Taking Engineering Lessons Home: A SCRUM Task Board for Household Chores

After teaching during COVID, all my task management strategies fell apart. My mental load was overflowing. When my second child was born in 2022, I couldn’t afford to let things continue to get out of hand. It felt like nothing was getting done in the house, the piles of laundry never stopped, and I could never catch up.

Mind you, I still feel like that. But this helped.

I went back to my PBL school days and decided to make a task board. Now, it’s an essential part of my weekly chores.

A little background of how I got here: I taught at a STEM PBL school for 4 years. The structure of our school was one in which the entire grade level worked on one interdisciplinary project at once. So, with seven subjects feeding into one project, there were several balls for the kids to juggle. The engineering teacher taught them the basics of SCRUM-ming (I’m going to say that’s a word… ) by helping teams set goals and accomplish tasks on a doable timeline.

Although they did task management in various ways, like conferences with teachers and programs like Trello, my favorite one was a task board that required them to manually move sticky notes from “To Do” to “In Progress” to “Done.” It was satisfying to the students and to me as a teacher to see tasks slowly get accomplished.

I took this idea and applied it to my home to help me manage my chores. Although it doesn’t fix everything, it helped me manage the mental load that’s constantly playing in my head (narrated by my mother’s voice).

Here’s how I put it together. Disclaimer: There are links to Amazon below, but I am not an affiliate at this time.

Materials

• Magnetic chalkboard (or whiteboard, or anything magnetic that fits your family’s aesthetic)
• Magnet labels
• Chalk markers
• Permanent markers
• Whiteboard markers

Step 1: Decide What Sections You Need

The goal is for your to do list to gradually move from left to right. So you should at least have three sections:

1. To Do: This is where everything will start.
2. In Progress: This is where I move things like “Laundry” when clothes are in progress (wash/dry/folded), but not put away in the closet yet. Or the floors are vacuumed, but not mopped.
3. Done: Congratulate yourself every time something lands here!

I also know that I occasionally have some items on our family to-do list that are huge, but I keep putting on the back burner. For example, we had a really hard time getting our baby’s social security and birth certificate paperwork done because the hospital made a typo. It was a huge mess. But I needed a reminder that it needed checking on periodically, or else I would forget. For that reason, I made a fourth category called “URGENT!” so that I would keep that part of my mental load as a priority.

Step 2: Label the Chalkboard

Divide your chalkboard equally and label it. I handwrote my labels with chalk marker. You could also create vinyl labels using a Cricut or Silhouette.

Step 3: Write Each Task on a Magnet

You may want to list out all your usual house tasks on paper first. I journal often, and one of my strategies is doing a brain dump on paper when things get overwhelming. So dumping everything on my to-do list is a usual practice for me.

Each magnet should get one task. You may realize that a single task has a lot of different parts to it (like, it’s not just “laundry,” but it’s your laundry, the kids’ laundry, the sheets, the towels, the bath rugs, etc.), so divide up those tasks accordingly.

Here are all my usual weekly household tasks. These all were written in permanent marker:

• Downstairs restroom
• Kids restroom
• Parents’ restroom
• Kid sheets
• Parent sheets
• Kid Laundry
• Parent Laundry
• Bath rugs
• Towels
• Downstairs floors
• Upstairs floors
• Play area
• Kids’ Craft Area
• Stairwell (because we use this area as a holding place for things that need to go upstairs)
• Indoor plants
• Garden
• Dog baths
• Meal plan

Items that would go in “Urgent!” are usually one-time things, so I would label that with whiteboard marker. My daughter has labeled “banana doo-doo” in my pictures, so enjoy that.

Step 4: Get to Work!

Now that you’ve got it, get started! Enjoy watching your tasks get accomplished!

I will say, these don’t all get done always. And there are periods of time when, due to mental health or family life getting busy, this board doesn’t get touched at all. But when I am in a cleaning mood, this board is such a good visual and tactile reminder of my slow progress. It feels more rewarding than crossing things off a to-do list because I’m actually seeing what gets done as well.

An added bonus: it helped my husband see how he can help in the house. Like many couples, we’ve struggled with the “I can’t read your mind”/”Why can’t you figure it out” conversation when it comes to household chores. This has helped. Again, still not perfect and not a complete problem solver, but it’s helped.

Hope this helps you as well! If you have other household task management tips, leave a comment!

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