Agile software development helps a team focus on the most important tasks to accomplish a shared goal. Jason and I both use the methodology at work and have adapted the process to our daily living. We’ve become much more productive at both work and home and have used the process outlined below to plan our wedding, two moves, and career goals!

We are the “business owners” who decide what the most important tasks are to accomplish at any given moment. The tasks are prioritized in order of importance, which is based on our values and short to mid-term goals. Each weekend “sprint” we pick a theme, or a set of “user stories” (e.g. unpack kitchen, improve financial process, prep food for the week, plan a camping trip).

This has been a huge break through for us! We’ve traveled a lot the past few years and are always involved in community and personal projects. We used to feel buried and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things we had to do, wanted to do, side projects, and long term planning that any family struggles with. The concept of a “backlog” of tasks itself was liberating. We know that what we want to accomplish is accounted for and will be addressed when it becomes important to handle. It moves these concerns off the “main thread” and allows us to focus on the present.

Technology

We use OmniFocus (family license) and have a copy on our laptops (both work & home) and on our iPads so that we can access the task list from the most convenient interface. We keep the database synced over my mobile me account (Preferences -> Sync -> Mobile Me). The backlog is the Library, user stories are tracked as projects, and tasks are added under a project.

The major challenge with our current model is that we have one database that covers all of our tasks. This gets a bit cluttered. Long term we plan to separate it into three different databases: mine, his, and shared. That way we’ll always have tasks that we need to do independently at hand and can plan for family tasks while at home. We’d also like to use email to add tasks and publish timely tasks to our shared Google calendar.

Have you applied any or all of these principles to your life? What did you find most effective? What tools do you use? Do you have suggestions on how we could refine the process?