Category: tactics

First Do Cat Food

That’s right. Cat food. I have to deal with cat food. You do, too. We all do. Freakin’ cat food… and I don’t even have a cat…

Cat food is the mundane. Cat food is the every day task. Cat food is the unavoidable. Much like literal cat food, if you don’t continue to do (…buy? sell? feed your cat? feed yourself? trade on the hot and emerging cat food commodities market?) cat food, something important ceases to work. Cat food is important at the lowest level, the opposite of which are activities towards fulfilling your purpose: important at the highest level. So, while moving along your life vector is important, so is cat food, and sometimes cat food comes first.

David Allen did a Google Tech Talk five years ago: GTD and the Two Keys to Sustaining a Healthy Life and Workstyle. Of ‘Getting Things Done‘ fame, he talks about two aspects of self-management: control and perspective. Getting control is mastering workflow, where you spend time collecting, then processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing. Getting perspective works with horizons of focus, from 50,000 feet, or your purpose and principles, to ground level, or the next actions; it is here where he says we should start, and not with a vision. You have to get deck-clearing capability first before being able to think at the high level.

Now that I think about it… this is what I did almost two years ago, when I first moved to my current place, where I started what ended up being a first version of ScrumOfOne. When at a complete loss of what to do next, when I had to clear my at least mental deck, I stepped through the following list first:

Eat food. Shop for food. Pay bills. Tidy up kitchen. Tidy up room. Do laundry. Iron.

Yeah. Ironing. (And that’s all I’ll say about that.)

Much as I like the idea of dealing with cat food before focusing on vision, I’d treat chronic pains the same way, where this includes items that are annoying, always there, and are general, glaring impediments to happiness. Sure, you can work on your purpose, but if you’re struggling with food, clothing, and shelter, and you’re concerned, then this’ll sit like a gremlin at the forefront of your brain and not let you freely pursue your heart song (ooh, I like that metaphor). You don’t need to totally rid yourself of this gremlin before starting down your happy path, but it does help to have a plan.

Visualizing Via Pinterest

Crap, I’m addicted. I mean, I was addicted, but only for the whole evening yesterday.

Pinterest is a site to post linked pictures, organized by ‘boards’. Simple. It’s popular enough that when you’re reading an article that features a picture, right next to those buttons where you can Tweet it or Facebook it (that’s a verb now?) or Google Plus it (Google add it?), you can now Pin it to a board of yours.

What’s so (P)interesting about this?

I now have suit coats because I wandered in Marshall’s and knew what to look for. I knew what to look for because between Sprints (during my Sprint Planning), I read over all of my Product Backlog. Sure, this takes a few minutes, but it’s worth it – it reminds me of the person I want to be via clear (and Independent and Negotiable and Valuable and ‘Estimatable’ and Small and Testable) stories to get there. One of those stories for an awesome me was amassing a collection of suit coats. This wish comes from what I think is a better version of “Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.”

Dress as the man that I want to be.

And how did this get onto my Product Backlog / master-list-of-what-makes-up-a-future-and-awesome-Merrill? I sat and thought, like Pooh Bear, and wrote it down. I visualized and wrote it down. What does Pinterest give me? A way to visualize (and find online or snap a pic of something) and pin it up. It’s a vision board. ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne covers this, where you work with The Law of Attraction to bring to you what you want, which only really works with some deliberate measure if you know what you want.

So, in the Scrum spirit of things, I’ll be transparent (shameless?) and share my Pinterest boards, so you can see how I use them as vision boards:

http://pinterest.com/mblamont3

Happy pinning!

Hell Yeah Test

Let me set the scene. (OK…)

Boston. South Boston. The Southiest part. South of Washington Street. It’s Sunday. There is this open air market. It’s filled with friendly people selling friendly things to other friendly people out in the open air. The air is so open and so airy (what?!) and so friendly that each tidal wash of this pleasantly invigorating life force is an intimate activity, since it’s among friends. (Oh c’mon…) Smiles are artfully and generously cast only to return like a boomerang of love. (Stop it, that’s just ridiculous…)

That’s when I walk into a trap (here we go…), albeit of my own doing. (Oooh, a twist…)

So, you know my thing about bow ties. I finally learned to tie one a few days ago (big whoop, it’s like tying your shoelaces, except around your neck) and have joined the ranks of the dapper, so why not augment my ability to parade my fashionable skill to the masses? (‘Cause nobody else does…) Thus, like a match made in open air market heaven, I happen upon a booth of bow ties. Custom bow ties. Friendly open air custom bow ties. (Snarky comment in three… two…) It was too good to be true. (They were made of bacon?)

In truth, however, it wasn’t good enough.

The bow ties were good, but they weren’t great. They were cool, but they weren’t awesome. They were custom, but they weren’t me. (That thing did not have a hemi.) I stood in that booth looking over the buffet, listening to the owners share their story, thinking about what outfit a particular choice would go with (ninja suit – can’t go wrong), learning how they were made in Thailand (BowTieLand?), feeling them pour on the pressure to buy like the management students they were. The longer I stayed, the more committed and bow tied down (niiice) I felt.

Through a break in the clouds, the wisdom of the commerce gods (Hermes? Mercury?) dawned upon me and I yanked myself away. I realized that none of the bow ties passed the Hell Yeah Test. (Now we’re making stuff up.) I didn’t make this up. I read it in ‘The $100 Startup’ by Chris Guillebeau (and then we made it up):

When presented with an opportunity, don’t think about its merit or how busy you are. Instead, think about how it makes you feel. If you feel only so-so about it, turn it down and move on. But if the opportunity would be exciting and meaningful – so much so that you can say, “hell yeah” when you think about it – find a way to say yes.

So yes, I walked away from taking on another piece of clothing I wasn’t excited about. And why shouldn’t that apply to anything else? Not just all purchases (a new rule I’m imposing upon myself) (oh, what a burden), but also… life? The big things and the small things. The big things meaning friendships, relationships, jobs, picking where to live, voting, other lifestyle choices. The small things meaning what to eat, where to eat, what to wear, what to do in your down time, what to buy, whether to buy a bow tie. Having the strategic and tactical driven by the Hell Yeah Test sounds like a sense of flow, yes no? (Hell yes no.) This test guides you along what excites you – what giddily excites you to your kiddie core. (Heck yes, please.)

Conversely, where possible, this also means don’t do things that don’t pass the Hell Yeah Test, like purchase a bow tie that doesn’t excite you. This thus turns into a very natural selector – in a sense, you’re listening to your body – essentially another version of following your intuition. I happen to like how it’s phrased here a lot better. Don’t you? (Hell Yeah.)

Personal Overhead

This is the post where I share my ScrumOfOne existential doubts.

Do I doubt this whole “Using Scrum for Personal Development” idea? Yes I do, yet I think it’s somewhat healthy. It is very encouraging that Scrum encourages critical thinking by building in a time to be retrospective and thus adapt: choose to amend the set of processes I’m imposing upon myself, which includes killing off all that overhead altogether! There is a question from ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ by Timothy Ferriss that fits this all too well:

Am I being productive or just active?

Rephrase:

Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?”

I’ll admit that I feel this ScrumOfOne idea is kinda my baby; I really like the idea and have found it key to managing how I purposefully get things done. So that I can analyze if these ‘Scrummy’ practices are a good return on investment, I have turned to these existential questions from ‘Rework’ by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson:

Why are you doing this?
Is this actually useful?
Will this change behavior?
What could you be doing instead?
What problem are you solving?
Are you adding value?
Is there an easier way?
Is it really worth it?

Man, those questions are straight-up down-right (left hook?) harsh! And I like ’em. A lot. They bleed with the spirit of Getting Real. I had huge plans: waking up at 5:31am to step through the three questions (I even convinced a buddy to be a part of this pre-dawn Scrum), stepping through and documenting a formal Retrospective, writing a PERL script to manage a text-based Product Backlog, reading weekly a set of quotes & phrases & book notes I’ve collected over the years as my personal set of Psalms. These weren’t just plans… I actually did them for a while!

So do I still do all this? Hellz no! These ceremonies were just not sustainable for the long term. My commute schedule changed, so 5:31am turned into an ungodly hour to be awake, although I still have the 531am.com domain name. My Retrospective currently covers what happened over the past two weeks, how process adaptations fared, and what process tweaks to adopt. My Product Backlog is a Google Doc with the Sprint Backlog at the very top – a text editor in the cloud suffices. My hours-long re-centering read now happens monthly. I pared down the personal overhead to manageable levels based on fruitful returns.

Sure, ScrumOfOne takes discipline, which connotes a struggle, though what I’ve found as I’ve been massaging this system of processes is you can change the nature of the motivation when you see the fruits of your labor. The morning stand-up has turned into 15 minutes of alignment, mental prep, and a generally feel-good start to my day. It’s a trigger to personal finance documenting, reading a few fruity-sounding affirmations, and walking into the day with a purpose. When I do this, I literally walk differently. (I do!) This whole Scrum business is just that transforming.

Thus the system continues, yet only because it started with a habit: a small step: the seed of a fruit I hoped would work out. Upon processes that proved their own worth, I added, modified, and removed (…mostly removed) as I evolved this personal overhead, like trimming a fruit tree.

Alright. Seriously. What’s up with all the fruit in this post? I think I’ll grab a pear…

Hide And Seek

Ever play ‘Hide and Seek’? At work? Try it some time – it’s what the cool (and productive) kids are doing.

The idea of a Sprint, a block of time to do stuff, is simple. And there’s magic in the web of it.

It is magic in that it protects a constant while still embracing change. Before a sprint, you set up what you will do for that duration – this list is called a Sprint Backlog. Once you enter the sprint, this magic box of time (I do two weeks), your Sprint Backlog is shielded from the weather. It might be calm and sunny, where you’re not really pressured to deviate from the plan. Other days, you might be in the middle of a crazy sand storm & hail front, where you’ve got what feel like forces of nature vying for your attention. Regardless, unless it is something catastrophic, Scrum espouses that you stick with implementing the Backlog for that Sprint; changes in priority and direction are handled in the Product Backlog (the larger list of things to do), which is then addressed in between Sprints. This allows you to get stuff done and not be affected by emergent distractions, usually changes in direction. Simple, yes no?

This is a strategic modus operandi. Let’s adapt this thinking to the realm of the tactical.

In the corporate environment (ah, cube land), you’ve got meetings, folks walking by and chatting, and guys flying stunt maneuvers with their (awesome, yet annoying) toy helicopters. These are distractions. Sometimes, they’re welcomed. Other times, when you’re in the zone or earnestly trying to get stuff done, they suck, and the DJ Tiesto-grade headphones that you bought for yourself as a Christmas present blasting progressive house don’t drown out the high-pitched whirring of spinning blades. Let’s apply some of the magic from Sprints and lessen the suckage:

Play Hide and Seek – block out time, space, and attention.

Block out time: Go into MS Outlook. Got a couple of hours that you would like uninterrupted? Create a meeting with one mandatory attendant – you! (awww…) Now when others are setting up a meeting that includes you, they’ll look at other available times, or think they’re super-important and double-book you while apologizing. (booo…)

Block out space: Go to a conference room. Hide. Wouldn’t it be cool if they made grown-up versions of Study Hall? It’s a sacred place where work gets done. Phones and pagers are silenced.

Block out attention: Turn off instant messaging. Turn off email. Do you really need to know the second you get an email via a pop-up in the lower-right corner of your screen?

Got any similar tactical tools you’d like to share?