How to plan your day in an Agile way?
There is a good saying about individuals who believe that hard non-stop work is the key to success due to the incessant work flow. The adage goes: A horse worked harder than anyone on the farm; however, horse has still never managed to become a farm owner.
As practice shows, although straight workload gives stable and positive results, unfortunately, it can hardly be improved, better monetized or wiser delegated.
I’d like to share how I could improve my productivity by applying the Agile Project Management principles to my daily time management.
The idea is to break your day in a 25 minutes Time Boxed slots and break your activities into 25 min slots. This rule is based on the Pomodoro Technique and the Time Boxed concept of the Agile Project Management Methodology.
My approach is quite simple and based on three steps:
1. Day Planning
The most important step in planning is the priotization is logging all your tasks into one and only one backlog first. Several tools can be used for managing your backlog I recommend Trello for a Kanban style or Todoist for task list style.
Start your day by a planning session of 25 min, where you go through your TO DO list and select three activities that will be labeled MIT (Most Important Task) of the day. I recommend to put these three activities as your first three Pomodori of the day. Having prioritized the tasks this way, you can plan the rest of your activities in the rest of 25 min slots available during that day.
2. Time boxing every task in 25 minutes
Once you have planned all your activities for the day, you wind up the timer for 25 minutes and start with the first MIT (Most Important Task).
During the Pomodoro (time box of 25 min) you focus ONLY on your task, and take just a note of every interruption that pop-up.
By the end of the 25 minutes, you take a break of 5 minutes to assess your outcome, review your interruptions that need a follow-up before moving on to the next Pomodoro.
3. Daily retro
By the end of the day, you go through your list and Pomodori completed successfully and ask yourself these three questions:
• Did I do my best to complete my 3 MIT (Most Important Tasks) today?
• What did work well today? My wins?
• What should I improve to get better results tomorrow?
Every day starts with a planning stage and ends with a retrospective. In between, there is an iterative loop or Sprint of 25 minutes.
This small rule will allow you to avoid unnecessary stress and any close calls that happen due to poor management. First you do right things, then you start doing them right.
Give this a try in a relatively not busy day to start, and write me your feedback as a comment to this post.
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