Have you noticed it too? At our house it feels like things are spinning out of control. Laundry, cooking, cleaning, groceries, bills, doctor’s appointments, school field trips, homework, and projects, it’s all just coming at us faster and faster. On the surface, it might look like we have it all pulled together, but underneath, we’re scrambling to keep all the plates spinning.
You know a problem has reached critical mass when the market decides we would be willing to pay for a solution. And as luck would have it, a plethora of tools have appeared in the last year or so to help us with this problem. Electronic calendars, chore gamification apps, Kanban boards, home assistants, and now even AI agents, all designed to theoretically make it possible for us to get more throughput in our personal lives.
But what are we actually experiencing? I don’t know about your household, but in mine, regardless of the tools we attempt to implement, we have more and more tasks in progress and fewer and fewer actually getting to done.
In this way, our homes are not all that different from our workplaces. We have two main failures in our home systems, and maybe you recognize them in your work system too: a push model (as opposed to pull) and 100% resource utilization (or lack of slack in the system).
You see, when tasks are “pushed” into the system by a force upstream from our homes, we have little control over when they arrive and, as a result, how we handle them. We must adapt quickly as the tasks appear to prevent them from being dropped, but at the same time keep the current tasks moving forward so they, too, get to completion. We’re like Lucy and Ethel at the candy factory trying to keep up with the ever-increasing flow of work moving into our queues.
Meanwhile, because more and more work is flowing into our queues (aka our households), everyone’s hands are full dealing with the tasks. That is, our “resources” (family members) are at 100% allocation. There is no “slack” in our systems, so there is nowhere for the new work to go. As a result, it overflows; Tasks either drop out of the system altogether (a bill or permission slip is forgotten) or the entire system locks up (the family shuts down and nothing get accomplished because everyone turns to escape like doom-scrolling social media or binge-watching Netflix.
For months now I’ve been telling my husband that we just need to prioritize our family tasks and then work them in priority order. But it’s not been working. I was at a AI conference listening to a salesman announce how much more we can do when we inject agents into our workflows when it finally hit me: The answer isn’t to just keep doing more with less, or to prioritize harder. Because you can automate all you want or prioritize continuously, but if the chocolates just keep coming faster and faster, you’ll never be able to keep up. We need a way to stop the flow of work being pushed into our households.
And just like that, I realized that a small but fundamental piece of guidance I give my clients was actually the crucial thing I was missing in my own life. Yes, I need to take my own advice. I, too, need to say “no” more, to put those nice to have but unnecessary “features” in my family’s backlog trashcan. This is the only way to take control of the backlog, to shift our household from a push system to a pull system
The hard part, of course, is figuring out what to say no to. The answer will differ for each family because it depends on what you value, what your goals are, and what your family strategy is for reaching those goals.
I’m not sure what the right answer is for my family, but I can tell you with certainty that we have entirely too much work in progress, and even more work piling up in our backlog. This isn’t going to be easy to sort out, but I’m going to broach the topic with my household “colleagues” at our family meeting this weekend. What will you say no to at home? When will you do it?
Interested in this concept and want to learn more? Check out this brief (and cute) video of Henrik Kniberg at the Agile by Example Conference: https://youtu.be/tEtQNxDOYCI?si=zihG7HPI4uQUalue
