Managing your life with Agile

I have been reading “Getting Things Done” by Dave Allen recently, and tried to adopt some of the principles in my everyday life. I started maintaining a list of all tasks in Notion, and have been following it for a few weeks. This morning as I was explaining how Agile works to a friend, it stuck me that GTD == Agile.

There’s a lot of overlap between the GTD principles and how we manage our work with Agile. Which essentially means that as effectively I use Agile at work to manage my product (SAP SuccessFactors Compensation), it can be used quite effectively to manage your life as well.

Here’s a recipe for how to implement this for you –

Write down everything you want to accomplish (product vision → life vision)
Create Epics for big projects that lead you there.
Break down epics into manageable tasks → stories
Have a big backlog of all tasks
Prioritize backlog and pull items into the Sprint (week long?)
Assign story points to each task
Over tea/coffe, have a daily scrum with your life partner
Measure your velocity, how many stories/tasks you are able to complete outside of your meetings and emails.
Measuring velocity will help you plan for next sprints better.
Have a Sprint review at the end of each week and see what can be done better.

So there you go, try this out and let me know what you think of it.

Gaining control of Time

Recently saw this TED Talk on Time Mangement from Laura Vanderkam –

So here’s my To-Do/Takeaway from the talk –

– Write the performance review for next year now — this means that imagine it is the end of 2017 and it was an Awesome year, what 3 to 5 things that I did this year to make this so great..

– Every Friday afternoon — make yourself a 3 category priority list — career, relationship and self.. and lookout for the whole next of the week and see where you can plan those for the next week.

How to beat Bangalore traffic?

Bangalore traffic can be killing.. You never know if it’s going to take you 15 mins or 1.5 hours. And it’s such a huge waste of productive time. Moreover, I got sick of all the Real Estate ads on the radio.

But recently driving has sort of become the 2nd best part of my day. Playing with Gungun being the best, of course. All thanks to the audiobooks. I used to listen to podcasts earlier, and recently started listening to audiobooks. Podcasts were also fun especially Stanford ETL, Freaknonimics, Tim Ferriss Show and others.

Now I have switched to Audiobooks. I had an Audible membership earlier and had downloaded couple of books including Lean Startup, Innovator’s Solution, Alchemist and more. Currently I have Delivering Happiness – by Tony Hsieh play and am almost close to finishing it. Thanks to Audiobooks I have finished more books in last 3 months than I have ever read in my life.

I also found out that Books 24×7, which is probably one of the most under-utilized company resources has tons of Audiobooks available. I had access to Books 24×7 for 7 years at IBM but never ever used it once. But now I am using it regularly. I finished Seth Godin’s Tribes and Purple Cow already and now onto Ziglar on Selling.

If you dread traffic as well, try using Audiobooks or Podcasts. I am you would wait to begin your commute everyday..