Updates + Launching Group Sprints

Hello guys. I've missed you. It's been a couple of weeks since my last podcast episodes. I just wanted to chat with you and share some updates about my life, about the monthly methods and everything that has happened. Okay, let's go. I am really so excited to be recording a podcast episode. I didn't know that I would miss it so much, but I'm glad that I'm doing it. The last couple of weeks have been interesting. I think I've hit some sort of plateau or I've hit some point in this journey and this podcast in the monthly method where everything I was doing didn't feel the same anymore. So, I wanted to take a break. I wanted to just observe what's happening. Maybe it was just me having a full-time job and also trying to combine the monthly method with my full-time job. Hence, that's why I haven't posted part two of how to combine a full-time job with a side hustle because quite honestly, I'm still figuring it out. So I don't want to share tips that I'm not a hundred percent confident. in, So, still trying to figure it out and also realized that some of the parts are not necessarily working for me anymore. For example, working with clients one-on-one was fun in the beginning, but now in my current point in life, it's just not feasible to allocate this much time. Quite honestly, I found it to be a bit repetitive. For all my new clients I have to tell the same story, the same principles of the monthly methods. And I was becoming a bit bored, to be frank here. I was like, okay let's pause. Let's see how I want to proceed, what I want to do going forward. And I took this time to not do anything, to just give myself some space. I highly recommend it to anyone who's on the edge of having burnout or just being lost in where you're going, what you're doing. It's okay to take a break. It's okay to take a longer break. No one will die. One of my favourite sayings is "Very few things are truly urgent and important". After having a break, I've realized that I've actually missed doing this podcast. And I've received some emails from my listeners, from new subscribers who are saying that they love my podcast. It's amazing! I love this community and I love just talking to you every single week. In terms of the podcast, I think I've covered all the urgent topics that I wanted to cover in terms of productivity, all the pressing issues that I always felt so strongly about, I've covered. I've covered the long-term planning and why I don't like it. I've covered the benefits of short-term planning. I've covered the main principles of scrum and how you can apply them to your personal productivity. I've created this free PDF guide that you guys can use kind of like a sample of what the monthly method is. So, you can plan your one week, just one week, not the entire sprint, just one week following the basic principles of the monthly method to see how it goes. I think I've covered everything I wanted to say for the time being. Right now, I want to dive deeper into your questions. All you listeners who are listening to this podcast on a weekly basis, please start sending me your questions, your productivity issues. And I will start creating the podcast episodes based on the questions that I get. I feel like it's going to be a very healthy two-way relationship where I provide something. Then I get feedback in return about what works, what doesn't, what questions I haven't covered. I'm sure there are a ton of questions that you guys still have. For me as a person who works as a product manager who uses Chrome at work, probably I have a tendency to assume that a lot of people know about Scrum, about agile and what it is, and I just don't cover a bunch of topics. So, please send me your questions about scrum, about agile. How you can apply it to your own productivity? Please send me questions. I'm begging you. I am out of ideas of what to talk about in this podcast, and I would love to get more inspiration coming from you guys from your questions. Okay? That's the podcast part of the equation in terms of the monthly methods and the coaching. Again, I think I'm not at the point of my life where I want to quit my full-time job. I like my full-time job for now. I'm learning a lot. It's my first role as a product manager officially. So, there's still a ton of opportunities to learn about Scrum, agile sprint planning. How it's done on the corporate level, how it's done in FOS grow in startups and how it's helpful? It's a very fun playground for me to be in. No plans to quit as of now. That means that I am not going to be accepting any one-on-one clients going forward for now. But, I still want to share this message of short-term sprint planning for personal productivity. I love sharing this message. I love seeing the results that people get from sprint planning and from this method. I want to continue providing the service. But I was thinking about, how can I still share this message, but not do it one-on-one? So, I thought that it would be fun to run some sort of group sprints. Meaning that every time, I am embarking on my personal newsprint which happens every month, I would invite a bunch of my listeners to join me for a very manageable, small fee so that we only have people who are truly committed. Again, nothing major, not a huge investment. I just want to experiment with it. It's one of my sprint goals. As you've probably heard me talk on this podcast a lot is that I love experiments and it's just something that I want to experiment with. So, invite a bunch of people to embark on this fun journey of doing sprint planning for their own productivity. The next print that I'll have is going to be my November Sprint. November sprint will start on Monday, November 1st. I'll open up the enrollment for you to join. How it's going to look like is we're going to have some sort of a group chats messaging platform, where I would be checking messages on and daily basis. Then we'll also have a weekly call on Monday mornings, Eastern time where we would get together. I'll walk you through some of the weekly planning, some of the weekly reflections. That's going to be weekly calls, plus you can post in the group chat. You guys can communicate and I'll check those chat messages every day. So, yeah, I think it's going to be helpful. It's going to work for me because I can still be of service, still spread the message of applying scrum to personal productivity, but maybe do it on a bigger scale in terms of how many people can participate in this. It's going to be very beneficial for you guys because it's going to be of course, cheaper than doing the one-on-one services. It's going to be very engaging because you'll get to share this experience with other like-minded people. The group chat is going to be helpful and also the weekly calls since they are going to be live. It's nice to have that sort of external accountability for sure. . Let me know what you guys think, I'll work on the enrollment page. Again, this is just an experiment that I want to run. I think it's going to be fun. I think I'm going to do it for at least November and December and see how it goes. Get your feedback. Then probably changed the format a little bit depending on what the members are saying. Every sprint is going to be a little bit different based on the feedback that I get and it's going to be better and better and better. So, yeah. That's all I wanted to share with you for today. All the links will be in the show notes. But for now, very happy to be back. Very happy to be recording this podcast. Very excited about upcoming episodes that will be dictated by your questions. I'm excited to see where this group sprint experiment will take us. Okay. That's it for today? I'll talk to you next week. Bye.