Hi, my name is Polina, and I've been applying Agile and Scrum frameworks to my personal projects and goals for the last 10 years. It worked incredibly well, despite contradicting almost every productivity advice you hear on the internet and self help books. I've been able to apply Agile to a lot of projects over the last decade. I started applying it when I was working in a startup. Then I transitioned into grad school and used it to finish it earlier. Then I used Agile to transition careers.
I also used it for fun personal projects such as planning a wedding, renovating a house, planning international trips. I used it to move to a different country. Two times, and I also used it to start two companies, prepare for a baby, just to name a few. And I think I've done it enough times in different contexts to really tell you that it works, and I find it to be much more enjoyable. and lightweight compared to a lot of other goal setting techniques and frameworks that you hear about.
And applying Agile to personal projects and goals is what I'm talking about on this channel. And today I want to introduce you to the foundation of it all, to the foundation of Agile, where it all begins. Today, I'm going to introduce you to the idea of backlog. In the software development world, it's called product backlog, but we are not products, we are humans. So let's call it from now on, just a backlog.
By the end of the video, you'll have a clear understanding on what a backlog is and where you can begin applying this idea to your life if you want to start experimenting with Agile. I'll talk about how backlog is your way out from chaotic and reactive lifestyle that you might be living.
I definitely used to be in that camp where you run in circles, you have a never ending to do list, you check things off, the action is happening, but at the end of the day, A week, a month, a year, you don't really see something substantial, something of value that you've produced. And it's definitely frustrating because the effort went into this, your hours went into this, your mental health went into this. But The output, something that you can say, Hey, this is what they've made, is low.
And Agile is definitely something that shifted it for me and hopefully it will give you some solutions on how to see meaningful progress in your life, not just checking off a bunch of to do items. We all have a very limited amount of time to dedicate to our projects, goals, initiatives, interests, hobbies. I would say it's one to two hours a day. That's the absolute maximum.
Even if you are self employed, your time is still eaten up by a lot of administrative tasks, emails, meetings, dealing with clients, all of that. If you have a full time job, well, that is up at least eight hours of your day. Not to count commute, eating, showering, all of that. Most of us have no more than an hour to be realistic. An hour of focused time per day to dedicate to our own goals and projects. That's how little time we have. So it makes sense.
to spend it on things that truly matter on quality goals and projects. So we should be really careful about selecting goals and projects and initiatives and hobbies that we commit ourselves to because we have so little time. We always have more ideas on how we can spend our time than the time available. So unlimited ideas, limited amount of time. How do we choose? We need to measure the quality of all these candidates that we have for our time, for all these ideas and projects.
And how do they measure the quality of ideas? The same way we measure the quality of pretty much anything else in our life, we measure it with time. How well does it hold with time? In my opinion, quality is always a function of time. You can't call something high quality if it falls apart after a few uses. How about ideas? Let's talk about books. What are considered high quality books? The ones that last with time. That's why we have classic literature. It was relevant 200 years ago.
It was relevant 100 years ago. It was relevant 50 years ago. It's still relevant today and chances are it's still going to be relevant 100 years from now. So the longer it was relevant before this point, the more it will be relevant after this point. Now let's look at our ideas and goals and we can compare it to the classic literature example that I just gave. If you have an idea and if it feels exciting and promising at the moment, it's fine. It's great. They all do.
But if you let some time pass, let's say, if you had an idea six months ago. And it felt exciting and it felt exciting three months later and it felt exciting yesterday and it feels exciting and promising today. It's a good idea. But most of the ideas, they feel exciting, promising, amazing, fun, easy today. But even if we slip on it, even one night, tomorrow is not going to be as rosy as it was yesterday. Quality is a function of time.
We can't really measure the quality of idea going forward, looking into the future. We can't predict how excited we'll be about this project six months from now, but we can look back and see how excited we were about it six months ago, three months ago, today. Again, you don't have to wait six months, can be longer, it can be shorter, but there should be some time built into the evaluation of the quality of the goal. Because quality is a function of time, always.
I invite you to look at it as a relief. That most of our ideas are fleeting, they don't hold with time. It's good news. It means that it allows us to save time. Only if we have the praxis of recording all these ideas somewhere, hint, backlog, and then allowing some time to go by and then reviewing them. That's the number one time management hack that Agile gives you is that don't be reactive. Don't jump into things and opportunities. Most of them are stupid.
Most of them are not worth your time and you will clearly see it if you just allow for some time to go by. I believe pursuing goals, finishing projects, it's already hard in itself. It requires Some discipline, a lot of time, a lot of mental resources. It's already hard and we should really use this resources, limited resources on the things that count. And the only way to find out if it counts is to pass it through the test of time. Let the ideas age.
and see if they get better with age or they start to stink. Same with wine. Gets good wine, gets better with age. Bad wine, goes sour, turns into vinegar. And now, good news. In Agile and Scrum, there is a tool designed specifically for this purpose. It's called Backlog. It's a place, a document, where you record All your ideas, all your projects, all your initiatives and let them age. You don't jump into doing them. It's, I like to look at it as a vault.
Something that is reliably holding all your ideas. It's protecting them. You will not forget them. They will not be lost. It's there so that your brain can relax and focus on the thing. That you need to focus on today and it allows ideas to age and reveal its true value. For example, the idea to start this YouTube channel has been on my backlog for the last, I would say five years. It aged really well. I never removed it. I always wanted to do it.
I was excited about it five years ago when they put it into my backlog. I was excited three years ago, two years ago. And the moment that I started this YouTube channel, I was still excited. And now that it's going, I'm still excited. It never lost its relevance. Of course, you don't have to wait five years to do things, but even given a couple of For emotions to cool down is a great idea. Backlog is how you prevent yourself from being reactive.
Throughout the Sprint, you are only allowed to put things in and never to put things out. It's kind of like a savings account where you're only allowed to withdraw money on specific days of the month. You are allowed unlimited contributions, so you can put money in, but you can only withdraw them. Let's say on the 31st of the month, backlog, you're allowed to put things in, but you're only allowed to pull things out when you're doing sprint planning.
Once a month in my case, because three weeks is my preferred length of a sprint, I recommend to keep sprints at least two weeks long. From two to six weeks is a sweet spot. So what ends up happening is that the ideas and goals that I choose to pursue are at least one month old. If I didn't lose the level of enthusiasm throughout the sprint, it's likely a good idea and I should pursue it.
However, what ends up happening, and that's my favorite part of it all, is that when I'm doing my sprint planning, I end up deleting a bunch of things that I have entered because They lost its relevance. And at this moment, I realized how much time I saved by not jumping into something that lost its relevance. so quickly and my life would have felt a lot more chaotic because I would be jumping from one idea to another, to another. And that's how it used to be before I discovered Agile.
That's what I talked about in the introduction to this video is that you feel busy, you feel this frantic energy. You're having a to do list that is a mile long and you're checking it off and then like, You don't really see meaningful progress because half of the ideas that you were reacting to, they lost relevance. So by the end of the year, you don't find those things meaningful at all. And yet you spend so much time doing those things. So the backlog is what prevents you.
from wasting your time on things that don't matter. So now when I select goals from my backlog once a month, it allows me to live a more intentional life. My actions have a higher degree of collaboration. There is no unnecessary doing. Okay, now let's turn into the practical side of it all. How do you actually implement it? If you worked in an agile environment, you are probably used to the idea that Backlog is the first column on your scrum board. That's how it's usually done.
That's what you see in a lot of agile project management tools such as Trello, Asana, I don't like it. I think it's really, really not the best scenario. I like to keep my backlog separate from my scrum board. I find it to be very tempting. It's like having candies on your countertop in your kitchen. You walk by it a hundred times a day. You look at this candy and it's just very, very tempting thing to grab one and go. Same with backlog.
All of this exciting, shiny ideas are staring at you all day long. Um, I just find it It's too much temptation, unnecessary struggle. I just remove it, remove it from the scrum board. What I do is I have a notes file on my phone. So I have apple products. I have iphone and laptop. That is an apple product and it comes with the notes. It's already installed and the best part is that it syncs across all of my devices. And I just create a note called backlog. I pin it to the top of my notes files.
Most of the ideas happen when you're on the go. It's never when you're working on your computer. It's always when you're doing groceries, when you're doing your dishes, when you're walking your kids or your dogs. So it has to be somewhere where you can. easily access it when you're on the go. Just a simple text file that is synced between your phone and your laptop or computer. And I've tried all the things for the backlog. I've tried paper. I've tried Moleskine notebooks.
I've tried sticky notes. I've tried different productivity apps to do apps. All of that, and I just find the node, the simple text file to be the best, the simplest, the cleanest solution. So how does it look like? So first of all, let me tell you, it's going to look messy, especially throughout the sprint and it's okay. And it's how it's supposed to be. When you put things in, it doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be in full sentences. It doesn't have to have all the context.
So imagine you're on the go, you're at the grocery store and you, you have an idea, you quickly record it. And then you continue doing your grocery shopping. Of course, you don't have time to organize it, color code it, and you don't have to do it. I'll show you an example of how mine looks like throughout the sprint. Okay. You'll see it's in, it's all over the place. It has things written in English, in Russian, in some things are in bold, some things are not. And there's no logic behind it.
It's gonna look messy and that's okay. That's how it's supposed to be. It just needs to be easily accessible. Again, the main purpose of a backlog is to prevent reacting to the idea. Any idea during the sprint is a destruction. I don't care how good it is. Everything looks important, shiny, urgent during the sprint, but it's just a destruction. So a new shiny idea goes into the backlog, it ages, and if it's a good idea, then you Choose it for the next sprint.
When it's time to do sprint planning, that's when you review your backlog. That's when you can organize it, make it more or less understandable, fix the format, maybe add some details, but I usually spend no more than 10 minutes on that. It's cleaning things up during sprint planning. And the biggest chunk of this time will be you just deleting things, which is perfect. And now you can start highlighting sprint candidates, ideas, projects that are competing. This is a competition.
Your ideas have to compete. So you select your candidates, you allow for some time to pass, you think about it, and then you can choose your next sprint goal. And then you do some other things, which I'll talk about in another video. But that's kind of the gist of it all. There's going to be a different video on sprint planning process. The actionable point that you can take today is to start the backlog file. Start a simple text document that is easily synced between your phone and your laptop.
And call it a backlog. Save it. Pin it. Make it easily accessible. The level of difficulty you're looking for is, when you're walking and you have an idea, you can stop quickly, write it down and continue walking. It should be easy and convenient. So don't go for some productivity apps or any of that because then they will require a certain level of details. to be entered in a certain format. It will complicate things and so you will not use it. Allow ideas to age.
Delete the ones that went sour and keep the ones that age well with time. Good cheese and wine get better with age. So the same principle should apply to the ideas and goals that you pursue. Listen, we all understand that we shouldn't spend our hard earned money on things that break quickly. We want to buy high quality things that last a long time, but our time is more valuable than money. So we should be even more careful about how we choose to spend our time.
And It's not that we have to compete for ideas, it's that ideas have to compete for our time. And I'm fully aware that the idea of waiting for a little while is very counterintuitive, goes against everything you read on Twitter, self help books, YouTube videos. It's definitely not your hustle culture bro, rah rah rah advice, but I've been doing it for the last 10 years, and Can't see a scenario where I would go back. I know that you're always told to seize the moment. Act now.
Don't procrastinate. And I think it's a good idea for us people who are probably realizing that time is limited to step out of this productivity hysteria, this belief that everything is urgent, ASAP, and realize that no, not everything is urgent. Not everything is important. Most of our projects, goals, initiatives can wait a month. We will not ruin our life by waiting a few weeks, but it will give us enough level of confidence to realize that this is something that we truly care about.
And it will prevent us from this chaotic, historical, burned out state of existence that we so often find ourselves in these days. I can guarantee that if you try it, And embrace it, embrace the concept of letting your ideas age and develop with time. You will be doing things that truly matter instead of doing the hard work on the ideas that are just fleeting ideas that are not worth your time.
I'm giving you the tool, a filter to pass your ideas through to realize ones are important and which ones are not. And it will save you. so much time, energy, and sanity. If you don't jump into action mode on every single thing that comes from your brain. In the next video, we'll talk about what to do next, what to do with the backlog.
Once you have a, have it established, how to select your sprint candidates, sprint goals and how to properly structure them so that you have a higher likelihood of completion of those goals in the next video. a sprint timeline. Thank you so much and see you next time.