While doing a refresher course on agile scrum (a software development method), I came across the Parkinson's law again! The law states: "Work expands to fill time available for it".
Isn't this so true for all of us ladies! Typically we have approximately same amount of work at home to be wrapped up, be it cooking, packing the lunch box, getting kids ready for school and so on. But it takes us different amount of time to finish on different days, thanks to the time we give it. Specially the work like cleaning up rooms, tidying up things seems never ending. Those tasks to me look like time-eating monsters that are not satisfied whatever time we feed them with.
Same is the case with many a things in our work environment, like for e.g. Creating a PowerPoint deck for presentation, authoring a white paper or newsletter, even writing an important email, all seems never ending. There always appears to be a better way of doing it, always a way to improve whatever is done and so on. Then there are emails, meetings that eat up a lot of time and many other distractions at workplace.
Scrum uses some powerful tools to deal with this issue:
- Timeboxing - Put a time box around your tasks. Timeboxing indicates allocating a maximum time for a particular task. Identify clear cut items you could do towards "completing" a particular task, assign a max time and only pick up highest priority stuff that can be done in that time. It's amazing to see results of this technique at office as well as at home. I have even tried this with my kids. They seem to love it specially when we time box the study time, but hate it when their mobile gaming or tv time is timeboxed.
- Constant prioritization - nothing stops us from changing priority of things at a regular interval. Scrum proposes backlog grooming at regular intervals to also help re-prioritise items so that what we do next is of value to our stakeholders. Same is true in our personal life, our priorities keep changing, more we acknowledge and push low value stuff out of our backlog (or outsource for that matter) the happier we are!
- "just enough" documentation - scrum talks about identifying the just enough level of documentation and adhering to it, rather than going over board. While documenting many a critical things is a necessary thing from future proofing and sustaining perspective, keeping it alive is a challenge. The documentation is an enabler, but the real value is in the working software. It's worthwhile to identify the "just enough" levels in many a places in life, specially in the time eater tasks that I mentioned above. It's rewarding to divert that time saved to more value adding activities such as quality time with family, me time and so on.
I have always felt agile is a natural or common sense way of working. We can also feed in those principles into our lives to make it more sensible!
Isn't this so true for all of us ladies! Typically we have approximately same amount of work at home to be wrapped up, be it cooking, packing the lunch box, getting kids ready for school and so on. But it takes us different amount of time to finish on different days, thanks to the time we give it. Specially the work like cleaning up rooms, tidying up things seems never ending. Those tasks to me look like time-eating monsters that are not satisfied whatever time we feed them with.
Same is the case with many a things in our work environment, like for e.g. Creating a PowerPoint deck for presentation, authoring a white paper or newsletter, even writing an important email, all seems never ending. There always appears to be a better way of doing it, always a way to improve whatever is done and so on. Then there are emails, meetings that eat up a lot of time and many other distractions at workplace.
Scrum uses some powerful tools to deal with this issue:
- Timeboxing - Put a time box around your tasks. Timeboxing indicates allocating a maximum time for a particular task. Identify clear cut items you could do towards "completing" a particular task, assign a max time and only pick up highest priority stuff that can be done in that time. It's amazing to see results of this technique at office as well as at home. I have even tried this with my kids. They seem to love it specially when we time box the study time, but hate it when their mobile gaming or tv time is timeboxed.
- Constant prioritization - nothing stops us from changing priority of things at a regular interval. Scrum proposes backlog grooming at regular intervals to also help re-prioritise items so that what we do next is of value to our stakeholders. Same is true in our personal life, our priorities keep changing, more we acknowledge and push low value stuff out of our backlog (or outsource for that matter) the happier we are!
- "just enough" documentation - scrum talks about identifying the just enough level of documentation and adhering to it, rather than going over board. While documenting many a critical things is a necessary thing from future proofing and sustaining perspective, keeping it alive is a challenge. The documentation is an enabler, but the real value is in the working software. It's worthwhile to identify the "just enough" levels in many a places in life, specially in the time eater tasks that I mentioned above. It's rewarding to divert that time saved to more value adding activities such as quality time with family, me time and so on.
I have always felt agile is a natural or common sense way of working. We can also feed in those principles into our lives to make it more sensible!
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