I agree with the fun things.

Instead of CleanBan, this was really a “house cleaning sprint” (in scrum terms).

The cool thing is that I put the money that I would have spent on a maid in an envelope labeled “fun”. The team (the kids and wife) can chose to spend it on things, disburse it, or save it (without my interference).

I am enjoying your book!

The movement of tickets and a definable end point is pretty important for everyone, including kids.

Also, I might recommend having fun things on the kanban too. Otherwise it’s a drudgeban!

Jim

This is what we did.
1. As a family, we spent an hour going to each room in the house. Everyone was encouraged to say what needed to be done in the room.
2. My wife made sticky notes for each job. (After the 3rd room, the 13 year-old wised up and stopped saying as much because she realized the stack of to-do’s was getting bigger.)
3. When we finished, my wife put all the sticky notes on the backlog. I told her to pick 20 items to get done today. This surprised her but relieved some of the anxiety with the kids. We negotiated and she picked 28 items which were moved to the “ready” position. The addition of 8 more items made the kids mad.
4. Each person was allowed to move one item from “ready” to “doing”.
5. When the task was competed, it was moved from “doing” to “done”.
6. Step 4 was to be repeated until all items were completed.

Retrospective:
My wife overestimated the throughput…surprise!
The kids were (understandably) upset at the addition of the 8 items.
Although we discussed expectations during step 1, some of the sticky notes didn’t have enough detail.
Prioritization didn’t work well which resulted in slack time.
Kelly’s back pain was limiting her work which was an impediment. She also picked issues that enabled her to sit down which caused friction in the team.