Hand Over the Pen
Now that I'm on the other side of it, I can write this down...
It was 10 p.m. on Monday at the dining room table. School was starting in two weeks, and with four kids, there was a lot to do. (And if you're a parent, you know that's an understatement.) There were school clothes, backpacks and lunchboxes, activities (oh, the activities!), new pickups and drop-offs, new teachers to meet, and more.
The new routine is a bit like launching a tiny startup with funding for nine months. You plan and plan, then cross your fingers and hope for the best. Then do it again next year.
For the co-parents out there, there are two of you leading this startup. Perhaps you live together (whoa, that's an intense startup environment), or perhaps you don't (remote work has its own challenges). Either way, there are two of you working together to get this year off the ground.
This year, my husband and I did it a little differently. We played the first draft of Game Plan.
We'd been playing for a few weeks to coordinate weekend cleaning, groceries, activities—basically everyday life. But this was going to be a big plan with a really uneven split, since I was traveling for a week.
Would we get it all done? I was crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.
Everything for school prep lived in my head. Let's say I was the subject matter expert. And it didn't all get communicated. My partner set up Game Plan while I finished the dishes (team multitasking!). We named the project School Prep and gave it a due date of a week and a half.
There's a rule in Game Plan: the person who says the task can't write it down. Your partner holds the pen.
So my husband took the pen. And I started talking. Brain-dumping everything I could think of.
Twenty tasks in all. In his handwriting. Then we switched. He talked, I wrote. Eight more tasks, written on slips of paper. We pruned the list down to 21 tasks—the ones we agreed actually had to happen before school started. (No wonder the week before school feels so busy for parents!)
We had a game plan.
Tiny science break.
There's a neat study from two UK health centers that tested something surprisingly simple. For follow-up appointments, nurses asked patients to write the date and time on the appointment card themselves instead of having the nurse write it for them. No-shows fell by 18% compared with the previous six-month average. The researchers framed it as a written commitment: the person making the commitment was the one who wrote it down.
And that's part of why we designed the pen rule into Game Plan.
So in Game Plan, I say: "We need new sneakers." And my partner writes: New sneakers.
My partner says: "Find the school supply list." And I write: Find school supply list.
You're not just hearing what your partner needs done. You're writing it down yourself. You hear the task, write it, and see it sitting there on the table. That's a very different experience from simply being told. This is just one of the many tools we use in Game Plan to help teams get more done together.
So how did our Game Plan for School Prep go?
At the end of the game, he had 14 tasks, and I had 7. A week and a half later, we had finished all but one: Get Peanut groomed. Since our puppy doesn't go to school, I'll call this a win!
So try the experiment.
The next time your partner says something that needs to get done, write it down and take it with you.
Have a job at home that lives entirely in one person's head? Drop it in the comments. I'd love to hear it. (Heads up: mine was twenty-one slips long.)
Know someone who's carrying the whole list right now? Send it their way.
We started Thymely Games because the plan should belong to both of you. Get on the list and be first to play.
Michelle
Co-Founder, Thymely Games
Comments