Another way to manage ongoing tasks using the task board

This Post is posted after an interesting question raise in one of the LinkedIn discussions (see below the Q and the A :))

Anyway, just for you Greg, here is an example.

·         In the above board you can see that the kids decide to write the tasks instead of using sticky notes.

·         They divided their day into three time frames: morning, noon and evening.

·         They assigned ongoing relevant tasks for each time frame.

·         In the daily gathering, they follow those tasks along with other tasks that are not ongoing (and placed in the upper section of the task board which is not shown in this picture).

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Greg Cohen • Avi, I already use a task/schedule board at home for the adult. But curious to hear more on how your children use it. It sounds like a task on your board is "brush teeth". Does your child take the brush teeth card from To Do and move it to In Progress then go to the bathroom to brush teeth and then returns to the board to mark it Done? And then the next day you move it back to the To Do? Is that correct?

And how does time get managed? Since at least my children are always happy to extend their "work day" and stay up late. Yet tasks like brushing teeth must get done at the end of each day.

And are any leisure items, like play, placed on the board?

Thanks,

-greg

Answer :

These are really important issues you are raising. We address most of them in the agile Kids  book.

We need to remember that the agile implementation inside our family is mach simple than in the workplace. There are many ways to visualize the time frame. Some of them is just drawing the line with a time stamp, sometimes we just write it on the tasks. And sometimes we just prepare a list of issues to be dome during a specific time frame (morning, evening and such). Our next post deals exactly with that, but it is only one example. (I will publish it later today or early tomorrow).

What holds a significant value is the visualization. This itself is very helpful with the kids and help them with organization and planning issues. The parents actions will be to take those things into a discussion. The core of the agile kids is the dialog. Once we visualize, we can scope the dialog over the important things during the daily gathering  (in your case it’s the time frame and in other cases there may be something else). We can then  discuss the things and we can make sure our boundaries and our rules are followed and accept.

 At the beginning, the kids did take tasks by task and performed it. It was fun! And it was technical actionso the kids will get use to the idea of “this is my task, I need to perform and I am in control”.  we do suggest we do it with smaller children and in the initial states of implementing the agile into our home. Later on, the ongoing tasks just disappear. They are already in order and do not need special attention any more. Then, other issues raise. Mature agile kids, does not need to move stickies any more, I see they usually do it just before the daily gathering.

Any way, thanks for a great comment .I will take your comment into my blog as well 

Shirly