Our travel planning Oobeya board

Post was originally written in April of 2023. See 2026 Updates half way through this post

About 20 years ago, the boss came to me and said we needed a visibility room. I reserved a room and set up our first project room. We put all of our goals on one wall, all of our deadlines on another, all of our projects on one wall, and all the metrics showing how we were not performing to our goals on another wall. Lots of charts and graphs and a lot of using printers and plotters to make everything look skookum. Management loved it and said this is how we are going to run our business. I had a meeting to show how to use it and had everyone give me updated charts. Everybody was happy.

The next month, only half the people showed. The following month, they told me to cancel the status meetings because they could just go into the room and review the info whenever they wanted. I updated the room for several months but I realized nobody was looking at it. I stopped updating charts and nobody said anything. The next year, we get a new senior manager that says we need a visibility room. I updated all the charts again and the same cycle happens and I eventually stop updating and nobody notices.

Over the years, I moved to different locations and organizations but I always seemed to be involved with the visibility rooms but they eventually began calling them Oobeya rooms which is Japanese for “Big Room”. They were popularized by Toyota and brought to many manufacturing companies as part of a LEAN production system. I made a lot of Oobeya rooms and they always were great for a couple of months but eventually I realized I was the only one updating and reviewing them. At one time I was the project manager of 6 different groups so I had 6 different oobeya boards that I was taking care of. I was the King of Oobeya . But I never really liked them because I never could get teams to update their own info, or management to visit the rooms to make them useful.

Then we retired and my project management career was now focused on organizing our plan to travel 9-10 months per year. We needed a way to organize our short term plans, long term plans and bucket lists. We needed a travel Oobeya room and I am the King of Oobeya. But we moved to a 1500 sq. ft house, then our son and his partner moved back in with us for a bit, and I didn’t have any extra “big rooms” to create my dream of white boards, maps, and big travel calendars with post it notes all over it. We also plan to be on the road a lot, and I don’t want to be like those old managers that are “unable” to access the room. Luckily I am married to another project management professional, and she knew how to create our virtual Oobeya room that we can access all over the world. We just set ours up using free Miro software and it was really fun. Miro is essentially a virtual, endless whiteboard, with lots of cool templates. And accessible where-ever we happen to be. It’s pretty close to being in a project room with post-its, markers, and a lot of great ideas.

We first started with our bucket list of destinations, organized by continent, that we want to visit. These are places we haven’t visited or want to return to see again. This is list is going to be continually modified and added to….

We then started a list of when is the best time to visit a location. We know not to go to Southeast Asia in the hot rainy season of summer and we know not to go to Europe in the rainy winter. But there are countries like Costa Rica that have different climates depending on what coast your are on. We want to have a list of the preferred season for each destination which will greatly help us in our travel planning. We have a lot of work to still do on this….

I already had a 3 year plan in my mind so I needed to get in on our Oobeya board to see if it fit the 3 year plan she had in her mind. We are still working on this but at least we have something on “paper” to cooperatively work on. Here is our start of a 3 year schedule

The last step is a long term calendar that is a little more generic using virtual post it notes that are easy to move around. We have talked about returning to Africa but somehow it isn’t on our 3 year calendar yet. The longer term calendar will help us feel good about not leaving places off, knowing that we do have a very tentative plan to visit some day. We also have a lot of work to do on this…

UPDATED APRIL 2026!!! So this was the original plan. It is now April 2026 and we have been using this for 4 years now. Kind of… Actually, we have been using the calendar and mostly ignored the other charts that I just talked about. We do still have a 4 year lookahead but the actual plan has looked nothing like the long term dream. The calendar itself is indispensable as our main travel planning tool, and I have added icons on to stays to show if there is a washer in the unit and I put a green check if the stay has actually been booked. I just started putting an egg pan icon in the box if we have will get a free breakfast at the hotel. I also have put in icons for planes, trains, buses, and rental cars to show how we are getting from one stay to another. Here is our oobeya boards from 2026 and 2027 to show how we are actually using it. sorry for those that are color blind….

I have talked to a lot of full time travelers that just use spreadsheets as their Travel Planning Calendar. Spreadsheets will the job just as well….. but I like Miro for the easiness of dragging and dropping the “post it notes”. It is kind of fun to move things around easily when trying to plan an itinerary. You can do it on a spreadsheet but it just doesn’t seem as fun…. I’m not saying that I don’t like spreadsheets. I have a lot of them that I use to track other aspects of our travel life. I have one for credit cards to ensure that we use our perks every year. I have one for hotels and rental cars so I can see which apps and cards I used to purchase things. I have one tracking all our flights. I like to know how and when I booked. It can be complicated when you are using points and sometimes need to purchase tickets through an airline that you aren’t flying on. I also have started to track our miles and points on our credit cards, hotels and airlines. It is really fun to see them all in one place and I have given up trying to find an app that will reliably do that for me. It is really a lot of work to keep everything updated but I remember that I am retired…. this is my job now and I kind of like it…. I love being organized.

In addition to our Oobeya board on Miro, we have started using Bublup. This is actually just a fancy notepad that we use on our phones and computer to jot down travel ideas. We both like to create lists of all sorts of things and we wanted to be able share what we have with each other. We create folders for trips and inside we put folders for countries and then for cities. When we are talking with other nomad travelers we often jot stuff down in our Bublup when they give us ideas. We do a lot of travel research on Youtube and we often save restaurants and hotels, and fun ideas from Vloggers. I also read a lot of blogs and steal a lot of stuff from those. We also have folders with possible itineraries and use this before we start laying it our on our Miro Oobeya board. Unlike Miro, this is something we pay for. I think it is about $40 per year. For us, it is worth it to have sharable online lists without paper.

This actually isn’t the end of our organization. During our travel, we have a lot of other apps in addition to Bublup and Miro that we actually use day to day. I have heaps of airline apps, rental car apps, train and ferry apps and hotel apps that we need to used during travel days. We save tons of locations on Google maps and have a different “save icon” for each trip. Our all encompassing app is Tripit that I’m not sure how we would survive without it. That is the first place I go when someone asks me where I’m going to be on a certain date. Yeah, the Miro Oobeya would tell me…. but doesn’t really have all the details…

It all seems like a lot of info and a lot of work. I am old enough to remember traveling before the internet….. I don’t want to go back to that. All this works actually makes traveling easier and reduces the stress of not having a full time home. I just want an easy life and all this organization makes a complicated travel life… very easy….