If you’ve been curious about how to plan your first personal sprint, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know. We’ll cover what a sprint is, how it works, how long it should be, how to calculate your sprint capacity, and why having a sprint focus matters.
What is a sprint?
A sprint is a short, time-boxed period during which you commit to completing a defined amount of work.
If we break down that definition, three elements stand out:
-
Short and time-boxed — A sprint should be brief. There’s a reason it’s called a sprint and not a marathon.
-
A fixed amount of work — A sprint includes a limited number of tasks, projects, or goals.
-
Completion required — Every sprint ends with your tasks moving from To-Do to Done.
Traditional productivity advice tells you to set yearly goals, which often leads to overwhelm and frustration. In contrast, Agile encourages you to work in short cycles. You choose the duration of your sprint, and then you adjust your goals based on your available time and energy.
How long should a sprint be?
Your sprint needs to be:
-
Short enough that you feel a deadline approaching
-
Long enough that you can ship something meaningful
Because of that, a 1-day sprint is too short, while a 3-month sprint is too long. The sweet spot — both in the tech world and for personal productivity — is 2–6 weeks.
Focus on completion, not activity
Agile productivity doesn’t care about how many hours you logged, your perfect routines, or whether you tracked every habit. The only thing that matters is whether you completed something by the end of the sprint.
During a sprint, ask:
“What can I fully complete in this sprint?”
Maybe it’s the first draft of a chapter. Maybe it’s building the outline of a course. Maybe it’s launching the first version of a website. The goal is to finish something tangible.
Examples of good sprint goals
I have a growing library of real sprint goal examples, each with a clear Definition of Done, drawn from real sprints (mine or my clients’).
You can get access to the file here.
Sprint Capacity
Next, let’s talk about sprint capacity — how much work you can realistically complete in one sprint.
Sprint capacity changes every sprint.
For example:
-
If you have a busy month at work → sprint capacity goes down
-
If you’re traveling → sprint capacity goes down
-
If life is calm → sprint capacity goes up
To estimate your sprint capacity for your first sprint:
👉 Start with 5 hours of focused work per week.
So, if your sprint is two weeks long → your sprint capacity is about 10 hours of focused work.
Note about units of measure for sprint capacity
Sprint capacity is closely monitored and measured when you use Agile and Scrum in professional settings. Having a rigid unit of measure for sprint capacity is an overkill if you are doing it for personal productivity. You don’t need to keep stats and measure every drop of time that goes into your sprints. We already measure too many things in our lives that don’t need to be measured. There is no added benefit to an exact sprint capacity measurement. Just get a sense of how busy you are in the upcoming sprint.
The more sprints you do, the better understanding you’ll have of your normal sprint capacity. My normal sprint capacity is 5 projects per sprint. I know the size of 5 projects I can complete in one sprint. It’s not an exact science. It’s a feeling. If an upcoming sprint is filled with travel, my sprint capacity for that sprint would go down to 2-3 projects for the sprint. If it’s a peak season in our family business, I’ll reduce the scope of my sprint projects.
I measure my sprint capacity in a number of meaningful projects I can complete (5 in my case). If you are a beginner, use ‘hours of work’ as your approximate measure. As I mentioned, 5 hours per week is a good start for calculating the sprint capacity for the first sprint.
Estimating sprint capacity is self-care
Estimating your sprint capacity is the investment in how you will feel at the end of the sprint. If you do it, you feel proud and accomplished by the end of the sprint because you will plan tasks of an acceptable size and in acceptable numbers based on your current season of life.
Self-care is doing an act of kindness to my future self.
From my personal experience, if I skip this step, my future self always suffers. She gets burned out. She gets frustrated and feels like a failure because half of her sprint goals aren’t completed.
That’s the main reason I’ve been able to use this Agile productivity framework for the last 10 years. It always adapted to whatever season of life I was in. I’ve never felt like a complete failure at the end of a sprint, unlike so many other productivity systems I’d tried before.
(You can read more about sprint capacity here.)
Setting a Sprint Focus
A sprint focus acts like a theme for the sprint. It ties your goals together and makes prioritizing easier.
For example:
-
“Moving”
-
“Finishing the website”
-
“Launching the podcast”
-
“Deep house reset”
A simple trick for clarifying your sprint focus:
Imagine someone asks: “What are you working on these days?”
Your one-sentence answer → that’s your sprint focus.
Summary: Planning Your First Sprint (Part 1)
To prepare for your first sprint:
-
Create your backlog (a list of potential sprint goals)
-
Choose your sprint duration (2–6 weeks)
-
Estimate your sprint capacity based on your current season of life and commitments
-
Review your backlog to identify sprint candidates
-
Take a few days to think about your sprint focus and sprint goals
What’s Next
In Part 2 of Planning Your First Personal Sprint, I walk you through how to select the right sprint goals and frame them in a way that makes completing them much easier.
You can find the core Agile and Scrum principles and their practical application to one’s life on the Start Here page.
If you want to read the most recent posts, click here.
If you want support while planning your first sprint, come find me over here.
