Handmade Treats

By popular request - and by popular we mean more than one person has expressed their interest - here’s a little behind the scenes peek on making of a Lego scheduling tool. BTW, judging by the feedback we get, we should include a lot more content about the painkiller Tramadol and obtaining it online, but we feel it would just be too off-topic even for our liking.

Getting the desired Lego pieces together is now easy as pie since Lego has introduced their Pick A Brick-shopping option online at lego.com. Besides the base plates, where the 48×48 sized extra-large gray plate is really the only option, you can just go wild with your imagination designing your calendar.

We went with classic 2×4 sized bricks to represent half a day of scheduled work. 2×2’s or 2×3’s would work very nicely if you need more days on one plate and 1×4’s for example would let you split a day in four if needed. Or alternatively double the amount of people you can fit on one weekly plate. One of the core ideas behind this calendar is the ease of modifying and updating it, and we feel going too small with 1×1 pieces would defeat much of the purpose.

Lego don’t really offer a huge number of different colours in all of their Pick A Brick-pieces and the number of standard colours isn’t enough to represent all the projects we have going in an eight week period, for example. We solved this the same way we did the lines on the base plates, by colouring over the dots with a flat permanent marker. We don’t have really long road tests yet, but so far the colour seems to stick very nicely even on the bricks that are sometimes connected to each other. No wear, no spill and enough contrast to tell the projects apart.

We ordered a bunch of custom made black ABS-plastic plates, glued the base plates on and hanged them on a wall. The colour black was chosen because we already had a black wall at our studio and the coloured bricks look way cool on it. We’ve even played with the idea of adding black light to the equation, please let us know if anyone has the chance to test lego bricks compatibility with UV light.

Besides the half a day task bricks we’re using 2×2 round bricks to represent certain milestones such as versions, reviews and deadlines as well as days off. The great thing about using Legos is that you can connect anything with everything. If you want to use a black 1×1 piece to tell something special about a certain deadline, you can always connect it to the round brick connected to the task in a certain project. Pretty sweet!

We use a Dymo Label Manager PC to print out the labels for week numbers and dates for each week. This is a dull repetitive task and tiny backlit LCD screens would be so much cooler, but we just had to stop somewhere. Again, anyone can do it, and if you feel it’s too much effort, we suppose you don’t have much experience in managing a dozen people’s schedules to begin with.

Storing the task bricks in a neat fashion in piles of ten seems like the best idea to us. If you need to lay 26 half day tasks, you don’t need to go through a bucket of bricks and count each one to get there. Or better yet, disassemble some creations your colleagues have built from the loose bricks lying around. You should just get another set of bricks for that.