Merrill III – Page 40

Your Power Hour

Some people are night owls. Other people are early birds. I people am not a fowl of any kind, thank you very much. (However, I am a male seahorse named Spikey, but that’s a different story…)

Do you ever get that jolt of inspired activity, where you suddenly want to do this thing and then you do it? Well, capture the nature of that jolt and ask yourself if you have a time of day where you’re likely to be as productive, relative to this jolt. This is your Power Hour! Now, apologize to yourself for asking yourself another question, then ask yourself: When is your Power Hour?

For me, if I can plop myself in front of a computer from the moment I wake up, I am super productive. Also, between 8:30 and 9:30 before my first meeting seems to be when I get lots of stuff done. Such times are usually ones where I am least prone to interruption and have a strict deadline. In the latter example, that Power Hour ends with the morning Scrum at work, whereas in the former example, that Power Hour ends when I start getting hungry. These are moments of sheer focus and Matrix-like clarity.

These times of day may not happen every day, but I wager that more often than not, much like for night owls and early birds, there is a time of day where you’re naturally more efficient. If you don’t know this for yourself, find it, even if it is by process of elimination, e.g., you’re useless after dinner or before your third cup of coffee.

After determining your Power Hour (and this is more a time of day than a strict 60 minutes), think about which tasks/stories you would want to have done during this time. Also, think about this somewhat physiological logistic when setting the day’s game plan during the Scrum. Besides prioritizing to work with your natural inclinations, this visualizing of getting a set of things done during that magical time feeds the good kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, and I’ll take a positive feedback loop like this whenever I can.

Two Metrics At Any Time

The last post talked about measuring life and how ScrumOfOne can do this to manage life, in a sense. The morning Scrum allows for a granularity of a day, but what about a measure with higher resolution? And would you even want one?

In ‘The $100 Startup’ by Chris Guillebeau, he proposes that in the monitoring of your business, select one or two metrics and be aware of them at any time, such that you can determine ’em in very short order. Examples include sales, cash flow, and incoming leads. To balance out the monitoring overhead, any other metrics would be subject to a biweekly or monthly review.

From a Scrum perspective, the burndown chart could be a visual representation of one of these metrics: how many hours left to complete all tasks associated with Sprint stories. For myself, I don’t have stories that I need to break into tasks quite yet… nor do I have a means to track this at a low enough overhead that I care to use.

The metric in this category that I do follow is how close to my Sprintly (financial) budget I am.

What would yours be?

Measure Life To Manage Life

A quote attributed to management consultant and writer Peter F. Drucker goes:

You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Makes sense, right? How can you tell if you’re getting better without a means to measure progress? Let’s apply this to the idea of life improvement. Want a better life? Measure it! Measure life? (Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred miiiiinutes… ‘Rent’, anyone?) I find this an interesting concept.

This harkens a conversation I had with a smart man in grad school. I argued that we measured what we valued. He argued that we valued what we measured. I now say the peanut butter and the chocolate (the chicken and the egg?) coexist together peacefully in a tasty treat (chicken parmesan?): both are true.

Accepting the duality of the above, whatever thing about life we measure, we’re going to value it, so we better choose something good. Now, what is it about life that we value? Ain’t that a juicy question.

Let’s approach this via quantity and quality. Live a long life? Yes please, at least on the longer side. Live a high quality life? Hm… can we say this equates to happiness? This allows us to point to a previous post that links happiness to excitement and initiative. Thus, we have:

How much excitement and initiative do you have in your life? How along your path and mission are you?

These should reflect your values, so now you’re measuring what you value – bingo! And this is what I love about ScrumOfOne. It is a framework for managing personal development with metrics, as well as processes for addressing these metrics, built in. It is a way to manage life by measuring life.

Top Of Mind

Half a year ago, I wrote about how I prioritize my ScrumOfOne backlogs. (Hold my horses… more than one personal backlog, I say? A future post covers this…) What I am finding now is that while, yes, each backlog is prioritized based on its vision, the backlog for the current sprint consists of items that are top-of-mind.

Idealism is great. It also takes discipline. While, yes, taking steps to grow me via my different facets is the road of continual life improvement I prefer to take, sometimes dealing with boxes after a recent move is an itch I feel I must scratch. (Hold the smart phone… what’s this ‘facets’ business I’m talking about? Did I just throw in the kitchen sink? Nope, that’s FAUCETS, and that future post will cover this, too…)

Yet, removing post-move clutter (floor-al chaos?) does not feel important, especially in that strategic sense; I don’t feel like I’m growing, nor investing in myself… I feel like I am delaying. So, fine, I could work on that and take direct steps towards life mission output and processes, but this does nothing for day-to-day living conditions. Thus, both strategic goals and tactical goals are top-of-mind. Oh, horsefeathers, what do I do?

Of course, rid myself of the refugee motif in the apartment. While, yes, tactical vs. strategic trade-offs are not usually this drastic, I try to accomplish the lesser of the two evils anyhow, thus choosing to tackle tactical backlog stories first. Thankfully, David Allen of ‘Getting Things Done’-fame agrees with this approach. After getting control (mastering workflow) is getting perspective (horizons of focus), where we start with addressing next actions (buy cat food) before addressing principles and purpose: get deck-clearing capability first before being able to think at a higher level.

There you have it, folks – how I prioritize my sprint backlog with more ease of mind: address tactical stories at the top of your mind, thus preparing for strategic stories by clearing your mind.

Don’t Have A Fine Day

Don’t do it. Just don’t. Whatever it takes.

If somebody asks you, “Greetings, citizen! How fares your day?” and you say, “Fine!” …then… think about that.

Fine? Do you really want a fine day? Just… fine? It’s your day, so if you could chose an adjective to be associated with it, would you really want it to be ‘fine’? Come now, fair citizen, surely you wish this not.

This line of thinking comes from ‘Tribes’ by Seth Godin, where he says that if you are having a fine day, then you’re not leading, because leaders are the heretics, out causing trouble, passionately speaking out against the status quo and creating change because the marketplace demands it. To be a leader, I can see this definitely applying.

To be a living human being, I can’t see why this shouldn’t apply.

If you’re having a fine day, then it is not an exciting day. Could you have an exciting day and honestly say it was just, well, y’know, fine? This echoes a definition of happiness from ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ by Tim Ferriss, where he equates happiness to excitement. If you are doing things that excite you (excites you to your core), then you are living life happily.

Let’s take this a step further and rock the boat a little: If you’re having a fine day, then you are not happy.

Ending on a lighter note, I challenge you to not have a fine day. Ever. Fo’ realz. Don’t float along the currents of everybody else’s life. Wake up every morning and tell yourself to make waves. I make this a part of my morning Scrum.

Stay in trouble, citizen.