Naughty or nice? Lendogram helps you lend – and return! – your holiday haul

By Valery Navarrete

“Can I borrow that when you’re done with it?”
“Call me anytime you need to use it . . . no sense both of us owning one of these!”

If you’re anything like me, these are sentences you found yourself expressing regularly over the last couple of weeks of watching friends and family exchange holiday gifts.

Whether it’s the latest “must read” paperback, or that hands-free drill you can’t wait to use on your mud room renovation, our respective inventories of stuff tend to grow faster than normal at this time of year.

All this generosity can be quite lovely, and provided you’re keen to read that paperback your mother-in-law gave you, then a heart-felt “thank you” is issued and, for some folks, it all ends there.

If you’re like me and the other people who saw themselves in the sentences at the beginning of this review, however, adding a new item to your personal “library of stuff” is just the beginning.

Then the sharing begins.

I remember one year I left my friend Nancy’s place after a gift exchange among friends with not only plans to borrow a book one friend had gifted another, but also a book Nancy lent me from her collection that had come up while we were talking about favourite reads from the last year.

Generosity begetting generosity is totally my vibe. Not only because sharing just kind of . . . feels nice, but also because I believe deeply that one of the best things we can do for the well-being of people, our planet and ourselves, is to stop having and disposing of so much stuff.

There’s just one problem. Remember that book I borrowed from Nancy? Well, years’ later, it’s still sitting on MY bookshelf.

I’ll read it one day. And return it eventually, but like many of the things I borrow and lend, for the time being it’s lost in “out on loan” land until one of us makes a move around its return.

Enter Lendogram, a new app designed to help us lenders and borrowers of the world keep track of our stuff.

Within a few minutes of downloading it and reviewing the “Getting Started” section under the “Help” menu, I had entered not just the famed book but also the set of travel adaptor plugs I’d loaned Nancy as she was heading out on a trip overseas last fall.

The best part? The App will send Nancy a reminder in January (the due date I selected) to get the travel plugs back to me, and me a reminder in a year (she says there’s no rush!) to finally return Nancy’s book to her collection.

So, not only does Lendogram help us keep track of what we share, it prompts us to return it. Because sharing may get you on the nice list, but failing to return what you borrow is potential naughty territory!