Daily Standup for Personal Productivity

Hello guys! Today, we are talking about Daily Stand-ups. It's one of the core meetings in scrum teams. Today, I want to give you some ideas on how you can bring the core principles of the daily stand-ups to your own personal life, to your own productivity as an individual. Okay, let's go. One of the core meetings in scrum teams is a daily stand-up. That's when they get together ideally, everyone is standing up and they quickly go through these three questions. Number one, what did they do yesterday? Number two, what am I going to do today? And number three, is there anything blocking me? This meeting lasts 15 minutes max. So it's supposed to be very short and concise. That's actually the reason why everyone should be standing up so that the meeting is quick and dynamic, that no one rumbles on. The logic is that you get tired a lot faster when you're standing up then when you're sitting down. So that's why it's called a daily standup. The goal of this meeting is to sync the team and eliminate much of emails and slack messages throughout the day. If you know that you have a daily meeting with your entire team, you can just focus on your work and save all the questions and updates for the daily stand-ups. And it also eliminates those traditional long update meetings once a week or once every two weeks that is so commonly held outside the scrum teams. The scrum teams choose to have short meetings but more often. And the logic here is to not keep everyone accountable, but more or less eliminate any blockers that might be blocking each particular individual. So question number three, is there anything blocking me is kind of the most important question in my opinion, because it allows the team to move fast and not waste a bunch of time just waiting for someone to respond to emails or slack messages or what have you. So, let's see how you as an individual can adopt very similar questions to your own life and to your own productivity. Let's start this question number one, what did I do yesterday? I personally use this question as an opportunity to quickly update my project management software or my to-do apps. I would just go and quickly update all the tasks that I've completed for the day. I can quickly go through my schedule and cross out everything that I have done. So kind of like a quick cleanup of all the things that you've done. Move them from one column to another if you're using more of our Kanban approach. So quick cleanup to make sure that your productivity system, whatever you're using, is up-to-date. The second question is, what am I doing today? This is a great question to ask yourself every single day. This question gives you an opportunity to look at your plan, kind of like your big vision plan, maybe your weekly plan. If you're following the Monthly Method and see what you can do today to get closer to the goals that you have on your weekly plan. Again, the top priority tasks should be the ones that come from your weekly plan or from your big vision for the whole year. So, this is a great opportunity to prioritize the tasks. This is a great way to look at your schedule. Realistically, see how many meetings you have today and have a realistic understanding of how much work you can get done today. Sometimes, it's not a lot of free time that you have available on that particular day. For me, some of my days are just filled with meetings and there is no way I can spend enough time to even write these podcast episodes, brainstorm them because I simply don't have enough time during the day. So the question, what am I doing today? Before you answer this question, you should look at your schedule and quickly realize what's realistic for you today and what's not. Another thing that I suggest you do is of course time blocking. So after you look at your schedule at all the commitments that you already have. And after you looked at your high vision goals and drew some tasks from those lists, now it's time to time block your day because that's what will guarantee you, that all these tasks will be done. Again, it doesn't have to take a lot of time for me right now. It takes, I don't know, two minutes to time block my entire day. So it's not a huge time commitment on your end, but the return on investment is tremendous. I've done a bunch of episodes on time-blocking, check out the archive for this podcast. And you'll see episodes that have time-blocking in the title. Just go listen to them. And the last question, question number three, that we can borrow from the daily stand-ups, is, is there anything blocking me? I like to rephrase this question, a little bit and ask myself, how can I make it easier for myself to do all the things that I want to get done. Instead of "Is there anything blocking me?" I would ask myself, "how can I make it easier for myself to get everything done?" And there is several things that usually come into mind. The number one, and usually the most important i in any adventure that you're taking is of course the mindset. And that's where I recommend using the 10X Coffee Practice tool. always find that a lot of the struggle and resistance comes from the mindset. And if you fix this piece, it becomes easier. So, 10X Coffee Practice whenever you feel stuck, if it's a difficult task that you want to do, the task that you've been procrastinating on for the longest time, use the 10X Coffee Practice. Check out the monthlymethod.com/guide. You'll be able to download the free PDF guide and it will the Ten X golfer practice on one of the pages. Okay. If I tried the mindset and it's still not getting anything easier, these are some other things that you can do in order to make acting on your goals easier. one is prepping your food the night before. if I know that I'm going to have a busy day tomorrow, one of the best things I can do for myself to make acting on my goals easier is to kind of take care of all the little mundane things for my future self, as much as possible. And one of them is of course food. Food takes a lot of thought and planning if it's not done at the right time. I don't want to make all those decisions tomorrow. Meetings with clients when they have my full-time job and they go to the gym, all of that. It's like, no, I want to decide the night before, pack everything nicely and have it ready for me to go the next day. That's an act of self-care. Another one packing workout clothes the night before. Again, if I have a very busy schedule and I want to go to the gym the next day and I ask myself, how can they make it easier for myself? I know that if I pack everything I need for the gym the night before, it will make going to the gym easier. Another idea asking for help. Not everything needs to be done immediately and not everything needs to be done. I am learning to delegate it as much as possible especially at home. So asking for help, if someone has to cook dinner, other than you ask for help. Another idea giving myself a bit more time. This might make acting on my goals easier for the day. So maybe instead of packing my schedule to the very minute, maybe removing one or two tasks off my plate and just giving myself plenty of time to finish each task, it will make it easier to finish those tasks because I won't feel as stressed out. Another idea of how I can make acting on my goals easier is going to the places and the environments that support this activity. So if you want to do some thoughtful work, brainstorming, strategy work, then probably sitting in your busy living room with the kids running around. It's not ideal. Maybe going to the coffee shop or to the library or to the office or co-working place might be a good idea. It will make acting on your goal a lot easier. Maybe it's not you physically going to another place, maybe it's asking your loved ones to be quiet for an hour or go for a walk or just give you enough time and space to get your work done. And here's the thing you don't have to do all of this planning the morning off. In fact, I prefer to do it the night before and the most successful clients I have prefer to do it the night before too. I do it because I am not a morning person. I do wake up early, but I'm not in my best mood when I do that. So, I'm not the most pleasant person to be around during my first two hours of the day. So, that's why I prefer to do much of the planning, much of the pack and much of the prepping the night before. Yeah, some other clients do it because they simply don't have time. There are different reasons for it, but I highly suggest it. Try it for yourself -do your daily stand-up the night before. if you decide to do the daily stand-up the night before the three questions will look like this. Number one, what did they do today? What am I going to do tomorrow? And is there anything blocking me or as I like to rephrase this question, how can I make it acting on my goals easier tomorrow? You don't have to spend hours responding to these three questions. Remember scrum teams spent 15 minutes maximum on this meeting. And to give you an idea of how quickly it goes right now, I'm a part of two daily stand-up meetings at my full-time job. Each of the teams has seven engineers. So 15 minutes for seven engineers, that's like two minutes per person. That's how quickly it goes. So don't overcomplicate. It's not where we go deeply into journaling and reflection and self-discovery. It should be very quick, painless. Just a quick opportunity to catch up plan the next day and maybe do some prep work to make it easier for the next day. That's it. It can easily take you less than five minutes to do the daily stand up for yourself, maybe you can even involve your spouse in this activity to make it more fun. It's up to you. So even if you decide to do just one question, I recommend doing question number three, how can I make acting on my goals easier tomorrow and just preparing for that. Just setting yourself up for success. And it's not this enormous activity. It's little things like packing your bag the night before it's like packing your workout clothes the night before it's like packing your lunch the night before. . I know it sounds like a bunch of packing, but it's just little small things like that that will set you up for success tomorrow. It's much easier to do that when you know that your past self took care of your present self and your present self is very grateful for all those packed lunches and the workout clothes. So it's more motivated to go and actually do the work that this needed. And now I have a question for you. If you're doing something similar yourself on a daily basis, I would love to hear about your routine. How does the daily standup look for you? And if you worked in teams that use scrum or agile, what are some of the best principles and practices that you've adopted for your own life. I would love to hear that. There, is contact information in the show notes, please send me an email and we can chat about it. Okay, guys, that's it for today, please subscribe if you want to have a freshly baked episode delivered to you next Monday.