Agile practitioners employ a set of disciplined methods to help them successfully complete complex projects. They believe in doing, rather than overly planning, discussing and documenting. However, what many of us sometimes neglect is having a similar process to help us in our personal and professional life in reaching our goals.

David Allen Making It All Work

David Allen, author of Making It All Work and the founder of the popular Getting Things Done (GTD) process has some great insights. David emphasizes identifying next actions in order to move your projects forward. In his book, Making It All Work, Allen uses an elevation metaphor to describe the different levels for planning your life. 

At 50,000 feet, you identify your purpose. Why are you here? What gets you out of bed? What do you want to be remembered for? At 40,000 feet, you define your vision. Imagine what success would look like for you, both personally and professionally. At 30,000 feet, you list your goals. What is important to you that you want to accomplish? At 20,000 feet, you define your focus. What is the most important areas you should be focusing on at present? At 10,000 feet, you list your projects. Allen defines a project as anything that requires more than one task to complete so by his definition, you would have lots of projects. Finally, at ground level, you list all of the single tasks that you need to do and your next actions to complete your projects. Central to the GTD process are regular reviews for each of the elevation levels.

Allen’s ideas and approach are very simple.Implementing them, and diligently following them requires some work, and in most cases, you will have to tailor a process that fits you.

SCRUM

Scrum is an Agile practice in managing delivery of complex projects. A central idea in Scrum is that teams self manage themselves. One of the techniques used to synchronize communication among the team is a short 15 minute daily Scrum meeting where each member stands up and addresses three things in front of the team. 1) What have I done since the last daily Scrum, 2) What am I going to do between now and the next daily Scrum, and 3) What is preventing me from doing my work.

Another technique used is the development of a product backlog. This backlog consists of features, functions, fixes and anything that should be implemented during the duration of something Scrum refers to as a Sprint. A Sprint is an agreed duration of time that the team will commit to delivering a shippable set of functions, features, fixes, etc.. A Sprint review is required upon each Sprint completion. On the start of every Sprint, a Sprint planning session begins that looks at the product backlog to determine what should be implemented for the next Sprint.

Where Rubber Meets The Road

So you might be wondering what does an Agile methodology like Scrum have anything to do with managing your daily life. Well, if you think about it, David Allen’s GTD approaches parallels in many aspects of Agile Scrum ideas. I find that in many systems, it is the simple ideas that make the most impact.

GTD is a great system for getting you to identify your 50,000 feet big picture purpose all the way down to your runway next actions. GTD contains common ideas with Scrum practices such as having regular reviews, tracking/establishing Goals list, Project lists, Next Action lists (in Scrum, these are your product backlogs, Sprint backlogs).

Here are some Scrum ideas that enhances my GTD process:

1. Self management – In Scrum, the teams are taught to self manage themselves. They know best when it comes to delivery of their product. Same is true for you. You know YOU best, and therefore you should develop disciplines to effectively self manage your life. Don’t have your spouse, father, mother, big brother/sister, boss, best friend tell you what you should be doing. You need to take control – make things happen for yourself.

2. Daily Scrum Review – David Allen emphasizes the importance of having weekly reviews to check your progress and course direct as necessary. I think it is vitally important to have daily reviews with yourself. For instance, I write a daily journal of the following each morning, after processing my emails, and before I start my day.

What unplanned things I did yesterday

- [these items are lightly grayed]
- [these items are lightly grayed]

What HAVEN’T I completed

- [these items are lightly grayed]
- [these items are lightly grayed]

What is preventing me from accomplishing my planned tasks

- [these items are lightly grayed]
- [these items are lightly grayed]

Events to note

-
-

What do I plan to do today

- Task A  (1 hr)
- Task B (30 min)

.

.

.

3. Time Blocking – It is absolutely important to time block. A lot of people hate to estimate or time block because they never seem to predict the right amount of time they need. That is okay to be off on your estimates because when you time block, and you exceed that time, you have had to make a conscious decision that what you are doing is more important than the other items on the list (by the way, I have a computer egg timer that buzzes me when my time is up). Additionally, time blocking keeps you on track and keeps you from over perfecting something that doesn’t need to be.

4. Being agile and flexible - Let’s face it, unanticipated things come up. Some of these things, we can adjust our priorities and reschedule on the fly. For others, we’ll have to course direct (turn our ship if you prefer the analogy). In Scrum, this means cancelling our Sprint and conduct another Sprint planning session to reprioritize what we will be delivering.  If suddenly, you won the $100 million lottery, your financial dependencies would certainly change (unless you are already mega rich). On the flipside, if your doctor said you had only 6 months left to live, you would likely revisit your life priorities. While these painted scenarios seems exaggerated, what is not are things like getting your income reduced, getting sick and not being able to work, getting divorced, or finding your skills obsolete. Being able to accommodate change, but doing something about it is being agile.