It started mostly out of desperation. Trying to manage five homeschooled kids for a few days while my wife took a well-deserved vacation to visit some of her extended family put me into survival mode. Having Dad in charge threw off everyone’s rhythm, and I was either going to spend several days hearing variations of “That’s not how Mom does it!” or find a way to get everyone on board with temporarily doing things my way.
I live by the Agile methodology in my professional life. Thanks to the Bullet Journal method, I’ve also adopted it for my personal and hobby work, with fantastic results. I figured I’d give that a shot. It couldn’t go worse than what I was doing. The first day, after breakfast and before school started, we had our first team standup.
It worked! Mostly, at least. Everyone was more or less on the same page, and I got a lot less arguing about doing things differently. This spurred a thought of trying to incorporate more Agile practices into our family life, but I wasn’t quite sure where to start. Serendipitously, we started going through David Starr’s Agile Families course on Pluralsight just a couple of weeks later!
With (mildly skeptical) buyin from The Committee, we held our first family meeting, a combined retro/planning session, at the beginning of December. It took a couple of weeks for everyone to really get into the swing of things, but it’s quickly become one of the cornerstones to the start of our week.
For the retrospective part, we review the family’s collective One Big Thing goal for the week, and any personal goals which have been completed. Everyone gets cheers for a completed personal goal. Then we move into a timeline retrospective where everyone writes both the high and low points of their week on post-it notes and sticks them on one of the large walls in the dining room. The kids love this part. In particular, they love taking turns talking through the timeline when everyone is done writing.
One of the highlights for me has been seeing how the different children see different things in their largely similar weeks.
After retro, we take a short break to pass out allowances. I’m really hoping that teaching the kids to manage money starting from an early age will serve them well later in life.
Once the money has been sorted, we move onto the planning part of the week. This is where we pick a new family goal for the week, people can select an individual goal or two (there is currently a WIP limit of two personal goals per person), and we go over the calendar of events for the week. No one is driving yet, but when sports seasons start up, things are going to get pretty busy with people needing to be all over the city during the week!
One hard lesson that the kids have been learning is that rolling over tasks isn’t fun. That WIP limit is there to encourage people to finish what they start. Also, rolling over the family goal sometimes means not getting to add a “fun” new goal like bathing the cats, because the current goal of cleaning the playroom wasn’t accomplished.
We’re now three months in. So far, so good! At some point we may change up the retrospective to something else, but for now, with the team ages ranging from thirteen to five, it works well. The biggest goal with this thing is to help the kids develop a framework for managing their own tasks and responsibilities. That’s something that I feel is lacking in most high-school curriculums, and is even overlooked by a lot of otherwise excellent homeschool plans. Stay tuned for future updates!