The entire Monthly Method is based on the idea of intentional living, committing to a small number of tasks that are truly important to you
It’s confession time. It took me 8 years to finally create an analog Scrum board for myself. I’ve been using Agile for my personal goals for years. However, building an analog Scrum board took forever. Why did it take me so long? My main excuse for not using an analog Scrum board was that I …
You set a goal. Plan out desired actions. But when it’s time to do the work, you don’t want to do it. You feel resistance. And you start talking yourself out of it. Sounds familiar? Meet The Boogeyman Technique that will help you stick with the desired behavior and ultimately achieve your goals. Traditional advice …
How to stick to your goals: The Boogeyman Technique Read More »
Confession time. Over the past 3 years, I came to the conclusion that habit-building as a goal is, for most people, a counter-productive activity. I know… a scandalous opinion in the personal productivity world. It will take some time to lay out all my arguments against habits as goals. But let me start with the …
Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is crap. It applies to books, restaurants, TV shows, movies, tweets, YouTube videos, and everything else humans produce. I spent some time thinking if it was true in my life. And… I tend to agree. When was the last time you encountered something outstanding? Something that was so …
Step off the hamster wheel with Agile and Sturgeon’s Law Read More »
Let’s dust off what’s left of high school math, shall we? Logarithms. Remember such a thing? A logarithm is the power to which a number must be raised in order to get some other number. Source: University of Minnesota Log10 (1) = 0 Log10 (10) = 1 Log10 (100) = 2 Log10 (1000) = 3 etc. …
Meet Angela and Laura. They are participating in a baking competition at school. They need to get the most votes on their cookie to win this competition. Goal: bake a damn good cookie Deadline: 1 month Time available to dedicate to this activity: 5 hours a week, 20 hours total Angela decides to embrace the …
Agile for beginners: How to bake a damn good cookie Read More »
If you live in North America, the moment you announce to your friends you are pregnant, they start asking when you are going to host a baby shower. But if you didn’t grow up in North America, the whole idea of a baby shower seems strange. What is the baby shower for? The baby is …
How is your February going? Let me guess. When you go to a gym, it’s less busy. There is less activity on productivity subreddits. Your YouTube feed stopped recommending goal-setting content. Atomic Habits is gone from Amazon’s recommendations list. It’s a clear sign that New Year’s resolutions are dead. Why do New Year’s resolutions die? …
The Secret to Beating the February Slump: An Agile Approach to Personal Productivity Read More »
Welcome to the final Part 3 of the New Year’s Resolutions series. Today we’ll discuss finalizing your New Year’s goals and resolutions using the remaining Scrum principles. Recap of our progress so far Let’s recap where we are. We’ve gone through Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. So far, we’ve done the review …
Applying Agile to New Year’s Resolutions – Part 3 Read More »
Welcome to Part 2 of Applying Agile to New Year’s Resolutions! Let’s discuss how you can apply agile concepts of sprints, sprint capacity, and backlog review to setting up your goals. Problem #1: A year is too long. You don’t feel a sense of urgency when you set a goal for the year. And without …
Applying Agile to New Year’s Resolutions – Part 2 Read More »
It’s that time of year when a lot of us are thinking about new year’s resolutions. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to think about next year. But there are some common problems that I see with the traditional way of setting new year’s goals. I decided to dedicate the rest of December to addressing …
Applying Agile to New Year’s Resolutions – Part 1 Read More »
For this sprint, I am working on something hard and time-consuming. I have just one goal for this sprint – to create a free workshop that I will host in the near future. The workshop is about three steps that you can do in order to launch your project in three months or less. I’m …
Let’s talk about external accountability and how it can help in achieving your goals. External accountability is the secret sauce behind so many services. Personal trainer and coaches When you hire a personal trainer, it’s not necessarily their knowledge that gives your results. The main reason why personal trainers can be so effectives is that they …
One of the clients in our October Sprint mentioned that he’s struggling with prioritization. He doesn’t know which goals he should focus on. This is a common problem. Let’s address it. How to prioritize goals? Why can’t we prioritize goals? The story we tell ourselves We think we don’t know the how. We think we …
I finished my master’s degree a few years ago. It was a two-year program. I was able to finish it in 5 semesters instead of six. I later learned that a lot of my classmates had to stay longer than six semesters. That made me think about some of the strategies that helped me finish …
Strategies I used to finish master’s degree early Read More »
In continuation of the topic of agile concepts, I would like to delve deeper into an interesting idea that will be helpful in the workplace and our personal lives: Sprint Capacity. We will go through how it works in agile teams. Also, we will tackle how it can be implemented in our personal productivity. How …
I want to share a mind trick that I use myself when I’m starting new habits. This mind trick helps me to come back and do this activity again, therefore increasing the chances of it actually sticking and becoming a habit. Everything is hard before it is easy A few years ago I heard this …
Mind trick for starting new habits and building consistency Read More »
Happy Path in Software Development As a product manager, I learned about the Happy Path concept from my manager. This is how it works in product management. The Happy Path When building a new product, you first focus on the happy path. The happy path is a journey a user of a product is taking, …
Building a productive habit can sometimes be a struggle. One of my previous clients asked me recently — “How many sprints does it usually take to build a habit?” I usually divide my habits into two groups. The first one involves those habits that you do on a daily basis, and the other group is …
Every once in a while, we encounter things that we never expected to become so useful in our lives. Perhaps most of you have discovered a life hack that you didn’t expect to be cleverly life-changing. Thus, it has become integrated with your lifestyle. Mine is a transformational way of thinking about goals that impacts my …