The other day, as I sometimes do, I was laying down next to my 3 year old on the bottom bunk to encourage him to fall asleep. When I do, that’s when my own mind starts drifting off and wandering into the zone of great ideas and thoughts (well, sometimes I just fall asleep).

I was fooling around with my cell phone trying to understand some of the more obscure settings on it when I suddenly realized how much the bars of the bunk-bed reminded me of project management. The bars appear to fade together the further in distance they are, even though they are in fact equally spaced. The bars closest to me in contrast are very spatially distinct to my mind’s eye. Hey, I thought, if each one of those bars were tagged with a milestone or deadline, then the principle of Agile Project Management would also echo the visual perception of objects in the distance. The closer in time something is to occur, the principle of Agile says, then the more distinction in definition and purpose an event should be given. The further out in time, the less granular and more fuzzy the planning should be.

So I took a pic of the underside of the bunk-bed with my cell phone and managed to upload it here for your enjoyment.