Before my fiance and I set out on our weekly food expedition, we made sure that the shopping list channel on our Discord server is updated.
Every week, we make a list of meals on a channel (appropriately called #meallist), sometimes with links to recipes. So, before our trip to the supermarket, we list all the ingredients in the shopping list channel. The way we used to do this involved us fighting over the same piece of written paper while figuring out what we needed and who was looking for what. Now, with access to the same digital list, we share and conquer the work in the store. Adding items we finished during the week is as simple as opening the application, typing it and clicking on send.
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Discord was created for players to facilitate online play with chat and voice. In recent years, and at an accelerated pace due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform has expanded into a more widespread space, both for socializing and for everyday life. In our particular case, Discord has become an integral part of our home.
Channeling our daily lives more into Discord made sense: we had the application open most of the time, since it was a place where we already passed messages and memes throughout the day. The messaging platform was versatile enough to naturally evolve into an indispensable home management tool.
As someone who needs to-do lists to work, Discord became a way to create a structured organizational system that still allowed for flexibility and customization. New channels mean new lists and each channel can be organized in a different category folder. We have channels for everything from household chores to large and diverse things to buy. After a task is completed, we can simply react with an emoji to indicate that it has been completed.
But it’s not just work – we also use Discord to maintain lists of films we want to watch. We have one dedicated to the photos that one of us took and the other wants a copy, one dedicated exclusively to updates about our cat and another for links that we need to keep in person for later. Discord makes it easy to add new channels, so whenever a new need arises (for example, like my newly discovered “anime to watch” list), we can simply add another channel or category. We communicate in person, of course, but it is useful to write things down immediately, instead of saying it out loud and waiting for the other to remember a grocery item or task to do.
Just as families gravitated to Slack, the workplace chat system for home management, Discord seems to be the only one suited to our most banal needs. Unlike Slack, which deletes messages after a certain point, the free version of Discord comes with unlimited messaging capabilities, allowing us to scroll back and forth to find anything. You can create categories for channels, something that my internal organization fanatic loves. But most importantly, Slack still carries the connotations of work and everything that comes with it; Discord is a tool that we use in our leisure time.
Today, people face a greater threat of burnout than ever, and the pandemic has forced many to work where they play. Discord has become something of a savior for downtime and fun instead of work and the need for productivity. Our home server is actually our only shared server, as we use Discord for different communities focused on our separate hobbies and interests. In a way, we are gamifying our list of household chores, making it less overwhelming than a mountain of chores and supplies to do. Discord allows us to simplify the monotony of domestic work – which in days of pandemic confinement can often seem extremely frightening – and therefore minimizes the lack of communication.
Overall, we still use Discord primarily for the intended functions (ie, chatting with large groups of friends with whom we don’t share a home), but an app without the ambition to help us keep our lives on track has become a part of important how we spend the week. That could mean shopping, choosing our Friday night movie, or just sending updates about where the hot new cat is currently lying. It’s all there.