It started because I kept forgetting olive oil. We'd run out, I'd plan to get more, I'd forget, we'd be in the middle of cooking something and have to improvise. My wife started writing things on the board specifically so that I would stop having this problem. I was the one who went to the shops more often. The board was communication infrastructure.
The olive oil problem got solved. But the board didn't stop. It expanded.
We added a section for things that needed to happen before the end of the month. Then a section for things we wanted to do at some point but weren't urgent. Then, after a conversation one evening about how fast the year was going, a section in the upper left corner that says "before 40" — a rolling list of things we want to do or figure out before we get there. My wife is 36, I'm 37. The list has eleven items. We've done two of them.
I don't think we planned for the board to become a life system. It grew into that shape because the board was there and writing things on it turned out to have low enough friction that we actually did it.
The things that don't make it onto the board — the vague wants, the someday ideas, the conversations that start with "I've been meaning to" — those things often don't happen. The things that make it onto the board have a measurably higher completion rate, probably because writing them down is itself a small commitment, a declaration that this is real and not just a thought.
We still run out of things we didn't write down. But we haven't run out of olive oil in two years.