The night her head spent five hours clearing itself out

A participant in our sessions recently showed us her system. Two children, now seven and nine, self-employed, and she started at the end of 2023.

The trigger was not an interest in productivity. She describes the state before it like this: running after things all day, sorting out the world outside, functioning. Then in the evening the realisation that she also has a body, and a headache she had simply pushed aside for hours.

When she started capturing, something happened that I rarely hear put so plainly. She cut up scrap paper and put it everywhere — next to the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen. And then her head began to clear itself out. Lie down, a thought arrives, sit up, write it down, lie down. The next thought. For five hours.

The next morning she took the children to kindergarten, came home, and there was quiet. Her sentence for it: I had the feeling I could choose again what I do, and that I was no longer being driven.

Why it is different with children

For parents it is not only the volume that explodes. The nature of the commitments changes.

A large part of what has to be done is not yours at all. The green pencil for the pencil case, the broken ruler, the present for Saturday’s birthday party. These are other people’s needs turning into your tasks, and nobody enters them anywhere. They get mentioned in passing.

On top of that, these things are individually laughable in size. Which is exactly why they do not land in a system but in your head. And your head does not distinguish between big and small. Every open loop costs the same, whether it is a product launch or a pencil.

That is why exhaustion in parents often does not correlate with the amount of work. It is the forty small things nobody wrote down.

One system for everything

She does not separate private from professional. Four boards in Trello, and both sit side by side there: the travel idea, the book idea, the client call, the school matter. Whatever is not current sits on someday/maybe and does not clutter the active lists.

This is the point where GTD differs from most methods, and with parents it pays off most. Run two separate systems and you have to decide for every single thing where it belongs — and you make that decision on a day when both are happening at once anyway. Her phrasing: everything has a place. That was what convinced her.

What needs separating is the view, not the filing. You do not want to see the shopping list while you work. But that is a question of contexts and filters, not of two systems.

The board on the wall

The part that occupied the group most: at her home a kanban board covers an entire wall, a good two metres wide, magnetic and writable.

The columns are the usual ones: inbox, to do, waiting for, done. And every family member has their own row, a swimlane.

On it are sticky notes with exactly the things from above. New green pencil. Replace ruler. Present for the birthday party.

Why analogue, when she has everything in Trello anyway? Because it has to be present in family life. On a phone it is gone the moment you lock the screen, and nobody wants to look at a phone over dinner to find out what is due. You cannot fold a wall shut.

The second effect matters more and gets overlooked: a visible board makes the volume visible. When one person carries it all in their head, nobody else sees how much it is. When it hangs on the wall, everyone sees it — including the people who are otherwise surprised that somebody is spent by the evening.

Your partner does not have to join in

Her husband does not do GTD. He uses the family board, and that is that.

Asked how she had convinced him, she gave the most relaxed answer of the evening: not at all. He sees the board, we use it together, and if he wants to know more I am happy to tell him. She has no interest in converting anyone.

I consider this the most underrated point in the whole construction. A family system does not work because everyone knows the method. It works because there is a shared place where it says what is due. Anyone trying to teach their household the method before anything improves will be waiting a long time.

Two context lists you only get with a family

Alongside the usual contexts, her next-action lists carry two you rarely see in office setups: discuss with husband, and discuss with the children.

These are agenda lists, and in private life they are at least as effective as at work. Everything that does not warrant its own occasion but should be raised at the next shared moment lands there. You stop trailing your partner with seven small things across the day, and you stop leaving a shared evening thinking you had actually meant to ask something.

With children a second benefit appears. When you know you have four topics to raise with your child, you also notice when three of them are reprimands.

Chore cards the children choose from

For the household she built cards with pictures, made with an AI image generator. Each card is one task: clean the sink, tidy the children’s room, empty the letterbox, take out the rubbish.

Saturday morning she goes through what is currently due. Some drop out because they do not work that day — plastic waste not on a Sunday, for instance. Then she lays the cards on the table and each child picks two or three.

The difference between assigning and choosing is the entire trick. A child who chose the sink cleans the sink. A child assigned the sink negotiates. And there are tasks children are surprisingly happy to do if you let them. Cleaning the toilet is not among them; that stays with her.

Two to three hours on Saturday, everyone at once, and then it is done. Her observation: together it is considerably more fun than spread out alone across the week.

One detail that shows the system really runs: laundry into the machine is a card. And afterwards she is waiting for the machine to finish, so the thing moves to waiting-for. That sounds excessive until the one time you notice at ten in the evening that the washing has been sitting wet in the drum for six hours.

Anyone can be busy

She experimented with a today list and stopped again. The reason is instructive: she never knew whether to move a card there or enter it anew, things were left standing, and then came the question of whether to move them back or simply recreate them tomorrow. The upkeep outweighed the benefit.

What works instead are markers for the things that are genuinely due. And she puts the insight behind it like this: one or two success-critical tasks, which then actually get done. Anyone can be busy. You can spend the whole day running after things, feel like you are doing something, and not have worked on anything that mattered.

For a day with children, appointments and self-employment, one to two is the honest number. Anything above that is a list that proves in the evening that you failed, even though you worked all day.

Waiting for, sorted by people

A small detail with a large effect: her waiting-for list is sorted by groups of people. Clients, family, school, network, plus open invoices and ordered parcels.

The advantage shows when going through it. You do not check thirty individual items; you go group by group and see immediately where something is jamming. And if you are on the phone with someone anyway, you have everything open with that person in one place.

A technical tip from the group for anyone using Trello: set up an automation that sets the start date to today whenever a new card is created on the waiting-for board. Then every entry says how long you have been waiting, without you typing it. And how long is the only information that turns a waiting-for into an action.

Where it typically fails

• The board hangs there, but nobody keeps it up. A wall board needs the same weekly pass as a digital one. Otherwise the Easter cards are still hanging there in May.
• The partner becomes a project. Try to re-educate your household before your own system works and you will give up on both. First the shared place, then perhaps the method.
• Everything gets done on paper. The wall board works for family matters because they are short-lived and should be visible. Projects, reference material and anything professional do not belong there.
• The small things still land in your head. If the pencil for the pencil case is not written down somewhere within ten seconds, it is written down nowhere. Capture has to be possible everywhere, which is why the notepaper sits in every room.

Common questions

How do you organise family tasks sensibly?

With a shared visible place instead of inside one person’s head. A kanban board on the wall with columns for inbox, open tasks, waiting for and done, plus one row per family member. The decisive effect is that the volume becomes visible to everyone.

Should I keep private and work tasks separate?

In capture no, in the view yes. A single system means every item has a place immediately. Separate views through contexts and filters make sure you do not see the shopping list while you work.

How do I get children involved in housework?

Choosing instead of assigning. Write or draw tasks on cards, select the ones that are currently due, and let the children take two or three from those. One shared fixed appointment works better than individual instructions spread across the week.

What if my partner does not want to join in?

Force nothing. A shared visible board works even when only one person knows the method behind it. Participation comes from the shared place, not from being convinced of the method.

Why do small tasks weigh so heavily?

Because your head does not distinguish between big and small. Every unfinished thing that is not reliably noted anywhere consumes attention, regardless of its size. For parents, many of them accumulate every day.

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If you live with children and feel constantly drained without being able to name what from: for one week, write down every small thing somebody mentions to you in passing. The length of that list is usually the answer.

A system that carries work and family at the same time is something you build properly once and then never again. That is exactly what a workflow setup is — with your real data. Write to me if everything is currently sitting in your head.