Day 33: Agile Principle No. 8

I know myself. I have energy for three weeks and if I overdo it, I will burn myself out on something. It can be a side project or something for work. If that thing only takes two weeks to do, I get showered in compliments of how fast I got it done and what a hard worker I am.

But if it takes longer than three weeks? My energy fizzles. I am like that popular crispy rice cereal that has sat in milk too long. No more snaps. No more crackles. No more pops.

But, I know myself. I know to set the pace as obtainable no matter which phase of energy I am in. This was the heart of why we assign hours to the tasks on how long they would take to complete, and how I budget out my hours for the week in a job hunt.

The 8th Agile Principle is:

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Rewriting for our purpose:

Agile job hunts promote sustainable job searching process. The job searchers should maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

So self-check time when it comes time for your retrospective this week...

1. Is the pace at which you set this whole job hunt up sustainable?
2. How can you adjust it to be so for the remainder if it isn't?
3. Can you identify tasks that you should keep up on, even if not in a "job hunt" phase of your career to make it smoother next time?

For me, I only dedicate about 20 or so hours, even if I am in between jobs a week. Why? It keeps me and my family sane. It allows for things like a wonderful presentation to be put together on the fly for an interview, or a bit of extra snuggling with the little one if they are having a tough time after teething. The goal isn't necessarily maximizing but sustaining a pace that accomplishes the goals we set out to.

Bexs

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Click here for past articles in the Job Search Like a Project Manager Series:

Note: This is a whole series that organically grew out of sharing an entire project on how to conduct a job search to both gain project experience and to give you a framework for how to conduct it. The earliest few days were posts before the newsletter format took off.