Start imperfectly.
After his high school graduation, my son just laid down on the couch watching anime for 5 weeks. That’s when he approached me to help him design a new routine where chores, pleasure, and rest would fit.
First draft: the Scrum Table
My son dislikes Trello so we used the tools we had available at that moment: post-its, markers, and our dining room table.
In the top yellow row are the days of the week. Each column corresponds to all the tasks/time boxes that he wanted to complete that day. I used different colors to distinguish the nature of the activity – pale yellow for BodyPump, green for piano, red for personal projects like writing and music production, and blue for work.
As we were placing the post-its on the table, my son was getting more and more anxious. He was afraid of making a mistake by committing to a schedule that he couldn’t follow. I put him at ease by reminding him that this is just a draft, that the post-its could be moved, and that we’ll be reviewing this design in a month. So we took a snapshot of the table and printed 4 copies to be placed in various areas around the house.
Second draft: digital Scrum Table ready for printing
Before printing, I cleaned up the snapshot, especially the top row where the days of the week were. I wanted my son to have clear the time he needed to wake up and go to bed.
Third draft: simplify, simplify, simplify
Between the constant changes in working hours and piano lessons, we couldn’t settle on a stable weekly schedule, so my son took the initiative to simply create 3 templates, one for each type of day: work-day, off-work-day, rest-day. The idea was to be absolutely clear every morning about the set of tasks he had to complete.
The small things are the big things
When it comes to developing new habits, details are paramount. The first infraction my son committed was not waking up when the alarm went off at 7:30 am, as clearly written on his Scrum Board. I reminded him that if he can’t do what he says he’s going to do, the whole project was doomed to fail.
Fourth draft: at last, Trello
The process of following up with colleges, scheduling visits, and conference calls got too overwhelming for sticky notes, so I migrated to Trello. Once there, my son loved it. I think that what he appreciates the most is having all that scattered information in one place, like a bucket, where we can all dump the information we find along the way.