The Bar Mitzvah Planning System I Wanted Didn’t Exist, So I Built It
Have I mentioned that my brain is full of a lot at any given time? I’m also a night owl, and there is a stretch somewhere between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. when the house gets eerily quiet and my brain decides this is the ideal time to become extremely productive. It’s when I write, design and solve problems, and also when one idea has a tendency to turn into 15 others.
One night, I was working through a completely unrelated visualization for an email for work when I started thinking about my son’s bar mitzvah. There were all these different pieces I was trying to keep track of before he gets home, scattered across my brain and various places I’d put them so I wouldn’t forget them.
Somewhere in the middle of working on something else, I started wondering why I was doing it this way.
There had to be a better way to organize all of it.
We’ve Used the Existing Systems
This isn’t our first time doing this. For Child #1, we used Paperless Post. Her bat mitzvah was during COVID, so almost nothing about that experience was particularly normal.
For Child #2, we used RSVPify, and it worked well.
Now we’re at Child #3, so I started looking again at RSVPify, Greenvelope and some of the other systems available. They all do what they’re designed to do. The problem was that I kept wanting things to work a little differently.
I wanted something that worked the way my brain works.
More importantly, I wanted one place where our whole family could see what was happening instead of having the planning live in spreadsheets, emails, invitations, notes and whatever happened to still be stored in my head.
My head is not a reliable family database.
I Wanted a Command Center
I’ve been calling it, at least in my head, the Simcha/Mitzvah Command Center.
What started as an RSVP system quickly became something bigger. I wanted the guest side and the planning side connected. I wanted to know what needed to be done, what had already been done, what we were spending, what meals we were serving and who was responsible for what.
I wanted information we collected from guests to actually connect to the planning we were doing for them.
If someone told us they had a dietary restriction, I didn’t want that information sitting somewhere in an RSVP export while I was making menu decisions somewhere else. If people were coming from out of town, I wanted the information they needed connected to the rest of their experience.
Mostly, I wanted to take the large collection of things I was carrying around in my head and put them somewhere everyone else could see them too.
Families Aren’t Organized Around a “Lead Parent”
One seemingly small thing kept bothering me about a lot of systems: the assumption that there is one lead parent.
A lot of databases, school systems and event platforms are still designed around the idea that one parent gets the information and manages everything from there. Ari wrote about this years ago in his piece about the “lead parent” and the persistence of a 1950s parent culture.
We’ve also used Google tools in our own family specifically because information shouldn’t have to live with only one person.
I didn’t want to reproduce that problem in something I was building.
If I’m inviting a child from my son’s class, I want to be able to communicate with the adults responsible for that child without pretending I’m inviting the entire household. I also don’t want the system to assume that Mom is automatically the point person. Or Dad.
It could be a mother, father, stepmother, stepfather, grandparent or someone else entirely. Sometimes two adults need the information.
That sounds like a tiny database decision, but it really isn’t. Technology encodes assumptions about how people live, often in ways we don’t notice until the technology makes us work around them.
If I was building this myself, I didn’t want mine to make that assumption.
This Is Where My Background Gets Weirdly Useful
I’ve been creating websites for about 31 years, starting not that long after my own bat mitzvah. I also have a master’s and doctorate in visual and communication design.
I tend to think in numbers and data, but also in hierarchy, spacing and structure. When I’m looking at information, I’m thinking about the story it tells and how someone is going to move through it. In my brain, the research-and-math side and the design side have never really been separate.
This project uses all of that.
But the really interesting part is that building something like this is very different now than it would have been even a few years ago.
You don’t need 31 years of experience creating websites to build something useful for yourself anymore.
AI Changed the Barrier to Building
I could have coded this system without AI. It just would have taken me much longer.
Now I can explain what I’m trying to accomplish, work through the logic and have AI help with pieces of the code. I can set something going, head downstairs for dinner and come back to work that has moved forward while I was gone.
That is genuinely remarkable.
It also isn’t magic.
AI can help me build much faster, but I still have to know what I’m trying to build. It isn’t going to spontaneously decide that the “lead parent” model bothers me or think through how I want a family to move through an RSVP. I have to understand the relationships between all of those pieces, recognize when what it gives me doesn’t make sense and keep pushing it toward the system I actually want.
And it certainly doesn’t reliably know when it has done something stupid.
That’s still my job.
For me, AI is taking over some of the work I used to have to do manually. That leaves me more time for the part I actually find interesting: figuring out what the system should do.
The System Keeps Growing
This started as an RSVP system.
Then I wanted planning tasks and a budget. Then vendors, schedules and menus. I wanted a way to track dietary needs and hotel information for people coming from out of town. I wanted to keep communication connected to the people receiving it.
Eventually I looked up and realized that the thing I had imagined as an RSVP page had become something much bigger.
Which, if you know me, is probably not surprising.
I see a problem and my brain immediately starts thinking about all the different ways it could be solved. Sometimes that’s incredibly useful.
Sometimes it is why I’m awake at 1:30 in the morning adding another feature.
The Real Test Comes Next
Right now, this is a very large-scale experiment.
I don’t know that I’ve gotten it right.
Building something that works technically isn’t the same as building something that actually makes life easier. The real test will be whether our family uses it, whether guests find it intuitive and whether it actually reduces the number of places we’re keeping information.
Does it make the months leading up to the bar mitzvah easier?
Does it let other people in the family know what’s happening without asking me?
Does it prevent information from disappearing into one person’s inbox or brain?
And, sometime in November, will I discover that I have built an elaborate planning system while the one piece of information I desperately need is still written on a Post-it note somewhere?
Entirely possible.
I’m Already Thinking About What Comes After
We still have another bat mitzvah in about two and a half years. Ari turns 50 in January, so maybe parts of this will get tested on a completely different kind of celebration before then.
And somewhere in the back of my mind is the family command center I’ve been thinking about for years.
Because the underlying problem isn’t really specific to a bar mitzvah.
Families manage enormous amounts of information: schedules, meals, tasks, school information, travel, medical appointments, forms, carpools, events and the endless question of who is doing what and when.
We’ve gotten very good at solving each individual problem with another app, calendar, spreadsheet, text thread or shared document. What we haven’t necessarily done is design the whole thing around the family using it.
I’m curious about what happens if we start there instead.
For now, though, I have a bar mitzvah to plan.
And apparently I built myself a command center.
