What is a sprint? How to use it in your life

Have you ever wondered how tech companies are able to build billion dollar products? How come there is so much innovation in the tech industry while other industries seem to be stagnating? And most importantly, have you ever wondered what ideas, techniques, methods, tools you can borrow from the tech industry and apply them to your own work, your own projects, your own goals? That's what this channel is about. And today we'll dive into the idea of a sprint.

What it is, how it is used, what a perfect duration of a sprint is, the sprint capacity, and sprint focus. And most importantly, how you can apply all of these things to your

own life. So what is a sprint? A sprint is a short time box. It's a short and time boxed period of time in which a set amount of work has to be completed. If you look at this definition, there are three things that clearly stand out. The first one is that a sprint is a short and time boxed period of time. Second is that there is a set amount of work. And the third one is that it has to be completed. It should go from to do stage to done. The idea of a sprint is that we ship.

the results out that things should be completed in the done state. So I want you to remember these three things as we go through today's video. The first clue that you saw in the sprint definition is that it's a short and time box period of time. Sprints should be short. There's a reason why they're called sprints and not marathons. So that's your first clue. And that's the first difference between Agile and the traditional goal setting advice is that we don't set goals for the entire year.

That's too long. We work in shorter increments of time.

And what's also important is that the duration of the sprint stays the same. So if you picked two weeks for your sprint duration, you work in two weeks at a time. Sprint duration is something that remains. fixed. You can change the scope of your work, how many goals you're pursuing in each sprint, but the duration stays the same. So what is a good sprint duration?

I like to say that it should be short enough for you to feel the deadline approaching, but long enough for you to produce something substantial. So it can be a day because there is not much you can produce and ship in a day. It's not a good idea to have it as a three months sprint because it's too far out. You don't feel the deadline. You don't feel that little pressure that always comes from a deadline. And you can decide it for yourself. What is the sweet spot?

I would say that a sprint duration between two and six weeks. It's a good spot. That's the industry standard in the tech world. That's kind of a sweet spot for the personal sprints as well. And you should remember that agile is all about shipping the work. Something that you can point at and say, look, I've made this. I didn't make this. That's mother nature, but you get the idea.

Agile doesn't care about the hours you worked, how hard you worked, your morning routines, your habits, none of that. It just wants to see the final result at the end of the sprint. In one sprint, we are aiming to get something produced and shipped. So that's why you can really start a lot of new projects, because you have to get them to the finish line within one sprint. My sprint duration is three weeks. That's what I found worked the best for me.

So I sprint for three weeks, then I take a week off. There's a reason for that. Stay tuned for future videos. And then I do it again. So you do you, but I would say start between two and six weeks. Start with something. Pick one duration. Do your first sprint with this duration. And then during sprint retrospective, again, another video, you can decide and adjust your sprint duration. But ideally you want to find a sweet spot where you say, this is perfect for me.

I'm going to stick with it and then you stick with this duration.

If sprint duration is fixed, we've got to have something that is flexible and variable because our lives are not fixed and we need to have some sort of lever that we can play with when times get tough, when there is a busy season of life and then we have to somehow adjust for it. And that's what sprint capacity is all about. Sprint capacity will be different for each sprint. Sprint capacity measures the volume of work you can do in one sprint. And again, it will be different every sprint.

And since this concept and this whole agile idea is borrowed from the software development world, and I worked as a product manager with software developers. I'll give you an example of how it's done there. So you can understand the concept a little bit better. Let's say you have a team of five developers and you have some data to say that, okay, on average, each developer can produce 10 units of work. There are different units. of measurements.

Let's just keep it simple and say 10 units of work. And so at the absolute maximum, the team is capable of producing 50 units of work per sprint. But then we also know that there is usually some work that needs to be done for customer support. There are some bugs, people are messaging, asking questions. Customer support team is not well equipped to answer them. So they need some developers to jump in and all of that. So usually half of one developer's time is spent on customer support tickets.

Now we can say that realistic capacity for a team is 45 units of work. Because half of one developer is going to support 45 units of work. That's our Sprint capacity, but then next sprint it's summer. It's nice. People are going on vacation. So we have two developers that will be gone for the entire next sprint.

So now our sprint capacity drops from 45 units of work to 25 because we have minus 20 units of work, but because they are on vacation as a product manager, someone who plans what work needs to be done next sprint, you should. only plan for 25 units of work and then the following sprint, this people come back, maybe another person goes on vacation. We have 35 units of work and then we have 45 and every sprint it's different. Got it.

So how can we apply it to our personal lives, to our personal projects and goals? Okay, so as you go through this agile journey, once you have a few sprints under your belt, you will get an idea of how much work you can complete. It's not going to be some unit of measure. You'll just get the sense. Is it three projects that you can fully get to the done stage? Is it five projects? So for example, for me, it's five projects on a good sprint when I don't have a lot of things going on.

So I have my regular workload and then with the amount of time left from all the daily emails, meetings, calls with clients and all of that, I have some time left on a daily basis. So that usually sums up to me being able to do five good projects per sprint. So the first step in the sprint planning session is that you check your calendar for the next sprint. How does it look like? Are you in a busy season of life? Are you traveling? Are you like, do you have a major deadline at work?

And you know that there will be a lot of last minute work that leaves you with less time to Dedicate to your own stuff. So this should be accounted for. Again, if you have kids, like how do their schedules Look like? Are they packed and you have to drive them everywhere or is it the more flexible season in your life? Is it like Christmas and things are usually crazy around Christmas. So your sprint capacity goes down. Two things to check your calendar and also your workload.

If you have a full time job, check what's going on there. If you're on your business, kind of think about what big things are happening next sprint. Are you fully available

for your projects or do you need to reduce the scope? And there are two things that you can adjust. The first one is the number of goals. So as I said, I, in my ideal sprint, I can do five major, good, substantial projects. But if I get busy, I can drop it down to three. Or I can keep the number of projects the same, but then I would just reduce the scope of each of them. So instead of, let's say, renovating the entire bedroom, I would say this print, I will only paint the walls.

You can do one of the two. And sprint capacity is always something that is not shiny

enough. People just want to skip and go to the next step, but please don't. A sprint capacity is. It's very, very important. It's your investment in how you feel filled by the end of the sprint. So if you don't skip this step, if you do calculate your sprint capacity, like again, you don't have to calculate the numbers, just like get them and just check your freaking calendar and your workload. That's all you have to do. If you do that at the end of the sprint.

You'll be in a place where you can be proud of yourself, feeling accomplished because you've planned the goals that are of the acceptable, sustainable size, something that you could complete in one sprint. I also like to look at it as self care. For me, self care is doing an act of kindness to my future self. So if I don't, if I skip this step right now and I put too much on my plate, then my future self will suffer. She will get burned out.

She will, get frustrated, upset, will feel like a failure because half of her sprint goals will be incomplete. And I think that's a major, major difference between Agile and other goal setting techniques is that Agile Um, I'm going to talk a little bit about, um, what are the different steps that you have seasonality in your life. You have seasons when you're busy and you don't have a lot of time. You have seasons when you're more flexible and you have more time.

You have seasons when you travel and you can really work too long. And so spring capacity is what allows you to do a little like to still ship meaningful results throughout the entire year. You just do it maybe at a different It's scale and it's very, very flexible, but it allows you to, to stay consistent. I think consistency comes when you can adjust the volume of your productivity based on where you are at the moment. And this consistent steps are not the same today and next month.

They can be different in terms of volume. One month you can like, you're really, really go in because it's, February, there is nothing going on in February. So you have so much time. Of course, you're going to finish four chapters of your book instead of one, but then summer comes around, you have birthdays and travel and all of that. Then you'll be able to publish one chapter, a sprint, but at least you're doing something towards your book. I have a lot of projects that I have to do.

I have a lot of projects that I have to do every single sprint. And another thing that I want to mention is that your sprint capacity, your kind of like the maximum sprint capacity, will change with seasons as well. So for me, as I said, right now it's five projects per sprint, but it used to be nine when they had more time, when I didn't have as many commitments, when I didn't have a baby, things, I had simply more time for my own stuff, but now it's fine.

And then maybe in another season of life, if it will be seven, let's say again, I like a job because it's flexible. I started doing it 10 years ago. My life was completely different 10 years ago. And I was able to stick with it because it was flexible enough to adjust to every season of my life. And sprint capacity is something, is one of the major tools, how it was able to adjust to To every season of my life. So sprint capacity. If it's your first sprint, you have no

idea how much work you can complete in your sprint. I would say start with this formula. Five hours per week. That's a good start. Meaning that you have five hours to dedicate to whatever goals you want to commit yourself to. So if you decided that your sprint duration is two weeks, Then plan for about 10 hours of work. If you go with three weeks, plan for about 15 hours of work. That's a good start. And then during the sprint retrospective, you can review and really get an idea.

Should you plan for more or for less in the future sprint? but yeah, start with five hours per one week, and then you just do the multiplication and plan for that. That's your sprint capacity for the first sprint. Okay, so by this point in your sprint planning process, you have your backlog that we did a whole other video on that. Check my YouTube channel.

You decided on your sprint duration and you reviewed your calendar and your workload for the upcoming month and you got an idea for a sprint capacity. If Not you just use the formula or five hours per week to calculate your sprint capacity. So now it's time to start looking at your backlog. By this point, you have a ton of interesting ideas on

what to spend your time on. Now it's a good idea to start highlighting the candidates. You already know that you're not, you don't have a lot of time, so you'll definitely have to choose here. This ideas will have to compete. for the spot on your sprint board. The Olympics among your ideas, start highlighting the candidates. I usually take a few days to think about what do I want to focus on for the upcoming sprint? What's my sprint focus?

Or another way to say it, what's my sprint And this is something that is not necessarily used in all the Agile teams, but that's what we did in my last job as a product manager. And I really enjoyed it because it allowed me to, well, first of all, keep the development team focused. There's always, it allowed me to put some priorities on what's really important. That's the sprint focus. And things that are of less importance, because sometimes when things are urgent, they might seem important.

And then you're stuck in this process where you do the urgent work, but not the important work. That's where the sprint focus comes in. comes really helpful. So it's usually a one sentence, one feature, that we are working on. And also why it was incredibly helpful to me as a product manager is that it gave me a quick answer to the question, what are you guys working on? that came from other stakeholders.

Whenever I would walk in the office and I see a CEO or sound like a, someone from customer support or from operations. And there's like this, water cooler chat going on. And they asked me like, what are you guys working on? I can give them this one sentence saying like, Oh, well, we are working on enabling SMS notifications or we are launching a tracking page. Or, we are adding this functionality or we are building integration with Shopify. So it's kind of like one sentence.

It's substantial and important. Like you want to say that you're working on something meaningful and you can use the same, trick that I kind of accidentally stumbled upon, with the sprint focus. So here's how you can think about the sprint focus. During the sprint, if someone like your friends, your spouse, your kids will ask you, what are you working on these days? You can tell them this one sentence is like, well, I'm working on finishing my first chapter, working on finishing the basement.

I'm working on decluttering the basement. I'm planning that family trip that we're taking this summer and why it works to do this way is because like When you imagine yourself in this scenario, you want to give people an answer that I don't want to say sound impressive, but, um, but it's meaningful, substantial, big enough. You wouldn't put, well, I am working on, I don't know, doing dishes. You see the difference?

It's kind of like you want to be able to say something that people would be like, Oh, nice. Cool. Like really. and feel good about saying it. So pick your sprint focus. Again, there are two ways that you can go about it. The first one is you pick the most important goal, even though you have time for more things, but this will be your top one, the most important one, your number one thing for the sprint, or you can have a bunch of smaller goals, but they have, they all have one thing.

For example, if you're moving, like if you're moving from one house to another, there are a ton of things that you need to do, but the underlying theme of this all is moving. I am moving this month. Either your top priority goal or the overall theme for all the goals. In the next video, I'll talk about finalizing your sprint goals. You need to massage them a little bit before you put them on the sprint board. There are some

things that you need to do to them in order to increase your chances of getting them to the completed state. A little teaser, the concept that I will be talking about in the next video is by far the most raved about concept on my blog and among the people that I taught it to. People love it. People say that it cures perfectionism and I totally agree with that. So you definitely want to stay tuned for that specific video. And because it's so important, I want to dedicate the whole video to that.

I don't want to mix that in today's video. I want to give a ton of examples, show you how it works in different cases. If you don't want to miss it out, subscribe to this channel. it's going to be the next video, but till then you have your homework. So again, we have the backlog. If you haven't started it, go back to the previous video.

We picked the sprint duration where you want to start two weeks, three weeks, six weeks. You pick, we reviewed your sprint capacity, again, calendar and workload, get an idea of how much time you can spend. pursuing your own personal projects and goals. You are starting to think about your sprint focus, what you want to focus on for the next sprint. One sentence, one phrase. When people ask you what you're up to, you can give them this answer and feel good about what you're working on.

Thank you for listening to this episode. If this is your first episode, I just want to say, hi. My name is Polina. if this sparked an interest or some curiosity and you want to learn more about Agile and Scrum, you can go to monthlymethod. com. There I have an archive of free content on the topic of applying Agile and Scrum to personal projects and goals. I recommend going directly to the Start Here page.

Go there, you'll find all the free blog posts neatly organized in the right sequence, with the core principles of Agile and Scrum. You can educate yourself and start planning and running your first sprint. Feel free to subscribe to this podcast or my newsletter on the website for even more frequent communication from me. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email. All the links will be in the description. Have a great day and talk to you next time.