The hardest part of preparedness is that it expires
Everyone who tests Readinity arrives with a half-finished plan from three years ago. The gap isn't knowledge — it's maintenance, and nothing in the category treats it as the main job.
We started building a planner. Six weeks of testing turned it into a maintenance tool, because every household we spoke to had already made a plan once. The water was bought. The documents were scanned. Then nothing was touched again, and the plan quietly stopped being true.
Batteries die in storage. Medication expires. People move out, phone numbers change, a child outgrows the clothes in the go-bag. A plan is a claim about a household, and households drift.
So expiry became a first-class object rather than a reminder feature. Every item in a Readinity plan carries a date and an owner, and the app's honest answer to "are we ready?" is a list of what has drifted since you last looked.
The uncomfortable consequence is that the app has to tell you bad news regularly without becoming noise you mute. Our current rule: one monthly summary, and an interrupt only for things that fail in an emergency — expired medication, a dead torch, a contact number that no longer works.
It also changed what we measure in testing. Not plans created — plans still true at ninety days. That number is much less flattering, and much more useful.