The guide
How HomeTeam works
There are three ideas you need and the rest of the app follows from them. It should take about five minutes to read, and everything on the way past is something you can click on and try.
One · Boards
A board is your work laid out in columns.
Your tickets live on a board with a column for what has not been started, a column for what is being worked on now, and a column for what is finished. You move a card to the right as it progresses, and anyone who looks at the board can see where everything stands without having to ask.
This is called kanban. It started on the Toyota factory floor in the late 1940s, where cards moved along the line to show what was being built, and software teams borrowed it decades later. It stuck because a board answers two questions at once: what still needs doing, and what somebody is actually doing right now.
To do
Clear the gutters
Book the dentist
Doing
Fix the closet door
Done
Water the plants
Drag a card between the columns.
Two · Cycles
A cycle is the handful you picked for this week.
If you write down everything that needs doing you end up with a list nobody wants to look at, which is fine and normal. That list is called the backlog and it is where things wait until you are ready for them.
A cycle is the week itself. You sit down on a Sunday, look at the pile, pull over the handful you actually intend to get through, and split them between whoever is around. What you are left with is a short list with names on it, which turns out to be the only reliable way to answer the question of what you are doing this week.
Cycles are optional and plenty of people never switch them on. They start being worth the trouble at about the point where two people are both assuming the other one has it covered.
Five jobs you could do. Switch to This week to see the two you chose.
Three · Routines
A routine is the job that keeps coming back.
Some jobs come back on their own. Taking the bins out, changing the filter, watering the plants. Nobody has forgotten that these exist, the problem is that the reminder has to show up on the right day without anybody having to remember to send it.
You set a routine up once and HomeTeam makes the ticket for you every time it comes round. That can be weekly or monthly or every third day, or it can be much looser than that, like calling your mum at least once a fortnight whenever it happens to suit.
The difference between this and a calendar reminder is that a calendar event goes past whether you did the thing or not, whereas a routine makes a real ticket that sits on the board being unfinished until somebody moves it to done.
You set up once
Take the bins out · every week
HomeTeam makes these for you
- Take the bins outThu, Sep 17
- Take the bins outThu, Sep 24
- Take the bins outThu, Oct 1
Set it up once. It keeps arriving without you.
The rest
Everything else can wait until you want it.
None of this matters on your first day and you can safely ignore all of it until something makes you want it.
Reminders
You can tell HomeTeam when to nudge you, whether that is the morning something is due, an hour before, or a week ahead. Out of the box you get one reminder, on the day the job is due.
Saved boards
If there is a slice of the work you keep coming back to, like only your jobs or only the rental, you can save it as its own board and it will be waiting next time.
Calendars
Point HomeTeam at any calendar's iCal link and every event turns into a ticket on its own — a booking calendar that needs a clean after each checkout, or your own Google or Apple calendar.
Docs and sheets
Grocery lists, holiday plans, the wifi nobody can remember. They sit next to the work rather than in a different app you have to go and find.
Priorities and due dates
Flag what is urgent and say when a job is due. Cards show a coloured dot and the date, so the important and the late do not get lost in the pile.
Households
You get a separate space for each home or rental, and the people you invite into one of them cannot see any of the others.
That is the whole thing.
A board to see the work on, a week to pick from it, and the jobs that keep coming back on their own. The easiest way in is to make one ticket for whatever has been bothering you the longest.
Create your HomeTeam