Applying Agile to New Year's Resolutions - Part 2

Hi there. Welcome to part two of setting new year's resolutions using agile. Today we'll talk about sprints, sprint capacity, and backlog review. Let's go.   Sprints & picking sprint duration  One of the problems that I see with the traditional New Year's goal setting and resolutions is that a year is too long of a time. you don't feel the deadline approaching. You don't feel the sense of urgency, and without the sense of urgency we tend to not take those goals in resolutions seriously. There is always tomorrow, there is always next month when we can start doing this activity or goal that we set for ourselves. . Just think back to the time when you were in school or university and imagine someone giving you an assignment with the deadline that is one year from. , would you really start working on this assignment immediately or would you postpone it till 10 months from now, or even 11 months from now? I bet it's the second. You wouldn't start working on it until you. The deadline approaching and a sense of urgency at that point, this assignment will become important and you will actually start doing the work. That's where the idea of sprints come into place. Under Agile Sprint is a fixed time box. Duration of time, usually quite short, where you create something, ship it to the. See the results, review the feedback, and then do it again. Agile projects are broken down into sprints or iterations, short, repeatable faces. The number and length of the sprint should be determined at the beginning of the project, and each sprint should result in a draft, prototype or workable version of the final deliverable. That's the definition that I found on the internet, and I think it's quite accurate. from My experience working in different scrum teams building software, sprints are usually somewhere between two to six weeks, and I think or five, six are usually pushing it a bit too far. But I would say two to three weeks are usually the most. So 2, 3, 4 weeks is usually quite short, but long enough to actually produce an iteration of a product. So the reason why they're short is that you want to see the deadline approach and you want to feel it. and that creates that sense of urgency that motivates you to actually show up for your work and do the things every day. Plus when it's short, it prevents you from over complicated and over. So when you only plan your workload for the upcoming two to four weeks, there is not much stuff that you can cramp in there. And that's very beautiful because Agile doesn't really like to spend too much time planning and strategizing and all of that, agile is all about getting your hand story, creating something, shipping into the world, and then waiting for the world to respond. And then based on this response, again, getting your hand story, creating another iteration of a product and then shipping it again. So Agile is definitely not. . Big strategy, big planning 50 page business plan, none of that. It's very practical. So how does it apply to the New Year's resolutions? I think we shouldn't set resolutions for the entire. We don't feel the deadline when it's 12 months ahead. There is no urgency. So we need to make the timeline shorter. It should be short enough to feel the deadline approaching, but long enough to see some first results of your. . So to get that feedback loop going, you need to produce something, you need to see the first results. Then you need to review it using the sprint review process, and then adjust again. So short enough to feel the urgency long enough to see the first. It's really up to you how long you want your sprints to be. and it's quite different if it's a project based goal that you are thinking about, or if it's more like habits and systems. When I was reviewing what I wanted to do for the next year, my New Year's resolutions for more systems and habit based, and it takes longer to establish those, I decided for this particular new Year's resolution type of goals, I would stick to three months period. I think it's long enough to build the system, build the habit, and make it automatic more or less. , and so I picked three months, but you can pick any amount of time that you want. I wouldn't go more than three months because then you lose the sense of urgency. So I would recommend anywhere from three weeks to three months. It's really up to you and what your goals are. So when I'm thinking about my new resolutions, they're not for 2023. They are for the first quarter of 2023. So for the first three months, and then after the three months are up, I'll pause. I'll do the spring review, which I talked about last time, and then evaluate the and adjust how I do things, or maybe even decide to set the next goal or the next resolution. If I feel like the first habit that I was working on in Q1 is already established. It's automatic. I feel confident about it, and then I can move on to the next thing. To sum up a year is too long of a timeframe to set your goals for. I recommend choosing a shorter duration for your goal set and timeframe. Call it a sprint. Pick the duration that works for. Is it a month? Is it three months? Depending on the type of goals that you want to set, really think about it. But pick a duration and set the goal just for this duration. The main criteria for choosing this sprint duration is that you should feel the sense of urgency. And it's different for people, right? So some people if you say something is due the month, they will fill this urgency, but some people don't. So they need the shorter timeframe. If you don't feel the sense of urgency, probably the timeline that you chose is to lawn. You need to reduce. It should be short enough for you to feel the sense of urgency, but long enough for you to produce some measurable results. Let's say you want to go to the gym more often than the sprint duration of one week. Sure. It. short enough to give you the sense of urgency, but it's not long enough to produce any measurable results. So if you go to the gym for a week, not a lot will change but if you go for three weeks, then you will start seeing your first results. Don't plan the entire year Now that you've picked your sprint duration, the tendency can be to divide your year into equal chunks and plan out your goals for the entire year. And this is a very common mistake because that's how we've been conditioned to think about planning and personal product. . However, it is the opposite of what agile framework recommends. Under Agile, all this extra planning is a waste of time because it's not based on any learnings from interacting with the real world. Under Agile, you would want to focus on planning just the first. and you don't want to overwhelm yourself with deciding on what you want to be working on in August next year because your ideas of what the life will bring and how it'll look like in August next year are just speculations. And the more plans you create on how things should be in August, what progress you should be making by August, the more you have these ideas, the speculations, the more resentful and bitter you will be when it's not gonna go that way, and most likely it's not. You will not be flexible and open-minded enough to adjust your approach, to pivot, to innovate, to come up with a different plan, to learn from the reality, to learn from your efforts, from your sprints. You will have this very rigid idea of how things should be and when the reality is not. Fit in this idea. That's when all the suffering comes up. When you create this long-term elaborate plans, first of all, you wasted a bunch of time and the the biggest downside of that is that you will be stuck in this imaginary world that you created for yourself when you were setting up New Year's goals. And because you will be stuck in this world. You will not see a lot of opportunities, a lot of learnings that come up from the real world. when you pick the duration for the sprint, don't plan out the entire year. Just focus on the first sprint because then you will do the sprint review. You will learn something new that you don't know right now, and then your approach should be based on the learnings up to that point, not up to today. Okay. Sprint capacity Now let's discuss another problem that I see with the traditional goal setting. So last week we talked about that oftentimes when we set goals, we are not learning from the past. We are not learning from our previous attempts. But another problem that we have is that, sometimes we set goals as. We don't have a job, we don't have a family, we don't have any other commitments. We are not human beings. We don't get tired and it's like tomorrow we'll wake up and it's gonna be another version of us that has all this extra time that doesn't have any commitments, doesn't have any family, doesn't have doctor's appointments, doesn't need to clean the house, doesn't need to do dishes. And no wonder we fail at our New Year's resolutions because that image is not realistic. We wake up, we still have family, we still have kids, we still have a job to go to. And our resolutions did not account for that. That's where the scrum concept of sprint capacity comes into play. So when you decide to plan out your first sprint, the first thing you do is you evaluate your sprint capacity, You open up your calendar for the upcoming and you look at all the commitments that you already have, all the deadlines, all the big work projects, all the trips that you are taking, all the doctor's appointments, family coming over, friends coming over holidays all of that. And there are two things that you want to understand when looking at your calendar for the upcoming sprint. The first one is how much time do you realistically have to dedicate to your New Year's resolutions for that upcoming. . And the second thing is, what are the areas of your life that are represented in your pre-established commitments for the first print? So what is the area or is there an area that is overly represented in your calendar right now? And the first question, how much time you have available allows you to have realistic expectations of how much you can do in the first print. When it comes to New Year's goals and resolutions. It'll allow you to pick the goal or a habit of an appropriate. The second question, will help you choose the goal of resolution that will balance out your life so that. You prevent burnout and your life is not skewed towards just one area. For example, if you have two big work projects and a work trip in your first sprint, then you don't want to set a resolution for the sprint that is work related. You want to balance things out to avoid burnout. So maybe you can focus on a health goal or a family goal. . So there are four broad categories that I look at. The first one is career and growth. So those are usually the activities, habits, systems that are related to income generating activities. The second group is health and fitness. Third key relationships, and that includes family and close friends. And the fourth one is the quality of life. , which means doing high quality leisure activities that, create good memories and just brings color and spice to life. So that we are not reduced to watching Netflix every single evening for enter. . So these are my favorite four categories. Feel free to use them as well. When I looked at my calendar for the first three months of 2023, because three months is the duration that I picked, I realized that all my commitments that I have on my calendar are work. So for the first print, I decided to pick a goal that is related to my health. And here's another thing that you can do. So when you look at your calendar and you see that you have something major, going on in your work, for example, so let's say you have a CPA exam or cfa, or a bar exam, whatever, like a very difficult exam that you need to study for. You see it, and there are two ways that you can go when picking up the focus for your New Year's resolutions for this period of life. you can either balance things out by picking quality of life activity, or you can pick a habit or a resolution that's gonna help you achieve that goal better, faster, easier. If you know that for the next three months you will be studying very hard, you can ask yourself, okay, how can I make it easier for. you can focus on eating nutritious meals because you know that without that New Year's resolution, you will be relying on takeout and it's gonna cause all the blood sugar spikes and you don't want to have that. Or maybe you want to focus on your sleep because then you'll have more energy to study and therefore making it. Or you can say, okay, it'll require a lot of my cognitive resources and what can I do in order to make sure that my cognitive resources are in top shape? And here you can pick a resolution to stop using social media because it's scientifically proven and I know it from my own experience. The moment you stop using social media, especially Instagram, TikTok, that is designed to shorten your attention span, the moment you stop using the services, then your ability to focus on difficult information increases exponentially. So basically you can pick a goal that will help you achieve your main commitment faster and easier. Backlog review So thus far you've selected your sprint duration, calculated your sprint capacity, and you've picked a focus for your upcoming sprint. Now is the time to do a backlog. If you've listened to my last episode and you've done the homework, you should have a backlog file and different ideas recorded in that, in no particular order, not organized, not color coded, none of that. It's just a placeholder for you to record all the ideas for New Year's goals and re. Now that you know how much time you have for the upcoming sprint and your focus area, you can start moving things around in your backlog. Move goals that are aligned with your focus area to the top of the. If there is a goal that you really want to do, but realize that it'll require more time than you have available, think about how you can break it down to fit your time budget. Let's say that you really want to deep clean your house, declutter it. It got out of control. So you want to deep clean and declutter the entire house. But when you looked at your commitments for the first print, you realize that, you know what, I don't have enough time to declutter and deep clean the entire house. Okay, how can you break it down? Maybe for the first sprint, you can deep clean the most high traffic room or area in your house and just focus on that. And that's gonna be your first sprint goal. Or maybe if you want to create longlasting change, maybe you can focus on setting up systems in place. What kind of weekly rituals, habits you should implement in this area to make sure that it's kept clean and organized, and then you focus your first. on creating this habits and systems, and then you move to another area of the house. The last step for this week is to reorganize your backlog and move the most suitable candidates for the first print to the top of the list. Hopefully you'll have a clear idea of what your first sprints goals or resolutions should be. When you have to many goals to choose from If you have too many ideas, but not enough time to do them all, spend some time thinking about what you should focus on. Again, you have a whole week go for a. Think about it. How I usually decide on what to focus on is I ask myself a question, which activity will bring the most strategic byproducts? Which goal, if accomplished, will benefit me in other areas of. , or as I said before, if I have a very major work launch or work goal, then I ask myself, which habit or activity will help me achieve that major goal that I have in mind? But if I don't have anything like that, then I pick a goal that creates the most strategic byproducts. As I've mentioned before on this podcast, you never just achieve one goal. You always create strategic byproducts when you are achieving this goal. For example, when you exercise, it also impacts your mood for the day and your product. . When you set a New Year's resolution to do something every morning, for example, you want to journal or read every single morning. The strategic byproduct of that is that you are establishing a morning routine without even knowing it. And we all know that a very good morning routine can be very impactful. When you decide to eat healthier, it affects your mood, it affects your energy levels, and it also saves you money. So the strategic byproduct of eating and healthy are in all the other areas of your life. When you decide to fix your sleeping schedule, there are a lot of strategic byproducts from health to self discipline, to mood to your appetite, your relationships. So if you have too many goals to pick from, pick the ones that have the most strategic byproducts. Homework So this is it for today. We've talked about choosing your sprint duration, calculating your sprint capacity. Pick in the sprint focus, and doing the backlog review. Highlighting the most suitable candidates for the first Sprint's goals and potentially choosing the one that you want to focus on. Next week in our final episode, we will go over the last step of setting up New Year's resolutions. Using Agile framework, so definitely subscribe to get that episode. If you want to launch something next year Also, if you went through this exercises and you know that you want to focus on launching a business, a product, a service, a YouTube channel, or a podcast next year, so basically launching something that. Create into the world. I am inviting you to the upcoming workshop that I will be hosting this month. It's called Three Steps to Launching Your Digital Product or Service in three months or less. I will be covering how you can apply the best product management principles, as well as agile framework to launch in your creation quickly. It does not have to take years to launch your product or service. And I'll be happy to explain what you can do instead. The link is in the show notes. It's absolutely free, and you can start applying the tools that I will be teaching immediately. So definitely sign up for the workshop If you can't attend the live. Still sign up and I'll send you the recording. I think it's gonna be very valuable. That's it for today. Have a great week, and I'll talk to you next week. Bye.