After When You Care: a tool for the administrative layer of caring

What When You Care names

When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others (Gallery Books, 2024) treats care work with the seriousness usually reserved for paid labour.

• Care is real labour. Not just love made visible. Strauss argues that treating care as something separate from labour is what allows it to be systematically undervalued.
• The undervaluation is structural. Across paid and unpaid care, the pattern repeats: care is essential, underpaid, and culturally taken for granted.
• The dignity argument. The case for elevating care as a category that deserves cultural respect, professional standing, and policy support.
• Presence takes bandwidth. Caring well, at the level of attention and patience the work actually demands, requires the bandwidth that admin-overflow steadily eats.

What Hermo handles

Hermo handles the administrative layer of parent-led caring. It is built for the school-age-kids household pattern; many of its capabilities transfer to other caring contexts, but the product has not been built to specialise in them.

• Automatic extraction from email. The school, the medical practice, the camp, the council, the swimming-lessons company. Dates and tasks land on a shared calendar without anyone copy-pasting.
• Familypedia. Household facts in a knowledge base both partners can query from WhatsApp. NHS numbers, school references, medical information, policy details. The mental retrieval that constantly interrupts the carer goes away.
• Watchers. Half-term camps, World Book Day, phonics books due Thursday. The proactive layer that catches things before they slip. The weekend watcher surfaces three local options on Friday.
• WhatsApp as the interface. Voice notes, photos of paper letters, forwarded messages. Capture happens at the moment of intent, including during a caring activity where opening a separate app is not realistic.

A Saturday morning through Hermo

It’s 9am Saturday. Joana is making breakfast for her daughter and texting her father, who’s been having a stretch of medical appointments. Carlos is on call for work. The day has no shape. By 11am, it usually doesn’t.

In a household running through Hermo, the weekend watcher pinged WhatsApp the previous afternoon with three local options. Joana picked one in two minutes between other things. Saturday morning has a plan that Joana didn’t have to invent under-resourced. The bandwidth she would have spent researching, deciding, and feeling guilty about not researching is bandwidth she has for her father’s appointments, for being present with her daughter, for both.

The administrative layer of caring is the one Hermo handles. The presence is yours.

Other books that put words to it

• Matrescence, Lucy Jones. Care work, identity, and the developmental shift into motherhood.
• Fair Play, Eve Rodsky. The renegotiation of household-care ownership between two partners.

Frequently asked questions

Is Hermo for eldercare?

Hermo is built primarily for parents managing households with school-age kids. The underlying pattern (email-and-information overload, household facts trapped in one head, things that catch families out) recurs in eldercare, and the product’s capabilities (email extraction, Familypedia, Watchers) can hold eldercare-related information. We are honest that the product has not been specialised for eldercare and that some workflows are better suited to childcare than to coordinating care for an ageing parent.

Is Hermo affiliated with Elissa Strauss?

No. Hermo is an independent product. We reference When You Care because the parents Hermo is built for recognise their own experience in it.

Will Hermo make caring feel less heavy?

Indirectly. The relational, presence, and emotional layers of caring are not what Hermo touches. What Hermo can do is reduce the administrative drag (the appointment confirmations, the school emails, the household-facts retrieval, the planning ahead) so the bandwidth available for the relational work goes up.

Can both parents share the caring admin?

Yes, and it’s the design point. Hermo lives in WhatsApp, both partners use it, both can query Familypedia, both see the same calendar and the same task list. The retrieval bottleneck through one parent goes away.

Who in our household sets Hermo up?

Whoever currently has the most household context. Hermo connects to one Gmail inbox to read household email, and both partners use WhatsApp to talk to it.

What does Hermo need access to?

A Gmail connection through Google-audited OAuth, and WhatsApp for the conversation interface. Hermo doesn't send email, reply to anyone, or delete anything from your inbox. Hermo doesn't read your WhatsApp chats.