Personal Agile: Iteration 1

January 25, 2020 2 minutes read

Agile • Productivity • Orgmode

There’s lots to love about agile, but my personal faves are two things:

timeboxed iterations
retrospectives

The ultimate goal of agile is to shorten feedback loops. If something is not working it’s easier to identify and correct the issue at the point of occurence rather than months down the line. This of it as a REPL loop for productivity.

I’ve been quite successful doing this at work, so I figured why not try it for personal productivity as well? I’ve had a couple of projects on the go for a while. I’ve made little progress so I wanted to focus and get things truely completed.

Here’s what my plan for the first iteration looked like:

Now, looking at it, I wish I followed more of the agile methodology and properly worded the tasks/stories I wanted to do. However I did do some things right:

I identified specific things I wanted to do.
I did identify completion criteria:
- In the case of the reading goal it was “half a book”.
- For my app it was 3 hours.
- For my fitness goal it was 10 times.
I did provide rough estimates for each activity to ensure that the plan was doable.

I also made an attempt at time tracking with org-pomodoro:

I’m not sure how to use these results just yet, but they do provide an intersting insight. The bulk of the coding project work was done early AM before work/family stuff on weekdays. I will continue with this practice.

Conclusions

Overall, I’ve achieved the goals I was striving for. This list allowed me to focus on the projects I wanted to push forward. Waking up at 5:30am on weekdays left me with enough mindspace and energy to work on personal projects, while chores and other tasks could be done post work. The fact that I eyeballed the amount of work I could actually complete allowed me to be successful. I did not get overly amibitious. I wanted to see how consistent I could be with this and overall I was.

One of the goals for next iteration is to develop better tracking to better understand how much work I can truely commit to and still be productive.