Sprint your life too

When I posted Share Blog! one of my friend Hiral Mistry (now Hiral Shetge) gave me an idea to write on How can we use Agile Software Development techniques to achieve some of the life’s small and big goals and tasks? Her idea was How to break goals into milestone and achieving it? It may sound more like goal setting but let me give a shot.

Agile Software development manifesto has 12 principles. But I will focus on 5 techniques on planing and execution of projects and demonstrate a real world example which I did recently.

1. Time boxing : It means allocating a fixed time period
2. Iterations (Sprint) : Multiple sprints will becomes a milestone
3. Daily Scrum: A daily team meeting or self meeting
4. Velocity: The speed at which you are accomplishing your tasks.
5. Retrospection: To look back and see what went right and how to improve.

The above explanation is relative to the blog content. Now to explain it with example I recently did a mini project.

I am planning to write 3 blogs per month for my past whole decade.

You can read the complete post Past Decade blogs.

1. It contains the example of time boxing which was 6 hours.
2. It contains the Iteration of 3 days which will end up with 1 year of blogs. So I need 10 such sprints to complete a decade.
3. Daily scrum means to check your status daily or planing daily, your team is your parents, spouse, siblings, partners etc. For those who don’t want to share can plan alone by checking their status. (A study has shown people only spend 1 hour for life planing in an year but more than 3 hours of vacation planing.) 
4. It also contains my predicated velocity of 12 blogs per day (or 6 hours).
5. Retrospection: Now that I have complete my 1 day of activity let me have some thoughts in it. It should have been done after 3 days.

Retrospection:

1. The 1st day went as it was planned. 12 blogs in 6 hours.
2. But I did not follow the exact plan. I first listed out title of all 12 blog post that I wanted to write. Which I did couple of days prior of my writing day.
3. I also wrote my first blog at a commute between office and home. Since my thoughts where flowing.
4. The quality of all the post are not so great yet the idea is getting communicated.
5. I feel, I should always write it on my waiting times thus not dedicating the whole day and still maintaining a velocity of 1 blog per half hour.
6. By applying this alternate way, I might need my dedicated time to format the blog content.

If we have multiple such planned goals, milestones etc it will give us the fire in the belly to be motivated. This is how I relate practice in Agile Development. I hope Hiral too was thinking like this, If not Hiral please email me, I would love to post your ideas here.

Happy Sprinting!