I typically use the Miro visual workspace tool at work, but I’ve decided that it improves my personal planning too. Are bringing work tools and frameworks into my personal life healthy? …Sure. Why not! Any stress or negative mental well-being would be impacted by a combination of things and not just online whiteboarding tools. So here’s how I’ve used and will continue to use Miro.
When I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking about work all the time (a habit I am trying to break), it’s hard not to consider using similar frameworks and tools from work for everyday planning too. Miro is an online whiteboarding tool that can be used for brainstorming, ideation, process maps, project planning, and more. It’s great for visual things like mind maps, workflows, kanban boards, and you can invite collaborators to work in it. You can drag and drop shapes and images, organize content, and write notes (in the form of text boxes or stickies) to create a visual representation of whatever you’re working on. Anything you’d want to use with post-it notes would be great with Miro.
Miro helped track pending decisions for our kitchen renovation
One of the biggest challenges in our kitchen renovation planning was taking all of the ideas I researched, documenting the final decisions, and tracking to make sure I had all my open questions answered.
I linked my Pinterest inspo to a Miro board to showcase inspo all around it, and sectioned out the planning into 5 buckets: cabinets, tile, countertops, hardware, and lighting. You could do this for way more than these 5 items.
In each section I wrote out what was finalized, and added colored stickies for the items that Mr. Nacho and I still had to decide on.
This layout was helpful because I didn’t need to scan down a Google doc for items to address. Each open question was highlighted visually in its own section and I could go through all of the stickies to see which one I could tackle to get to an answer or a final decision.
Below is an image of an example layout and the sample Miro board is linked here.
Miro helped us map out experiences we wanted to have throughout the different stages of our life
There are lots of things I want to experience and do with Mr. Nacho to continue building our life together. It certainly has crossed my mind that we might not be able to experience everything we want to with our limited time on this earth. Some things we want to do are close to home (like build our mountainside home), do things more generally (like a meditation retreat), and visit various places.
After learning about the book “Die with Zero” by Bill Perkins, I realized it wouldn’t hurt to start planning all these experiences out for different phases of our lives. In his book, Bill Perkins challenges conventional wisdom about retirement and wealth accumulation. Perkins emphasizes the importance of experiencing life to the fullest, prioritizing meaningful experiences over accumulating wealth that we may never fully enjoy. He suggests creating a “time bucket” and allocating resources to different life stages, ensuring that we don’t delay gratification until retirement, when health or circumstances may limit our ability to enjoy it.
I wanted to easily map out all the things we wanted to do, and when we would ideally do them – moving the more “active” experiences into our earlier, more active years.
- Create sections: I created columned sections in 5 year increments starting from 35 until 70+
- Label sections: Underneath each, I noted “active” until 60. 60-65 and 65-70 are “less active” and 70+ is noted as “least active”
- Brainstorm onto sticky notes: Mr. Nacho and I brainstormed our experiences and ideas onto sticky notes (a separate color for “domestic travel”, “international travel”, and “general”)
- Organize sticky notes: We moved the stickies into the various columned sections to plan out how to tackle the more active activities earlier in our lives
What is also neat about having these stickies in Miro, is we are reminded about all the things we want to do and how long we really have to do them. There are items I’ve forgotten Mr. Nacho has added, and we are reminded and will continue to plan for how to experience as much as we can of it.
Below is an image of an example layout and the sample Miro board is linked here.
Miro has a Free plan for $0
The Miro Free plan offers unlimited team members, 3 active boards, and access to pre-built templates and integrations (Google Drive, Slack, etc.). Three boards might not sound like a lot, but you can put all of your planning for different things into one board. There is unlimited “whiteboard” space so you can have sections for everything you need in one place. You don’t need to create a separate board for it.
Other ideas
Miro has a post detailing use cases for how others use Miro here. I particularly like their ideas on trip planning, to be able to organize and write out itineraries, link out to documents, color code activities and sections, and include images of where we will be staying and visiting. They also include an example of a much more intensive home renovation project which is great inspiration for our future planning!
