Do You Master Your Day and Run Sprints?

15 Sep

When I was a software architect, my team used to run “sprints” as part of our process of building software in an agile fashion. A sprint’s duration is usually two weeks. A sprint is a set number of days, and on its first day, the team sits together for an hour and decides what they will do for the next two weeks. Tasks are written down and put on the “To Do” side of the board, then moved to the “In Progress” section and eventually “Done”. Every day, the team members get together and tell others what they did yesterday, whether the progress is good or if there are impediments and that help is needed. The tasks you don’t complete move onto the next sprints of two weeks, but you do a retrospective of what went well, what didn’t go well, and how we could improve.

This concept of agility is closer to what I read in Alexander Heyne's book Master The Day last year. My mission as a full-time creator is to establish myself and lay a foundation to start earning money; otherwise, the dream won’t go that far. I am fully committed to working hard and smart. To quote a Gen Z term, “I am busy cooking!”. Let me put it this way, “I don’t want to waste. time, I can’t waste time, I can’t afford that”.

I run sprints, too. My sprints are a week-long, though. Based on the broader goals I have set for myself, I write down what I want to do in a week. After I finalise it and realise that this is aligned with my goals, I allocate them to days of the week. I could use software for that, and I use it to manage everything, but I am keeping it very tactile and manual for now. Below are photos of this week’s sprint and sprint goals.

This helps me with the following:

accountable to myself since I am my boss (my actual boss is my wife, but we don’t talk about that)
aligned to my vision and broader goals
organised
personally fulfilled because I need confidence to move forward and know I am not wasting my and my family’s time
aware of where I stand today, how far I have come, where I need to go and if I need to pivot

I hope this helps you in mastering your day and week.

Quote of the week: “Time doesn't heal. It's what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility when we choose to take risks, and finally when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.” ~Edith Egar

Video of the week: Be the main character of your life by Ottilie

Kind regards

Muji