I'm constantly looking for better ways to organize my personal life. I happen to be extremely scatter-brained, sometimes to the point of forgetting to take out the trash for three consecutive weeks. I've tried everything – notecards, daily to-do lists, spreadsheets, online services, planners, notebooks, cork boards, smart phone apps, and every combination of the above. These things work to varying degrees and for varying lengths of time, but I've never found that silver bullet that revolutionized my life and instantly turned me into a productivity magnate (hint: it doesn't exist). Then, a couple of weeks ago, a thought occurred to me: why not try Scrum as a method for personal organization? So, I'm giving it a shot!
Why Personal Scrum?
There are a few things that go into the picking, planning, and execution of a personal routine: the routine should provide the faculties necessary for accomplishing your goals; the routine should have enough flexibility that it can adapt to the unpredictabilities of life-living; and, most importantly, you must be able to form a habit around the routine. It's usually that last bit that gets us (The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men…).
Now, chances are that if you're thinking about adopting Scrum in your everyday life, you're already familiar with it from work. This was my experience – Scrum and other Agile and Lean concepts were encountered through industry first. When I first thought about applying Scrum to my life, I was uncertain whether I would be able to adopt it successfully – and the jury's still out, to an extent. However, the big allure was that I had already formed a habit around Scrum’s workflow and associated software from my job. This was a significant boon inasmuch as it lowered some of the typical barriers to entry. Of course, there was still the usual overhead of updating my system-of-the-week with my mental backlog of personal errands and goals. Conveniently, Scrum has this process (Backlog creation) built in! Okay – I was sold enough to at least give it a try.
The Method
First thing I did was to find an online service that suited my needs. We use Rally at work, and it's pretty excellent, but I decided to look elsewhere for a few reasons – I wanted something lightweight, and I wanted to learn some other tools to broaden my experience. After doing some research, I settled on ScrumDo – it was free, online, had a nice Kanban board, and was easy to set up. I created a project (aptly named "Life"), added a few things to the Backlog off the top of my head (beauty of a Backlog – no pressure to add everything now!), and set up my first Iteration. I can’t stress how important it was to just get started.
Since the schedule was fundamentally arbitrary, I decided to make things easy and do my Iterations in tandem with calendar months. "October 2012" is my first Sprint. I've been adding future Sprints into the system whenever I first encounter a User Story that I want add into that Sprint (like "Buy Christmas presents" during November and "Seriously, buy Christmas presents" during December).
How Is Personal Scrum Different?
As mentioned above, a big concern was whether I'd be able to adapt Scrum to my personal schedule without warping it too much. A few differences have popped up during the brainstorming, planning, and execution of these first few weeks.
Life has continuous deadlines.
Sometimes life's deliverables have mid-Sprint due dates – "Buy Mom's birthday gift" can't be finished for October 31st when her birthday's on October 15th (I mean, you could do that, but have fun explaining yourself). Also, these Stories can't always be fit into the previous Sprint. In this way, life demands “continuous releases” (Agile, but not necessarily Scrum).
It's hard to decide what is worthy of being a User Story.
Things like "Car inspection" make great candidates for personal User Stories. They're relatively important and sizable Tasks with easy-to- identify deadlines and no dependencies. Things like "Do the dishes" probably aren't worth putting through this system. Where's the line? My gut says that only experience will dictate where this line is, and it may well be a matter of personal preference.
Repetitive tasks are awkward to capture.
It's entirely reasonable to capture a User Story such as "October 2012 Bills" for an Iteration, with a Task for each bill you have to pay during that month. It's a little bit more annoying to create a separate Story or Task every week to "Take out the garbage". I'm toying with the idea of a monthly "Mundane house chores" Story, but that seems like a hack. I haven't yet figured out an elegant and useful way to capture repetitive small Tasks.
It's only part of the story.
Scrum isn't really suited for capturing things like calendar appointments; but then again, in business, we don't use it for that either. In any case, it's worth pointing out that my method will probably be a combination of Scrum, calendar management, and daily to-do lists for the little things.
Standups?
I try to replace the daily Standup with 15 minutes spent looking at my current Iteration, updating Stories, planning what I'll do over the next day, and grooming my Backlog. This works very well, and motivates me to get things done. It's helpful but difficult to do it at a consistent time. I shoot for right-after-work because I find that I'm often most inclined to want to work on my personal Stories immediately after my Standup.
Lots of mid-Sprint additions to Committed Work.
If you know of a way to avoid this, let me know. I suspect there isn't one.
Early Roadblocks, Early Successes
I've run into a few issues with ScrumDo – most notably, the fact that the Burndown only reflects Story Point completion (Tasks can't have hour estimates). This means that your Burndown doesn't change until you finish a whole Story, which can be frustrating because I'm used to seeing the Burndown change much more incrementally and I like seeing the progress I make every day. For future Stories and Iterations, I'm moving towards much more granular Stories organized into Epics – basically, using my Stories as Tasks and my Epics as Stories (make sense?). I've also found that the Kanban (a.k.a. "ScrumBan") board has been a huge boon – it's an awesome visualization, and it's strangely motivating. I've grown addicted to moving Stories across the board, and thus I find myself often rushing to be productive immediately after checking the board. I've also noticed that when I add a new Story, I'm inclined to do it immediately (if possible) instead of my usual strategy of "ignore until urgent".
Finally, and very significantly for me, I find that the backlog is the perfect mechanism for dumping my mind-store and allowing myself to stop worrying about unfinished business. I know that things will be captured and completed in their due time (and with due process). This allows me to stop worrying about whether I'll remember to get to things – Scrum has built in mechanisms for grooming and prioritization that extend very nicely to life's optional to-do items.
What Next?
If you know Scrum, you've probably heard of the "Retrospective". It is, in my opinion, one of the most important pieces of the Scrum equation. I'd love to occasionally make a blog post part of my retrospective. This is a very touch-and-go enterprise for me, and only time will teach me what I want to know. If you see me back here over the ensuing months, then you'll know that the experiment was a success!
