The Agile Life: Lay Out Your Sprints For The Day

To manage our lives using an agile approach, we need to extend the concept of the sprint to include both once-and-done items related to the aspects of our lives we have defined as projects and also to routine task we do daily or weekly. Things like answering emails are tasks—sprints, if you will—that need to be done on a regular basis. To keep our progress on everything going, we need to fit the routine sprints into the day with and around the project-based sprints. For instance, you may need to finish a PowerPoint or Keynote for… next week, and to do that you need to find some data… That's a once-and-done sprint. Answering emails and checking in with the family to see if you need to pick up anything on the way home are routine sprints. You need to do both the routine sprints and the once-and-done sprints! By creating a prioritized list of once-and-done sprints and then injecting the routine sprints into that list appropriately keeps you moving, keeps you on track to finish all the projects. Aligning our routine sprints with project-specific sprints and creating a prioritized order allows us to effectively make progress toward our life goals.