Agile Pomodoro Autofocus Scrum GTD Combo 2

What productivity techniques work for me? I use a combination of Agile, Autofocus, Pomodoro, Scrum, and GTD. Each one of these disciplines is its own religion that each take months or years to study and master. Each of them also have their own cult following.  Like Bruce Lee, I absorb what is useful and discard what is not. Although, I don’t want to imply that you should discard anything from any of these disciplines, I will tell you key elements that I’ve isolated to bust up procrastination and inherently maintain balance.

 

 

Agile – One Shot, One Kill

You can read the Twelve Principles of the Agile Manifesto but you still may not take away some of the finer subtext that comes from implementing it in practice. Some may argue that I shouldn’t necessarily be attributing the following list to Agile, but I think this is a good a place as any. Here are a few principles I choose to re-iterate or explain:

1. Finish the table before you work on the chairs. In fact, as soon as the table stands up on its own, throw a table-cloth over it and call it version “1.0”. In other words, have something to show for your work as soon as possible, even if the reality is that it secretly isn’t finished.
2. Procrastinate on perfectionism, not on the actual task itself. By breaking away version 1.0 tasks from version 1.1 tasks, you can still have the option of perfection later. And more often than not, you’ll find the perfection you were needlessly striving for wasn’t as important as you thought, or wasn’t as perfect as you thought.
3. Ready-fire-aim-fire is effective, but ready-ready-ready is not. Don’t spend hours, days, or weeks learning all the intricacies of the C# language before you decide to lift a finger on creating your new grocery list app for Windows Phone. You should dive right in.  Plan which piece should be implemented first. Work at completing the first task until you find it a necessity to do research. At that point you are allowed to research just enough to complete that task (without perfectionism), and then mark the task complete.  Avoid preparedness overkill and the resulting stagnation by using task-driven research. One Shot, One Kill is yet another way to summarize this.
4. Even houses get remodeled.  Change is OK. It is okay to write a draft of your novel or prototype your software application. Know that it will suck. Know that you will re-write it a few times. Understand that having a draft of your novel is infinitely more valuable than a stack of blank paper. It is faster to create, look at the whole picture, and then recreate than it is to try and create perfection on first try. In the kitchen, it is faster to work quickly, make a mess, and clean it up than it is to work slowly and deliberately.

Once you know how to let go of perfectionism, you can then begin to sprint.

Pomodoro – Sprint to Success

My shortened version of pomodoro technique is to wind a kitchen timer to 25 minutes, and then sprint (work quickly) on a chosen task until you hear a ding. Ding. Write a micro-journal about what you just did, and what you are going to do next. Wind the timer to 5 minutes and take a break. Ding. Back to work. Repeat 4 times. After 4 Pomodori have been completed, take an extended break.

The Pomodoro technique is a Muay Thai knee to the ribcage of procrastination. You can do anything for 25 minutes. The micro-journaling helps you stay focused on what you want, and the mandatory 5 minute breaks keep your mind sharp and allows you time to back away and evaluate if what you are doing is the best course of action. Completing pomodoro reps and having physical proof (micro-journal) is satisfying. (Also, seeing for the first time just how many times you get distracted while attempting to complete a single pomodoro is also just as compelling.)

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with journaling, it is time to subject it to Autofocus.

Autofocus – Keeping with the Physical

The Autofocus technique is a complicated one that requires having unordered task lists that span multiple pages of a notebook.  It works for making you feel accomplished as you cross things out, but I believe it shouldn’t be used as a complete productivity system. I’ve chosen to simplify it to solve a problem of letting todo lists get too long and stale.  Here is my version of Autofocus:

Keep a pen-and-paper todo list of things you are going to do today, and take the time to keep re-copying it to new sheets of paper (or new pages of a notebook) on a daily basis.  The physical act of writing tasks down is satisfying, yet the pain of re-writing tasks you failed to complete will greatly encourage you to either do the task or to drop it. Re-writing a task is just inconvenient enough to still be doable, yet it pressures you enough to either make cuts or to stop procrastinating.  This will automatically focus you on the most important tasks that you should be doing.  Although I don’t believe the focus I speak of is where the Autofocus name comes from, that is how I choose to view it. My modified Autofocus technique enforces GTD-like reviews of your todo lists regularly, which is critical for getting Getting Things Done to work correctly.

If you want a full explanation of Autofocus, I think this article is helpful, but it is so long that it will make your eyeballs melt.

Scrum – Estimates inspire action

From Scrum we will be taking the step of creating estimates for your todos.  Until you do this you aren’t going to believe how well it works.  Here we go.

Look at your task list and write estimates for how long each each task will take.  5m, 15m, 30m, 60m, etc.  While it is perfectly acceptable in normal Scrum practices to provide estimates of upwards of a week per item, I highly suggest you follow the following rule with your task list:  If a task exceeds 30-60 minutes, you need to break it down further, particularly if you are having trouble getting motivated. This fits perfectly with the Pomodoro technique. If you can break tasks down to be less than one pomodoro unit, you will experience a very dramatic shift in your productivity and sense of control.

Breaking tasks down into pieces and giving estimates for those pieces does the following:

1. Bite sized pieces are much easier to swallow. When you actually take the time to think how long a task will take, you naturally want to do it more.
2. Humans are better at giving estimates of smaller amounts of time than they are larger more ambiguous amounts of time. The smaller you break the tasks down, the greater your accuracy.
3. High accuracy time estimates are incredibly helpful for predicting what you can and cannot get done in a day, which is a huge stress relief. I typically find that when I break down what I need to do, the time it will take is 1/4th the time that I imagined. You can actually get most of what you need to get done before lunch, and your lunch will taste better and the rest of your day feels like a victory celebration. You’ve earned it.

Getting Things Done (GTD) – All things connected

Much could be said about GTD, but here are a few things that we coincidentally covered intentionally or unintentionally, that I feel are connected:

• Keeping lists that you continuously review
• Making “executive decisions” to cut items from your todo lists
• Breaking projects down into smaller pieces
• Critically thinking such as providing consideration to constraints, such as time
• And finally, using pre-determined time constraints and contexts to intuitively pick the right task to do at any given moment

Thank you dear reader. I hope I have given you a sufficient crash course in many disciplines and shown you at least a few of their similarities, or as I like to call them: common truths.