An Agile Approach To Life

Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.

As in software, it is in life.

I like the Agile software methodology because you set a target vision of something that you wish to achieve, breaks down the vision into smaller achievable chunks and then iteratively implements something valuable that can be reviewed and measured in line with the deliverable goal. The shorter iterative cycles with continuous feedback loops allows you to reevaluate regularly to ensure that you are delivering incremental value while allowing you to change direction if you see that what you are doing is not working, or needs some additional thought.

Now this is the same thing for life. We can set large visions of grandeur, spend months planning these projects to the nth degree without accomplishing anything and at the first step realize that the opportunity has passed, or that what we have done is not valid or not even feasible. Is like planning to fly to Mars and being off by 0.1 percent of a degree, in the longer term that deviation is going to have much larger repercussions.

So as in software, create your large vision of what you wish to achieve, create some high level goals that will get you to your vision, set yourself interim targets, get going and do the first one on the priority list and then check back in to see if it made sense. Did you achieve what you wanted to do. Then move on to the next.

You can even have the same ceremonies.

• Backlog refinement to create high level goals in line with your goal
• Sprint planning to take the high level goal and break it down into tasks to achieve in the iteration
• Daily check-in to see if anything is blocking you from completing the tasks you are busy with, and then focusing on clearing those blockers
• Sprint reviews to demonstrate what you have achieved in the period in line with what you committed to complete
• Retrospective to identify What went well, What didn’t work, What you can do more of and What you should be doing less of. This is the part where you celebrate small wins and learn from your mistakes. It gold!