What if “Home Alone” Happened in Our Time? | When Jira & ActivityTimeline Exist

We all agree that the pre-holiday season is wonderful! Everybody decorates houses, Christmas trees, buys gifts, plans a Christmas dinner with family. There is a pleasant bustle everywhere… But sometimes this bustle can turn into a real disaster, as in a world-known movie “Home Alone“. We all know how many problems can emerge, especially if you have a full house of guests, a future trip to another continent with 11 children, and 2 bandits-losers planning the robbery.

It’s obvious that everyone can lose attention and even forget the child at home in this mess!

What if we say, that there can be another successful scenario? What would happen if mom Kate have found a great resource planning tool and started planning the trip to Paris earlier?

Let’s take a deeper look at the McCallisters’ family special use case and understand how we can plan/manage tasks for the whole family and don’t miss anything with the help of the resource planning tool for Jira – ActivityTimeline.

How to Manage a Large Family Using ActivityTimeline?

The everyday routine of the McCallisters’ family is mostly typical, except the fact that parents have 5 children and each of them has different schedules, classes, household chores, etc. Due to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, parents generally spend from 1-2 hours a day with a child, depending on the age. McCallisters have 5 children of different ages and have full-time jobs, so they are also overwhelmed with their tasks&duties, and it’s hard for them to keep everything in mind.

One day mother Kate heard about a useful tool that helps to keep everything in stride, schedule and monitor tasks, as well as visualize all of them on a scalable dashboard with personal timelines! Kate understood that she wants to try ActivityTimeline and manage family tasks effortlessly.

The app provides a planning dashboard with all teams, projects, and tasks. First of all, Kate creates a team with all of the family members. She also creates projects that equal different family activities/general planning:

She’s very satisfied that it’s clearly visible who is doing what and when it will be done. Kate schedules tasks by drag-n-drop or creates new Jira tasks directly on the dashboard. All tasks are fully synchronized with Jira:

Kate can also see the workload of her children and she’s very happy about that, as she for sure doesn’t want to overload her kids:

She likes the possibility of splitting the same task between her children as sometimes they need to clean a house together:

Mother usually uses Jira tasks for the planning, sets due dates up, and plans capacity. Sometimes she makes her sons and even husband Peter log time because they are not often punctual and attentive with their tasks. Last month Peter forgot to pay bills on time and make a scheduled car inspection, so Kate scheduled reminders and made him log hours:

ActivityTimeline provides a wide range of internal events, so Kate decided to use them for holidays planning. She found bookings very practical as she can create&schedule them very quickly, as well as set up the approximate time:

The Personal Workspace for Everyone

ActivityTimeline perfectly suits teams of every type and size, so even the “Wet Bandits“ came with a great idea to start using the app for future planning! Harry heard about the app while was collecting the data about families in the role of the police officer and decided to try. He added Marv to the team, but Marv obviously did not understand how to work with the app, so Harry only added the addresses of the empty houses to the dashboard:

Harry also used a personal workspace for employees that’s available in the ActivityTimeline, as there he saw his personal arrangements. He also used a special Timer to count time spent on each house, after that he even logged spent hours:

Although Wet Bandits used the application, it did not help them because they are too hopeless!

Kevin went to Paris with his family and they had a great time there! ActivityTimeline helped them to plan time in the best way, so McCallisters came home satisfied and happy!

Our team wishes you happy holidays, a great time with your families, and no “ Wet Bandits” near your homes!

By the way, did you know that even Santa plans with the ActivityTimeline? Check the use case of the  Santa’s Corp. here!