Ever feel like you’re not getting anything done? Do you feel like you should be achieving more with your life but it’s just not happening? One of the things I believe in is an extremely organised life. This might seem pretty boring, but I believe it is one of the key reasons why I’ve been able to be successful in my endeavours.
In software engineering I’ve been using agile techniques to deliver effectively for many years. It gives you a bunch of ideas to use when building software, but these can be used anywhere there is an intention to achieve a goal. But can these same ideas be used outside of software engineering to help you achieve more in your life?
I use ideas from agile to manage myself in my personal endeavours. The main components I use are:
- Breaking large tasks down into smaller manageable ones.
- Maintaining a prioritised backlog of tasks and regularly reviewing it.
- Having planning sessions regularly to decide what work to commit to.
How does this help with personal goals and aspirations?
The Ability to React to Change
One of the key agile manifesto values is that we value responding to change over following a plan. What this means is, committing to small amounts of work at a time allows us to quickly re-prioritise work when change happens. This is a cornerstone idea of agile and it helps massively when it comes to ever evolving priorities both in your life
Your happiness is ultimately defined by your ability to react to change.
You’re never going to be able to predict everything that will happen in your life. I’ve learned that I can barely predict what is going to happen in 6 months let alone 6 years. Things change, life changes, if you accept that, you will be better prepared to cope with it.
Incremental Rewards
It is psychologically rewarding to see yourself completing small tasks regularly. I had a goal a few years ago to renovate a flat to sell. The task involved a huge number of different tasks, which if I had viewed as one bit target to tackle over a few months would have been overwhelming. Working on a large piece of work and not seeing much progress is demoralising and will cause you to give up altogether.
By breaking down a large piece of work into smaller manageable tasks, you are able to see progress which makes you feel good about yourself. This enables to keep moving forward towards your goal.
Regular Planning
Software engineering teams who follow scrum commonly have planning sessions every 2 weeks, where they get together and discuss what they’re going to commit to over the next 2 weeks. This means that if priorities shift you can realign your goals and change your work appropriately.
In my life I do planning every week for the following week. Typically this just takes the form of a conversation with my wife deciding what our priorities are and creating a list of tasks that we want to complete in the week ahead.
We maintain a backlog of tasks that we want to complete, which we add to as new things come up. Things like:
- Buy curtains for spare room
- Go to hospital appointment Tues @ 9am
- Fix broken plug socket
We also maintain a list of our higher level goals that we want to achieve over the next year or so, things like:
- Find a new hobby by the end of the year
- Run a marathon in 2017
- Move house in 2018
I use Trello for this and I highly recommend it. It basically allows you to keep lists of items, synced across all your devices. It’s very simple to set up and it’s great for organising yourself.
Using ideas from agile in my everyday life may not be the sexiest, but it allows me to edge closer to my dreams easier and more efficiently!
