Agile At Home
My wife and I use Agile to survive and thrive at home.
We have 4 lovely and lively children between 7 and 13 years old, and we both have busy jobs in Tech.
We have adapted Agile to help us keep our lives organised, but also to help us focus on what is important, including how we adapt and re-prioritise as our children grow and develop.
This is how we do it.
Form and Zen
We are great believers that everything needs to include Form and Zen.
Form is the HOW. The process, tools and artefacts used manage, process and deliver things.
Zen is the WHY. The purpose, values and motivation that help you define and prioritise WHAT you want to do.
Agile defines our Form, enabling us to manage the whirlwind of family life, while making sure we dedicate regular time to the Zen.
Our key inspiration for the Zen is the Patrick Lencioni book, The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family.
This helps us define the Why and the What in a simple and effective way.
An honourable mention also needs to go to the Four Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals. Whilst it is a business book, it describes how to deliver your goals whilst managing the day to day. Something which is a key challenge for any family.
Tools and Artefacts
We started with a lot more physical items such as a family diary and a planning wall using post-its.
This was great to start with, particularly is it really involved the children. However it was hard getting these to scale, plus also limited our options when we weren’t both at home.
We have made the shift to doing everything online. Google Drive and Trello make this very easy.
Tools
- Google Calendar — share our calendars, including children.
- Trello — track all the work! I use this for work and personal boards, as well as family ones.
- Google Slides — mainly used for the ‘The Family playbook’ (see below)
- Google Sheets — used for Budgets, Christmas shopping lists etc
- Google Drive — used as shared document archive (including Scans)
- Google Docs — i.e. templates for letters to school
- Google Hangouts — for meeting virtually when we’re in different places.
Artefacts
The Family Playbook
This captures our family objectives in a 7 slide document. Built using the methods described in The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family. Once a quarter we review and create defining (i.e. strategic) objectives for the family, based on what is most important for the next 3 months. This includes things like school applications, exams, goals etc.
Actions Board (Trello)
This captures all our ongoing actions, categorised into the following columns- New, This Week, Today, Waiting/Chase, Done, Next Week/Someday/Maybe, Templates, Reference
Our board is called the Planing Wole, which is the name our children gave it when they were little.
Actions Board Done
Instead of archiving cards, we regularly move done cards to a different wall. Using a column for each week, this allows us to easily track when things were done.
Backlog / Upcoming Board (Trello).
This is based on the GTD forward file, It includes upcoming stuff we need to do, organised into monthly columns.
Budget
Spreadsheets tracking our monthly budget (for recurring expenses) and cashflow plan for upcoming projects (such as house renovations)
Templates.
Covering everything from absence letters (for when the children are off school sick) to thank you letters.
Rituals
Weekly
We have two meetings a week to review.
- Face to face at the weekend
- At lunchtime during the week over Google Hangouts.
We originally had one face to face meeting but found that the meeting needed ~2 hours and became an energy suck. Splitting it down made it a lot easier to do.
During the meeting we cycle through 3 main items
- Calendar review. Where we sync on the next 2 weeks, such as who is where, picking up children etc, as well any extra stuff such as birthday parties, work trips etc.
- Trello Board Review. Where we review the active board, including progress on existing actions, as well as mining and triaging new actions.
- Family Playbook review.
We review the defining and standard objectives, giving them a RYG score and identifying the next step on each one.
Quarterly
Strategic planning session to update the family playbook. This includes agreeing our family goals for the next quarter, family holidays etc.
Annually
Once a year, in the quiet period between Christmas and New Year, we talk about what has happened over the year and what we would like to do next year. In effect we are doing a retrospective and a goal planning session, but we don’t tell the kids that :-)
As a family we list
- all the good things that happened in the past year,
- what we would like to do more of,
- and what we would like to do less of.
We all then pick one goal for the next year. I capture this into a mindmap and we keep that for the next year.
