Recently, I took the decision to have a career break. My plan is to spend time feeding my passions and to have more time for/with my family.

A couple of years ago, I discovered Agile software development methodology and it quickly became one of my passions. I decided to improve my agile knowledge and tried to solve my daily “challenges” with an agile mindset.

As, we started a cost reduction plan at home we partially cut into our cleaning fees. Who would need a house cleaner if I was going to be more present at home? I was expected to take care of daily home support.

Then, to avoid this, I started wondering:

How would I be able to avoid being our full-time housekeeper?

Would it be possible to build a self-organized family culture at home to cope with the cleaning?

May I give a try to the Agile Household?

Here comes the agile family team!

1. I asked my oldest son to build Self-organized family weekly task dashboarda cardboard dashboard: a table containing typical family tasks. In the first column, he listed all the tasks ; as the first row, we listed the days of the week.
2. Each family member got 20 labels with their name on it (each of us has a different label color)
3. We stuck the dashboard and the labels to the wall (the most visible one)
4. Then, we set up some family agreements:

• When someone finishes a task, he’s allowed to stick his label on the dashboard.
• At the end of the week, 10 labels give a Pokemon card (this works well on the family’s little ones…)
• We do not enforce anyone to do anything.

We are now in our second month with the self-organized family dashboard… it took some time and patience to adopt it but I can say that is working incredible well.

• It gives a high visibility to all the tasks at home, and to who does what. The first week most of the labels were mine and my husband was hardly having 5. I can tell you that he felt very embarrassed when at the end-of-the-week review. He is smart (that is why I love him), so his reaction was to collaborate more at home.
• It empowers kids to help us at home, they are all willing to stick their labels. Some mornings they get up and lay the breakfast table before we are even out of the bed!

I am looking forward hearing from your family agile dashboard experience!