You have a direction in life? Holy cow! Congrats!
Wait, you don’t? That’s cool. Having a direction for life is pretty major. Let’s start with setting a direction for, say, the next two weeks.
Before I found my life calling, I had a large prioritized list of things I wanted to be and do. Spanning numerous aspects of myself (musician, ScrumMaster, runner, host, boyfriend, …), I had little focus to my stories within each two-week Sprint. At some point, I adopted something I read in ‘Rework’ by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, a couple of guys from 37signals: the concept of a short-term press release – What is the exciting new thing you will share proudly with the world at the end of your Sprint?
The Sprint Press Release became a focal point about which my stories would congregate and, in a sense, filter themselves. A theme would arise. The similarly-themed backlog items would, through the Sprint, help each others’ completion because they were related. They would all share the same spirit, that which is represented not by the sum of parts (functionalities of all stories, combined), but by the whole, an example of punctuated evolution where a new functionality emerges that is relatively large, possible only because the smaller stories were completed.
Thus, rally stories within each Sprint around a theme. They’ll be easier to get done, and because they’re along the same vein, that’s a sense of –
You have a direction for the next two weeks? Holy cow! Congrats!