Using Scrum in Real Life
A few months ago, I started to think about using Scrum in personal life. Today, I’d like to share with you the feedback from my experience.
Life goals are different than action items:
There is a big difference between setting goals in your life and taking actions towards your goals. Writing down your categorized life goals in a Scrum backlog won’t do you any good. The goals may remain the same, but the actions can dramatically change. For example, in the middle of the sprint, I realized that my action items towards one of my goals are entirely wrong along with their time estimates and everything. I simply, had to start this sprint over again due to the dramatic changes in the way I think about achieving one of my goals.
You need to have fun:
Everyone needs to relax and have fun at some point during the week or month. You may need to go the movies, hang out with friends, ride your bike to the parkway, …etc. You can’t plan how to have fun or at least, you can’t plan it in small details. I think that planning fun takes out all the fun. For me, it is the best when it is spontaneous. To mitigate this into Scrum, you may need to assign a percentage of your sprint time to have fun.
You can’t always say no:
Life throws us in a number of commitments that we can’t always say no to. Friends’ birthdays, holidays, family commitments, …etc. It is hard (not impossible) to have all these planned right as part of your sprint.
Life is full of surprises:
Car is broken, motorcycle needs new tires, a really interesting discussion at work and you don’t wanna leave, .. etc. Again, predicting these items and assigning the right time estimates for them isn’t impossible but pretty hard to do.
Now, let me give you the geeky side of the conclusion.
There is a number of different agile software development methods. Each one tries to solve a different set of problems in different ways. Project managers should have the skill to decide on which method would work best for the project at hand and/or the team members he is working with.
The problem I see in applying Scrum in my personal life is that it requires a lot more time to plan it than I am willing to give. Therefore, I’ll start trying different methods. Hopefully, I’ll find the right one to manage my life goals and help me achieve a lot more in my life with a lot less time.
Please, share your thoughts!!!
We also tried using SCrum at home to keep track of all the household things we had to take care of – setting doctor’s appointments, having the car serviced, shopping for specific things for school and kids, etc. Especially since Scrum encourages “team work” I thought it would be a great way to make everything that needs to be done visible and to enable us to keep track of progress.
It didn’t last long, though. I agree that life goals and software goals don’t compare all that well, and Scrum is too structured. It doesn’t allow for organic changes, like you say. For the time being, I’m back to using Google Tasks for my personal to-do’s. But also starting to experiment with “Remember the Milk” as a collaborative to-do system.
For personal productivity at work, I’ve also started using Kanban. From working with it actively over 10 days, I actually think it’s approach to flow is most suited to use for life planning, as well. And it’s fun!
I found the same problem – stuff comes up.
There are lots of scheduled activities in your life (doctor, car) and recurring stuff (pick up son from school, ballet lessons) where as a project has different stories being worked on each week.
I’d be interested in seeing how scrum can apply to daily life for to-dos. Something I’m going to try is pulling from a prioritised backlog. I’ll block off time to do personal stuff. Then I’ll pull from there.
I’ll need to check for errands as well. Perhaps categorising tasks will be helpful – @home, @errands like GTD so I know which tasks are best for me to do when – kind of like design tasks, development, tasks and so on.