In May, my girlfriend and I start preparing to move to the UK. Moving out is challenging, especially when moving to another side of the world. It involves numerous tasks. One day, my girlfriend complained about my working style. It lacked transparency – she could not understand my progress or our plan.
“You have been a project manager / Scrum Master for a long time,” said my friend during our video chat, “It’s time for you to apply your PM skills in this life project.” Indeed, I tried many skills and techniques while I was working at the office. Life is also one of the “products”. Those techniques might work in managing my life.
If my life is a product, my current product goal is to have a safe trip to the UK. My work items should be related to this goal. Afterwards, I picked up my sticky notes and brain-wrote all the work items. I logically grouped them into 4 categories – Personal, Work, Health and Travel, as suggested by Noah Kagan’s Million Dollar Weekend.
I set the Sprint goal every Monday. Then I discuss with my girlfriend what and how I’ll achieve this. Next, I work just like the typical Agile product development process. Pick a card, try my best to complete it, and move it to the “Done” column. Meanwhile, my girlfriend can do her work by referring to my Kanban.
As a single Product Owner and Developer of my product, I try not to make the work process overcomplicated. Every morning, I check the Kanban and my Google Calendar, thinking of how I should move towards my Sprint Goal. On Sunday, I review the “Done” cards, “Aha! I’ve done so much this week. Should I get more done? Or have I bitten off more than I can chew? Were there any impediments?”
It’s been 4 weeks since I started this working process. The transparency improves a lot. As all the cards are on the Kanban, my girlfriend and I can easily keep the progress on track. We sometimes identify if something is missing. This also releases my memory as I don’t have to memorize everything or be worried about missing. The greatest reward is, of course, that I have been receiving fewer complaints from my girlfriend.
By the time this article is published, we should have already finished the packing process and be looking forward to our travel to Japan. Applying system thinking and Agile thinking is a useful way to manage my life. Life is just another system. If we can use these project management tools in our work, there’s no reason we can’t use them in our daily lives.
A perfect way doesn’t exist. Things become more complex when you’re settling in with your couple. To further improve our quality of life, I plan to further turn the product from “My life” to “Our life” and transiting “My Kanban” to “Our Kanban”. At that stage, we can create our common goal instead of only caring about ourselves. That’s where the trust builds.