, you’re not alone. A good calendar can help, but as helpful as a calendar app on your phone or computer can be, it’s not front and center for the whole family. Likewise, a paper calendar on the wall can help everyone keep track of dates, but it requires that someone remember to transfer digital events to a poster on a wall—not the worst thing in the world, but it requires some degree of discipline, which not everyone will have.

Digital wall calendars aim to make family schedule-planning easier. They often connect to a companion app but can also be controlled via a large, wall-mounted screen, and in theory, they make it so that everyone in the family can easily see everyone else’s schedule. But at several hundred dollars or more for each, it’s a considerable investment for a product that, primarily, does one thing. 

I tried four wall calendars to find out whether any of them could help my husband and me keep our calendars aligned. I ended up falling for one, but as I discovered during the reporting of this story, keeping your digital calendar in the right spot is crucial to its success. If it’s tucked away in the office, where I did most of my testing, its usefulness is limited; you’ll likely want to install it somewhere the entire family congregates in the morning, which in my experience tends to be around the kitchen area. 

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Angela Lashbrook

Angela Lashbrook is a senior multimedia content creator at Consumer Reports. She has been with CR since 2021 and covers a wide range of topics, but she is particularly interested in anything health- or parenting-related. She lives with her husband, their son, and her dog, a Libra named Gordo.