What would a Teal contract look like?
02-03-2016What’s a good spike?
09-05-2016I have a problem. Despite teaching people and organizations how to organize their work effectively, how to prioritize, about the evils of multi-tasking and the importance of sustainable pace, I have never been able to get my own to-dos under control. By extension, my life has never really been under control either. So I often work late into the night, almost every night, and on the weekends as well.
I have experimented with the Pomodoro (I could never get myself to stop working after 25 minutes. I want something done before I can put it down) and Personal Kanban (post-its with waiting-working-done around the screen of my notebook (the problem wan’t the WIP but the length of the backlog). The results of my attempts was always the same: I worked very hard, getting things done one after the other, but my work schedule always extended into the night and over the weekend.
An experiment with timeboxing tasks/goals
Two weeks ago, a read an article on linked in, Critical Things Ridiculously Successful People Do Every Day, by Travis Bradberry. His first recommendation: “[F]ocus on minutes, not hours.” Enter your program in your agenda. A light went on. If I am going to do something, the first question I must answer is when am I going to do it? Then I block the time for that activity. What happens if I don’t have time for it? Either postpone it, don’t do it, or cancel something else.
So I decided to try an experiment. For one week, I would schedule every major activity I needed to accomplish. From Sprint Planing for the SBC website, to quotes I needed to send customers, a talk I needed to prepare, to packing for my trip to the Scrum Gathering. Everything went into my calendar. Looking back on it today, I see that I had 30 individual items over five days. Only once did I schedule work into the evening.
What happened? The good news: Friday morning, when it came time to leave, my wife said, “it’s time.” I said, “OK,” put my suitcase in the car, and off we went. On the way, she said to me, “I have never seen you so organized and ready for departure before a trip like this!”. (And I hadn’t even told her about my experiment!). I accomplished every major goal I set for myself that week (except one). And I had time to watch 4 hours of amateur Star Trek videos on you tube without feeling guilty! Wow.
The bad news. My estimates suck. It starts with the assumption that 30 minutes every morning is enough to deal with routine emails. So I had to deal with that.
Having a schedule in my calendar, and new goal starting half an hour from now, has proven to be an interesting attractor. It reminds me to focus my attention on the right thing. I can look at my calendar and see what I should be doing.
If I get to the end one time box, and the goal has not been achieved, I have to ask myself the questions, what do I do now? Do I keep working on my current goal? Or do I schedule the remaining parts for later? Or do I cancel or postpone the next goal?
Depending on the situation, I have already done all of these. Remember, I said there was one major goal I did not accomplish? Well, I got to the time when I was supposed to start it, but I was nowhere near finished the previous goal. I evaluated the importance of the two goals and decided that it was more important to finish the goal I that I was working on. So I finished it and dropped the other one (urgent but not important). So timeboxing individual goals enables me to prioritize and ensure that the most important things get done. After a week of this, I was pretty happy with my results.
What does this have to do with Scrum?
For me, Scrum consists of 6 essential patterns:
- Inspect and Adapt at regular intervals
- Produce something that might be valuable at least once per interval
- Management leads and supports, and knows when to stay out of the way.
- The whole team solves the problem
- One voice speaks for the customer/maximizes the value of the work done
- A coach helps everybody achieve higher performance.
How does planning my time on my calendar in this detail get me closer to doing Scrum? Let’s look at how this implements the patterns:
Inspect and Adapt at regular intervals.
Produce something that might be valuable at least once per interval
The whole team solves the problem
Management leads and supports, and knows when to stay out of the way.
One voice speaks for the customer/maximizes the value of the work done
A coach helps everybody achieve higher performance
Next experiments
My Personal Scrum, v0.1
- When I decide I want to achieve a particular goal, I also decide when I will work on it, and block that time in my agenda
- If I have no time to work on a new goal, I have to either postpone the goal, reject the goal, or reschedule or renounce another goal
- I strive to work on / that which is planned at any given time
- I know my estimates suck, so I leave slack in my agenda and forgive myself if things don’t get finished when I hoped/expected.
- My agenda serves me, not the other way around. So if reality is different than plan, I adjust the plan to reflect reality.
1 Comment
Hi Peter, great post!
I’ve been both scrum master and project manager over the past several years, and your post particularly resonates with me since a lot of concepts I’ve built into my own system I also took from agile and scrum practices.
My initial thought was to treat my own task backlog as a PO would use the product backlog. I prioritize tasks considering value, effort, and urgency, and always take the next task from the top of the backlog.
I find the calendar approach to be too restrictive though. Since, as you mention yourself, estimating effort is quite difficult, I think it’s better to use estimates qualitatively rather than quantitatively. That is, I can pretty accurately estimate if a task is small, medium, or large effort, but a ‘medium’ task might take anywhere from 10-30 minutes. Under such circumstances, it’s not practical to line everything up in a calendar.
Instead, I take a ‘kanban’ approach here: take a task from the top of the backlog, complete it, and when ready, take the next task. Really the only important thing is to work on the next most important thing at all times.
The article you mention (which by the way is also very interesting) compares to-do lists against calendars. I also ran into the problem of ever-growing static to-do lists and keeping them up to date to be able to choose the next important task. As I mentioned above I don’t believe calendars solve this problem however. What I did instead is introduce certain modifiers to task priorities that increase or decrease the values over time. This makes it possible for certain tasks to bubble up to the top over others eventually, based on their urgency or how long they’ve been in the queue. Others would sink to the bottom if I postponed them too many times (indicating they’re not really that important anyway).
Of course all this needs automation to be practical. It’s probably easier to show than explain, so I made a quick demo of the main elements of it: http://flowtree.wix.com/home#!demo/s989p
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this – do you see any drawbacks with taking this approach?