This is basically another form of GTD, think of it as a layer on top, or another way of doing GTD
I’m not the first person to think of this, which makes me feel better about the idea. Perhaps link the video from 2022-03-02. Well, definitely include sources to other things. Think of how this relates to GTD etc. Also think of how an evergreen note should be atomic, declarative, concept oriented, densely linked, etc. For example, agile is it’s own atomic concept, we can separate it out. Keeping it all in one document makes for a good persuasive essay, but not a great evergreen note. Perhaps copy paste this into a different folder, and then take its component parts and boil them down into evergreens, reference them in the finished article? Or is my goal here to write nice articles, not evergreens? I guess I should reflect on what exactly I’m trying to accomplish here.
Same thing as Imagine your life as a project, these can be combined. if you delete though, make sure to update references.
Life Is Not A Sprint, It’s Comprised Of Sprints
Basically, I think that agile methodology can be applied to more than just work, it can be used for organizing your personal life. I won’t say that it should be used for that, just that it can. I’m not the first person to think of this, there have been people writing about this, making videos, giving TED Talks etc. for at least a decade, probably more, so that at least validates to me that this is a valid strategy, even if just for some people. But enough preamble, let’s delve into some specifics.
Agile Basics
The basics of agile are that that work should be done in short timeframes, or “sprints.” A typical sprint cadence at a software company is 2 weeks, but it can be 1 week, or 1 month, etc. At the start of each sprint, there is a well defined set of work that you want to accomplish by the end of the sprint, and this guides what you do for duration of the sprint.
However, life doesn’t always go according to plan, and things may come up during the sprint. When this happens, you make an honest decision on whether it really is important enough to prioritize for the current sprint, or if it can wait (if so, you put it in a backlog of other tasks you eventually want to get to). If you end up finishing all the tasks for the sprint early, you can pick some off the backlog.
At the end of the sprint, you do a retrospective on what went well, what didn’t go well, and how to improve for the next sprint. You go through the backlog and pick the most important tasks that you want to do for the next sprint, making sure not to overcommit because we only have so much time (you can estimate how long tasks will take to help make use of your time effectively). Typically the backlog is ordered by priority, so things at the top are higher priority, this makes it easier to pick tasks off the backlog when you have extra time, as they’re already sorted for you (this prioritization of the backlog, typically called grooming the backlog, can be done in between sprints, but doesn’t necessarily have to be).
And then you rinse and repeat.
The idea here is that you can make constant progress over time as progress will be made during each sprint. Not all sprints are equal, sometimes more/less things come up during the sprint to randomize you, some tasks are harder than others, etc. so don’t expect progress to be linear, but if followed properly you can expect progress to be constant. Note that progress can present itself in different ways; even if you feel like nothing was accomplished, if you can identify why during the retrospective and fix that for the future, that learning itself was progress.