Don't Break The Chain Rule with Agile Twist

Hi there. Today we're talking about don't break the chain rule and how you can use it under Agile framework. I'll share some examples of how I've used it in the past and still use it today and hopefully it'll give you some ideas on how you can use it in your life. Let's go up For this print I have one clear goal to create a free workshop that I will host in the near future, and the workshop is about three steps that you can do in order to launch your product, your project in three month or less. I'm summarizing all the lessons that I've learned from launching different products myself, from my professional life being the product manager, but also in personal life by launching this podcast two businesses and some other projects. And also lessons from my clients, the ones that I've helped launch their projects, like YouTube channels, site businesses online courses . Basically it's a free workshop and it is a lot of work. It's one of those projects that I call marathon projects. They're so time consuming and so long that you really need to have some stamina to go through them. I've had several marathon projects in the last maybe five years. The major one was of course, my thesis that I had to write for my master's program. That was a two year marathon project. Very, very long and time consuming and exhaust. The next marathon project that I had. Finding a job. If you ever looked for a job, you know how exhausting it can be at times to apply for all these jobs and go to interviews and all of that. I'll use this three projects as examples in today's episode to illustrate the same principle that I've used to go through them. I find the best way to approach this marathon projects is to apply the, don't break the chain. You've probably heard about it from other sources. It is sometimes called the Seinfeld method. It is the productivity method that commits you to completing a daily goal for an extended period of time. Each day that you complete your daily goal, you add an ax to a calendar. Eventually you build a chain of Xs that extends days, weeks, or months. This chain of accomplishments is increasingly rewarding and discourages you from breaking the chain. Eventually you are able to build a long term habit. Why it's called the Seinfeld methods in some sources is because that's their recommendation that Seinfeld give in one of his interviews when asked \ how one can become a better comedian, he basically said, every day you write the. When you are done writing a joke, you put an X on your calendar and you do it every day, and your only goal is to never break the chain. And the longer the chain is, the more motivated you are to keep on writing jokes. So as you can see, this method is traditionally used to build habits. So you might have heard people use it to build a working out routine where they would say, I just need to work out for 10 minutes a day and then I can put an X on my calendar, or I can do the morning routine and. I'll put an apps on my calendar. So basically you use it to build habits, but I use it kind of differently. I use it to complete long lasting projects, the ones that I call the marathon projects. And of course I don't just follow the rule, I like to apply my own twist to this rule, given some things that I know about Agile and Scrum, I like to tweak this method a little bit. When I apply the don't break the chain rule, I still have my three week sprints. My sprint planning doesn't go anywhere. It stays the same. I do plan my three week sprints. I still set my sprint goals. I still use a very clear definition of done for each of the goals, and I still do my sprint reviews, daily standups. So that stays, and I've talked about it before. So you can definitely go and check out my previous episodes where I talk about sprint planning, definition of done, sprint, review, backlog, daily standups, all of that. So I'm not gonna go into details here. So again, I'm not getting rid of any of this agile planning methodology when I have this marathon projects, it's still in place. For example, this sprint, I have one major work goal. It is to finish this workshop. It is basically the only work goal that I have for this. I know it's a big one. It's an ambitious one, and it'll take me a lot of time to get it done. And then I decide on the criteria for the don't break the chain rule. Whenever I want to make consistent progress on such time consuming projects, I know I need to work on it daily. And for me, if it's a work project, then that means Monday to Friday, or very least Monday to Thursday, and I pick the minimum amount of work I want to produce every day. So it's basically what is the minimum amount of work that qualifies me to put an X on my calendar for the don't break the chain idea. So here I want to emphasize one major difference between my approach and the regular don't break the chain rule approach. My minimum daily goal is always presented in some sort of result. Some sort of finished shippable work. It's not presented in the number of minutes or hours I spend on something. It's not enough to just work on my workshop for an hour, let's say, to guarantee an X on my calendar. I need to produce an outcome, some tangible outcome from that one hour, therefore, doing passive actions such researching, planning doesn't really qualify for an X on my calendar. It needs to be something tangible, something I can show to another person and say, here, I've made this as Seth Gordon would say. So again, in traditional, don't break the chain. Sometimes people tell you that in order to build a habit, you just need to spend 10 minutes on something, five minutes on something, and then you put the next in. My approach is it doesn't matter how much time you spend on it, what is the minimum shippable amount of work that you need to produce in order to put an X on your calendar? all, It should be an outcome that leads you to the sprint. . Doing research on how to do workshop doesn't really move me that much closer to getting my workshop completed. Creating actual slides. That's the work that move me closer to finishing my workshop. That's why it's still very important to have sprints because it has a very clear deadline for when it needs to be done. It's still very important to have a clear definition of done because then you can kind of judge your action on whether it moves you forward to this definition of done, or you are , still kind of stuck in the nowhere land, where you are kind of doing some action, like doing Google research, watching YouTube videos, but you're not actually producing anything. These are the examples of my daily minimums on each of the projects that I've applied this principle to. When I was writing my thesis, my daily minimum was 500 words written down. It wasn't two hours spent working on my thesis. No. It was put in the words, something I can show to my thesis supervisor and say, here I wrote this. Check it out. Some days I managed to write more, like when I was in Flow State, I would write more. Some days it was exactly 500 words, and it was painful to get to those 500 words. But the moment I did it, I closed my laptop and went home. Some days it took one hour. Some days it took three hours, but all I cared about was the result. My word count increasing by at least 500 words every day from Monday to Friday. When I was looking for a new job, my daily minimum outcome was 10 job applications submitted. So it doesn't matter how much time I spent on applying for this job. Some days it actually took me longer because some of them required cover letters and creating separate profiles and all of that, but some days it took less time. But it doesn't really matter as long as it was at least 10 applications per day. And now I'm working on my free workshop and my minimum daily outcome is one section of a webinar, which is usually around 10 slides. And it is something that I can email to my coach. So I basically sign up for this program that guides you through how to create these workshops because I've never done them before and I actually don't mind paying other people to eliminate all the necessary Googling that I have to do. And they have external accountability. That's a big one. I've talked about it last time. they have assigned a special coach that is there for me if I have any questions. So that's great. So my criteria is that every day I have to produce something that I can email to my coach and say, here, I've made this. Give me feedback. It doesn't mean that I email my coach every single day, but. It needs to be something that I could email to my coach if I need to. So it should be something very tangible, something that they can share with another person, something that doesn't need a lot of explanation, and something that they can review and give feedback. As you can see, the daily minimum outcome is something that you can share with other. something that is very specific, something that consistently moves you forward to the final result. The reason why I say it should be something that you can share with other people is not because you need to get some outside approval of, of your. No, it really doesn't really matter. It's just for me, it's the easiest way to explain the difference between passive action and active action. When you do passive action. For example, when you spent four hours of your day on Google and YouTube trying to research how to do something, it's very hard to explain to another person how you spend your. and what the outcome is because there is no outcome. But when you've watched something and then you've produced a draft version of what you're working on, then you can share this draft version and say, Hey, like this is what I've created in order to create it. Yes, I had to do some research, but it's irrelevant. This is what I've created. Please give me. , and that's kind of the main idea of Agile, is that you want to ship your product as fast as possible and start getting feedback from other people, from your clients, from maybe your coworkers. Get some feedback as soon as possible, and not spend too much time in research and create any perfect plan and all of that. And also what helps is to create some sort of way to visualize this. Don't break the chain rule. The most straightforward way to do it is to put an X on your wall calendar. So just go to a dollar store, buy a wall calendar. And put the next, whenever you finish something. I carry this A4 size notebook with me every day. So I just created a simple table in this A4 size known book. And every day that I work on my workshop, instead of putting an x I like to put an outcome that I've produced. Another fun way to do it is to snap a picture of your daily result. it Would work incredibly well for some clearly visual projects such as renovation, do it to yourself art or craft project. Especially if you have one of those Polaroid pictures that prints out the picture immediately, it's a fun way to do it. You can even dedicate a small section on your wall to pin this pictures down see your progress from day to day. I think it would be very fun to do that. Every day you take a picture. Represents the work that you've done for that day. Some tangible work that you can see on the picture. You can maybe even think before and after. I think it's very fun to see the progress that way. But definitely have it somewhere invisible. Have it on your wall. Have it in your notebook that you know that you open every single day. So that's why I prefer more analog solutions like paper and pen or printed pictures because then you see them every day compared to some digital file on your computer that you open maybe once every two weeks. So that's what they've been doing intuitively ever since I had to write my thesis a few years ago, and I think this approach works really well. So I've been doing it myself. And then recently I stumbled upon psychology professor Robert Boy, and his research on the right and habits of his fellow academics. He spent his entire career figuring out what differentiates his successful peers who publish a lot of papers. And what his conclusion was that the most productive professors, generally, they made writing a small part of their daily. From Monday to Friday. So every day they would sit down and they would write, and sometimes it took 10 minutes, but it never took them more than four hours a day. But other professors who were less productive. Writing academic articles, they would do their writing in the sort of do nothing, do nothing, and then work 10 hours a day for few weeks, then again, do nothing. Do nothing. And that was so surprising because if you think about it, like 10 minutes a day, one hour, four hours at most, like you wouldn't think that it would produce a lot of results, but it turns out that it actually produces higher results in the long. And I was thinking why it works so much better to do something like this on a daily basis compared. Doing a huge chunk of it once in a while, and my personal opinion, again, it's not backed up by any science or anything, but what I think is happening is that you train your brain to get into the deep work state much faster when you do it every day. So if every day you go to your, like for me it was coffee shop and I was writing my thesis. Right now it's a local library where I go to every single day. So every day I go there, I sit down and I know that I have to get this portion done. If you have to do it every day, then this mental resistance that you have before you do something difficult, it diminishes from day to day. So at first, yeah, it was very hard for me to kind of get my brain going and convince it to start working on this difficult task. But now, as it's been a few weeks now, it's kind of like I go, I sit in there maybe three minutes of self talk, and then I'm ready to. But I think when you do it in a way where you have a huge amount of work in one day and then you do nothing, first of all, it takes you an enormously long amount of time to get into this deep state of mind because you don't train your brain to get into this deep state every day. So you only go into this state once a. . So the other six days you are spent checking email and doing some shallow work. So that's the reason number one. Reason number two, 10 hours of writing. That's a lot of work. That's exhausting. You are probably mentally, physically dead after this long session, and then your brain remembers. It's like, oh yeah. Remember last Thursday when we had to go through this torture, and then only because it remembers how hard it was, then the next time you're trying to convince your brain to. Whole session again is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not doing that again. And it takes even more effort and energy to convince yourself to actually sit down and start the work. But when you do like an hour or two hour deep state every day, you still feel energized and good after that, you're like, It wasn't too bad. Yes, it was hard, but it wasn't too exhausting. I still had a good day afterwards. And then it's much easier for you to convince your brain to do that activity again, and again. So I think a lot of the productivity actually comes to our ability to manage our resistance and some of the choices that we make sometimes doing a lot. Hard work all at once. It results in us having even higher resistance the next time. That's kind of like my ran on. Why I think this don't break the chain rule is effective at managing this Longlasting projects. So I highly recommend you try it as well. So just to sum up what you do is you select a sprint. You still do the sprint plan. So you select a sprint duration from three to six weeks long. You set the goal for the sprint. It's probably just this one goal, this marathon project that you are working. . So it might be not the entire project, right? So if you're writing a book, the Sprint goal can be finished, the first chapter. It doesn't have to be finished the entire book. So you kind of break down your goal accordingly to the time that you have available and the project. So you set the goal for the. You create a clear definition of done for this goal. I've made a whole other episode about that. You select what days you want to work on your goal. Is it every day or is it Monday to Friday? Again, I'm a big advocate for having your. To yourself. So if it's a work goal, I would definitely recommend sticking to Monday to Friday schedule. You select your minimum daily outcome in terms of output, not in terms of time spent on an activity. Again, keep this idea in mind that it should be something that you can show to another person, even if it's imaginary friend, and say, here, I've made this today. And also you create some sort of visual representation of the chain. I think analog is always, than digital because you are more likely to see it on a daily basis. You can do it in your paper notebook, wall calendar, your planner, sticking notes on the wall. You can be as creative as you want to. But don't spend too much time on the step. And after that, you record your daily outcomes and you see your chain grow. And eventually it gives you motivated to keep on doing your daily minimums because you see that the chain grows from day to day. yeah, this is what I wanted to share with you. This is what I'm using right now. So it's definitely something that I highly recommend. I have some other cool. Rules and mind tracks that I have up my sleeve that might help you with your productivity. I've listed links to a bunch of them in the correspondence blog post to this episode. Check it out. I have six recommendations for my favorite rules and mind tracks, so definitely check it out if you like this. And also if you want to sign up for that free workshop that I'm working on, definitely make sure that you are on the mailing list. So let the link in the description below where you can sign up for the mailing list so you don't miss this workshop. It's absolutely free and I think it's gonna be great. So definitely check it out. But for now, have a great week and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.