Hi there. It's this time of year where a lot of us are thinking about the new Year goals and resolutions. And I think it's a wonderful time of year to think about it, but there are some common problems that people face with the traditional way of doing New Year resolutions or setting new year goals. I decided to dedicate the rest of December episodes to addressing these problems and actually thinking through ways how we still embrace this vibe of new beginnings this motivation that is in the air, but maybe do it a little bit smarter and apply agile principles to how we set our new year goals and new year resolutions. Let's go.
Welcome to the Monthly Method Podcast. This is a show for solopreneurs, creators and artists who have a burning desire to launch a project. This is for a project that is not urgent, but truly important. The one your best life depends on. Your host, Paulina B is a certified scrum master. She brings a proven record of launching successful projects, both professional and personal.
You will hear about tested techniques that lead to calm, consistency and results. Stay tuned to turn your idea into reality one month at a time.
In this first episode, let's look at the first set of problems that we face with New Year goals. The number one problem that they see when thinking about New Year goals and basically analyzing my own goal setting in the past is that it looks like this goals and resolutions stay the same year after year. So it's basically a set of two to three goals or resolutions that you keep repeating. For a lot of people it may be. To increase their income or lose weight or go to the gym more often or maybe read more books and you kind of cycle through this goals year over year. And the FiNet thing, and I've never thought about it like that.
Why do they stay the same? Why is the formula. Always the same. Why don't we learn from the previous year? And even though the intention might be the same, to be more active or increase our income or whatever, but why don't we learn from the previous attempts and maybe phrase the goal a little bit better?
So that's my problem. Number one is that these goals stay the same.
Problem number two that comes from problem number one is that we are not learning from our own experience and from our attempts to achieve these goals. So there are no learnings, no feedback loops, nothing. So every year on December 31st, as if we just woke up and we have no history of achieving this goal in the past. And we just choose the same definitions, the same phrase for the next year. And the third problem that have is that I don't think that we spent enough time thinking about what to focus on for that coming.
Usually it looks like on December 31st at 11:40 PM when it's about time to raise your glasses and welcome the new year. You kind of scramble something and you're online saying like, yeah, I wanna go to the gym every day, or, yeah, I wanna read 50 books this year. And then you kind of like spontaneously decide that it's gonna be your new year resolution.
and for something like that, for something that you are committing for the upcoming year, it's not enough thinking and it's not enough analysis. That might be one of the biggest reasons why we are not succeeding at New Year resolutions.
So this are the first set of problems that I see with New York goals. And let's look at how we can apply Agile and in particular scrum ceremonies to fix these problems. And. Do this process a little bit better, a little bit more effective,
and the first thing I want to look at is the idea of sprint retrospective. Or some people call it sprint review.
If I were to boil down the agile to its pure essence is that under agile, you want to embrace the idea of continuous learning, continuous improvement, and this continuous feedback loop. From the real life, from the real customers, from the real situation.
And once you get this feedback, you adjust your approach and then you do it again. And then again, you look at the feedback and you do it again. So you do something for a short period of time. We call it a sprint.
Then you stop. You pause, you review your results so far, and you analyze what worked, what didn't, and then you change your approach based on your analysis of this feedback, and then you create the plan for your next sprint based on this feedback that you received last sprint.
So you always create your next sprint based on the learnings from the previous sprint. So you never just do sprint planning from scratch without analyzing what happened in the past.
So how can you apply the idea of Sprint with respective when thinking about the new year?
First of all, I want you to spend some time on. Focusing on the done list, not on the to-do list or all the items that are left undone. What were you able to accomplish last year? What was done? Focus on the things that you've created, made, manifested into existence from all the areas of your life.
Work, health, home, renovations, maybe community service. Every single area of your life. So what I did for example, is that I walked around my house and noticed all the things that I've created over the last year. So Last December, we moved into a brand new house and there was nothing.
So basically we had to do some renovations, buy all the furniture do all the things. And even just walking through the house and appreciating how far we've come is a very good activity because you kind of tend to forget about all the little things that you've done throughout the. Is there a new product that you've launched?
Maybe a new business? What about some parties or dinners that you've hosted? Events that you created for your friends or for your work? . If you are having a hard time remembering all of it, I recommend just going back in your calendar back to January and just scrolling through and seeing what events you had.
If you're using time blocking, that's even better. So you can see what you focused on in January, February, and kind of remember how many things you have created this year.
This celebration time allows you to reinforce the idea that you can make things, that you can create things that you are capable of doing all of this, because it might be that right now you don't feel that great, maybe you are. Maybe you are under the weather and you just don't feel that great.
You don't feel that good about yourself. And doing this exercise of just going back and seeing how much you were able to create actually improves your self image, how you look at your results and your life. So instead of focusing on what hasn't been done, it's nice idea to first focus on what has been done and what you were able to create.
So that's step number one. And then you can apply the traditional. Retrospective template. There are basically two templates that you can use. All of them have three columns. So template number one is that you grab a piece of paper and you divide it into three columns. The first one is what went well?
The second one, what didn't go well? And a third one, how can I improve next year? So that's template number one. My favorite template is actually template number two, and that's also three columns. The first one is continue. Second column is stop, and the third column is start.
Basically, you look at everything you've done last year and you processes and your systems, and you ask yourself. What worked and what should they continue doing? So that's the first column, continue. The second one is stop. What are some of the harmful behaviors or habits that you have that you should stop doing?
And the third one is start. Maybe there is something missing in your life that you should start doing. It's just three columns and you focus on filling this out and take some time to do it. Don't just think about it, actually write it down.
Take a day to think about it. Go for a walk, come back, continue filling out this table. And Really spend time analyzing your previous year because it's gonna be the foundation of your successful 2023.
I think you should never set new goals without reviewing your. Thus far, there is so much to learn from your own history, from your own attempts at achieving specific goals, from your own successes, and from your own failures.
Sometimes you can learn so much from succeeding in one area of your life and then transfer this lessons into another area of your. And don't use the cookie cutter templates for achieving your goals. The more customized the approach is to your unique situation and personality and your own history, the more likely it is to succeed.
So instead of buying another self-help book or watching another motivational video on how to achieve whatever you are trying to achieve or how other people achieved what you're trying to achieve, your time will be better spent. If you sit down and analyze your own life and your own behavior and your own circumstances.
What things worked, what didn't? What can you do better? And as I said before, it's probably not the first time you are setting a specific New Year resolution. As I said, from my own experience, it's usually. Two or three goals that you keep cycling through. So there is a very high chance that you've set this goal before. Maybe not last year, maybe the year before.
Sit down and analyzed when you set this goal, what worked, what didn't? What do you think can be improved?
And then you create your custom approach to this goal for the next year based on this findings.
I love to tell my clients to put on a scientist's hat. I tell them, Hey, imagine that you are in a lab. You are the main scientist of your life, and you treat your every year or every sprint as an experiment.
As a scientist, if you think about it, you run an experiment based on a set of assumptions, and then
you looked at the data, at the real data and you analyzed, okay, what from this experiment, what worked, what didn't, and how can you improve your next experiment? You can agree that you wouldn't be a very good scientist if you repeated the same experiments year over year over year without accounting for the findings from the previous experiments
So in order to be a very good scientist of your life, you need to take the time to analyze your findings and plan your next experiment based on the findings of the last experiment.
So that's the sales pitch, to actually sit down and analyze your last year, analyze which areas you succeeded in and what worked. Why did you succeed in this areas? What were some of the methods or disciplines that you developed in order to get to those results? And then look at the areas that weren't that successful.
Why do you think it was? And then come up with ideas of how you can improve next.
And then the second step is to create a backlog file if you haven't created it yet. it's a simple text file that is ideally synced between your phone and your laptop. You call it a backlog, and you record all the actionable items from your sprint retrospective into the backlog file.
You can look at the columns start and continue. Okay. And those are usually the action items, and you move them to the backlog file. And right now, there's absolutely no need to act on any of these items.
No need to organize them, make them pretty or any of that. No need to create color coded calendars productivity systems. None of that. All you need to do is to have a safe. For you to capture all this ideas so that you're not storing them in your brain and you have somewhere safe to keep them.
And then your brain is free to brainstorm further, to brainstorm deeper, and come up with even more creative ideas.
So Here's the homework that I want to offer you for this week is to, number one, celebrate what you have achieved this year. Focus on the things that you were able to create, make. Successfully complete, and it's gonna be very useful in the year review process because you want to draw as many lessons from your successes that you can then apply to other areas of your life.
So definitely go and find out as many win as possible. Because your successes and your wins have the keys, the magic keys, to unlocking the success in other areas of your life. Because if there is a strategy that worked really well for you to finish that work project, there is a high chance. That the same strategy will work for you in order to achieve a health goal or something else.
Celebrate what you have achieved this year. Number two, do the 2022 year. , what worked, what didn't, what can be improved next year. Number three, record action items in the new text file called backlog.
So whenever you are done reviewing, your year, record all the action items or all the ideas that you have about how you can improve your life next year into this text file called backlog. It doesn't have to be fancy.
It's just a text file that is synced between your laptop and your phone. I have iPhone, so I just use their notes. App that is installed on all the iPhones, so you don't even have to download it. You have it, it's there.
And then task number four is to continue recording any potential action items throughout the week. the more you think about your previous year, the more you kind of think about what you want to do next year, you'll have more ideas and you will have them throughout the day.
You will go to the grocery store, you will have an. You will be driving home, you'll have an idea, you will be watching a movie, you'll have an idea. So they'll be popping into your brain and it's beautiful. That's kind of the amazing thing of how our brains can work on the specific task on the background.
So just have an easily accessible file. A file on your phone that is sent to your laptop is, in my experience, the most convenient way to do it. Just record it there. All you need to do is just maybe pause your movie for a second, write down your idea in your notes file, and then continue watching your movie.
No need to organize it yet. Do anything about it yet, just store it there for the time.
I really hope you take the time to do this process.
I cannot recommend it enough. Just trust me. If you spend time reviewing what worked and what didn't last year, you will set yourself up for a much greater success next year.
I also want to invite you to the free workshop that I will be hosting at the end of this month that will be focusing on the three steps to launch in your digital product or service in three months or less. If you want to start a business, launch a podcast or a YouTube channel, start an ET shop next year.
Or anything along those lines, I'll be sharing practical lessons on how you can do that in three months or less. I will be sharing the lessons that I have learned from launching different products and services in very short periods of time both when I was a product manager.
Working for someone as well as being on my own and launching different products, businesses, as well as helping other people launch, their product and services from consultant businesses to online courses, YouTube channels, podcasts, et cetera. Again, it's absolutely free. I just think that next year, given everything that is going on in the world us having learned from all the layoffs that happened last year, is that probably a pretty good idea to have some site income or a site project, or maybe even become fully self employ.
2023 will be a great year to start something. And my goal is to teach you that it doesn't have to take long. You can apply agile principles and get it quickly and start making sales or getting your first subscribers very quickly.
But if you don't want to launch any specific income generated product or venture or service, you can still apply those principles to any project that you're working on, being renovating the house, finishing your master's degree getting a new job.
are a lot of things that you will learn that you can start applying that same day, so definitely. Come in, check it out. I'll be more than happy to see you. It's gonna be my first workshop.
So I'm a bit nervous, but at the same time, I can't wait to share some of the things that I have learned.
The link is additional, but for now, have a great week and part number two of this series is coming next week.
So stay tuned to hear more about New Year resolutions and how you can apply Agile to make it much more effective
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