Home. Parents'. Airbnb. Three Inventories, One Account.

I have three places I'm responsible for, and none of them are the same kind of place.

There's the flat in Tokyo where I actually live. There's my parents' house, which is in another country and which I haven't slept in for the better part of a year, but which still holds two shelves of my old university textbooks, a wedding china set my wife refuses to throw out, and the half of the Christmas decorations that don't fit here. And there's the small second flat we rent out on Airbnb — one tatami room, one kitchen, one recurring fight about wine glasses.

These are three inventories. They are not three folders, three tags, or three rooms. They are three different lives.

The "one big list" problem

If you try to track all three in a single shared inventory — the kind a spreadsheet or Sortly or a Notion database hands you by default — three things break almost immediately.

The signal-to-noise ratio collapses. Search "kitchen knife" and you get three results. Which kitchen? You don't know. You have to open all three, read the photos, and guess from the countertop. Multiply that by every duplicate item — pans, towels, spare batteries, IKEA furniture, identical-looking boxes of "random cables" — and the search box, the one feature that actually justifies the inventory, becomes useless.

Sharing turns into a privacy bug. My wife has full access to home. My mum has access to the boxes at her house. The Airbnb cleaner has access to the Airbnb. If those three contexts share one list, then every person you grant access to sees everything. Granting the cleaner permission to count wine glasses shouldn't mean she can see what's in my wardrobe in Tokyo. In a single-list world, it does.

You forget which place you're searching from. You open the app, type "blender", get a hit, and discover ten minutes later it was the Airbnb's blender, not yours. The list lies to you not by being wrong, but by being too inclusive.

These aren't power-user complaints. They're the first three weeks of trying to run more than one place from one app.

What a workspace is, in practice

A workspace is one of those lives. You open the app, you're in one of them at a time, and everything you see — boxes, items, photos, search results — belongs to that one place.

You switch when you mean to switch. The rest of the time, the flat in Tokyo doesn't know the Airbnb exists, and vice versa.

That's the whole idea. There's no clever data trick to explain. The point is that opening "Home" and opening "Parents'" feels like opening two different apps that happen to share a login.

The scene that sold me on building this

Mum calls. It's eight in the evening her time, lunchtime mine.

"Where did you put your old French books? Your cousin's starting uni and she wants the Maupassant."

A year ago this would have been a forty-minute phone call where I'd describe the layout of her own house to her, badly, from memory.

What actually happens now: I open the app, switch to Parents', search Maupassant. One hit. Box 14, the second cupboard in the hallway, third shelf from the top. There's a photo of the spine visible from the box opening.

"Hallway cupboard. Second one from the door. Third shelf."

Total time: about fifteen seconds. I haven't physically been inside that house in eight months. The inventory has.

The Airbnb is its own animal

The Airbnb workspace exists for one reason: I am not the person who uses it day-to-day. The cleaner is. Sometimes a co-host. Once or twice a year, a friend who stays between guests.

So the shape of that inventory is different. It's not "things I own", it's "things that need to be there when a guest arrives". Wine glasses (six). Hand towels (twelve). The specific saucepan the listing photo shows. The Bluetooth speaker the last guest mentioned in their review.

When a cleaner messages me — "we're down to four wine glasses" — I don't have to mentally rummage through a single combined list of everything I own across three countries. I open Airbnb, search "glassware", see that the backup box under the sink has four spares, tell her where they are. Or I see there are no spares, and I order a set on the spot before the next check-in.

That decision needs to happen in under thirty seconds or it doesn't happen at all. A combined inventory doesn't survive that deadline.

Sharing, but per place

Each workspace shares with its own people, and only its own people.

My wife sees everything in Home. She does not see Parents' or the Airbnb, because she has no reason to and we'd both rather keep it that way.

My sister got full access to Parents' last year when my parents started downsizing. She can add boxes, move things, photograph the garage. She cannot see a single item from my apartment or the rental.

The cleaner gets read access to the Airbnb's "consumables" area and nothing else. Not the rest of the Airbnb, not the other two workspaces, not even my email address — just the boxes she needs to check before turnover.

Three workspaces, three completely separate share lists. (We went deeper on the mechanics of sharing — viewers, editors, revoking access — in Sharing Boxes: How Couples and Families Can Inventory Together. This post is about the places; that one's about the people.)

The fourth workspace nobody asks about

The use case I didn't predict, but which turned up in support tickets within a month of launch: the workshop.

A guy who restores old motorcycles wrote in. He has a home. He has a one-car garage three blocks away that he rents purely as a parts locker — maybe two thousand small, near-identical components, bolts and gaskets and brake pads for nine different bikes, which he needs to find from his phone while standing in a different garage talking to a customer.

That locker is a workspace. Different photos, different naming ("M6×20 stainless, qty 40" vs. "winter jumpers"), different person with access (his business partner, not his wife). If your stuff has more than one address, it has more than one inventory.

What it actually buys you

Three workspaces don't make you more organized. Discipline does that, and no app can outsource discipline.

What separate workspaces buy you is the absence of a specific kind of friction: the friction of pretending three lives are one life so the app's data model stays simple. They aren't, and it shouldn't.

You open Home for your home. You open Parents' for your parents'. You open Airbnb when the cleaner messages. They never collide. Search means what it says. Sharing means what it says. The list is the place.

If any of those three lives sounds like yours, the app is on Google Play. Set up the first workspace tonight. Add the second one the next time your mum calls looking for something.