Vacation Mode: Pause Chores and Put Them Up for Grabs
A weekend trip, a school event, or a few days with family can take one member out of the household routine. Sometimes several people are away at once. Their chores should not follow them on the trip, and they should not come home to a list of missed work they had no chance to do.
Xtra Hands vacation mode lets you choose who is away and for which dates. Their chores pause during that time and resume afterward. If something still needs doing at home, turn on Up for grabs while they're away so an available household member can take it on.
Why we built the handoff
Simply hiding a chore solves one problem but can create another: the dog still needs feeding, the bins still need moving, and a parent may not want to rebuild the schedule for a short absence. Up for grabs gives eligible chores a temporary place on the lists of members who are home. It keeps the away member's record fair while leaving the household a way to get the work done.
These are optional opportunities for the members at home, shown in their own Up for grabs section rather than mixed into their required chores. If nobody picks one up, it does not count as a missed chore for the member on vacation.
Set a vacation for one member or several
On the parent side of the app, open Manage, then Vacations.
Tap Add a vacation. Give it an optional name, such as Weekend trip.
Choose the Start date and End date.
Under Who's away, select every member who will be out.
Turn on Up for grabs while they're away if other members should be able to pick up eligible chores. Leave it off when you only want those chores paused.
Tap Create vacation.
The switch is optional and starts off. Whether it is on or off, members marked away are not assigned chores for those dates, and their time away is not treated as missed work.
What members at home see
When Up for grabs is on and an eligible chore needs coverage, available members see it in a separate section of their home screen. Someone can complete it while the original member is away. It is not added to the helper's ordinary "chores left" count just because it is available.
For example, if Finn is away for the weekend and his scheduled chore is to feed the dog, another available member can pick it up. Finn is not marked as having missed it. When the vacation ends, his regular chore schedule resumes.
Coverage is for eligible chores, not a blanket reassignment of every possible payout arrangement. When a chore is assigned to multiple members with Individual payout, the available assigned members keep their own copies; it is not opened to the whole household.
Let people be away without losing the routine
A vacation should be a break, not a backlog. Set the dates once, let available members help where they can, and let the usual assignments pick back up when everyone is home.
