What do you put on your shared planning board?

June 26, 2022 10:37 AM

Do you have a joint planning whiteboard (or other kind of planning board) for you and your spouse? What do you put on it, and how do you organize it?

We've reached middle age and somehow managed to get this far without maintaining a joint planning board or other family goal/plans tracking system. We've done pretty darn well, I think, but now we're looking at the rest of our lives and thinking that we should plan and organize better – things like retirement goals, financial goals, bucket lists, near-term plans for house remodels, etc., etc. So we did what countless other people have done, and started writing things on a whiteboard.

If you've done the same, what have you found is a useful way to organize your planning board? And what kind of processes have you put around it? Are there any good guides or blogs about this that we should also read? We have no kids (by choice), but presumably most of the same principles and approaches apply whether you have kids or not. Also, my spouse wants to use a real, physical board, but if you use online tools, it's still worth hearing about because some of the same ideas probably can be reused.

I have undiagnosed but pretty clear (to me) ADHD tendencies, so any additional tips for organizing planning boards in ways that work well for ADHD types would be welcome.

posted by StrawberryPie to Home & Garden (3 answers total)

On New Year’s we sit down and write goals for the year on a posterboard, organized by type (career, social, family, body, money, home, fun, etc). We sign it, and hang it behind the closet door so we only see it sometimes. It’s not fancy, just handwritten with sharpie kinda like this. (We do a rough draft first on paper to kind of plan it out so the final thing looks organized and uses the space well but it only takes like 20 mins to make it). We make a little occasion of putting stickers on the goals as we achieve them. It’s fun!
posted by nouvelle-personne at 11:08 AM on June 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

We have a shared free Trello board for grocery shopping. One column for stuff we need to buy, one column for stuff we’ve put in our grocery cart as we walk the store (we move the card over from column 1). Other columns for hardware store, liquor store, etc.
posted by Hypatia at 5:58 PM on June 26, 2022

Oh the shared phone list is great for ADHD. We have one long shared google keep checklist with subheadings for different shops - grocery, hardware, pharmacy, dollar store, mall. We just put things on the list as they run out, then when running errands we check the list.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 7:58 PM on June 26, 2022 [2 favorites]