“Breakfast is in the oven, water is boiling, Lunchbox almost prepared, school uniform is ready, need to just drop a quick email about the 9a.m meeting, car needs servicing, have to call electrician today for sure, my 2p.m meeting needs to move can’t handle double booking, library books need to be dropped off, oh wait, baby is up”

And so, goes my morning, by 9a.m I am already exhausted thinking of all the things that I have to do in the day, if there is an unexpected event that appears, that will surely mess my day.

So how can I respond to change over following a plan?

This was my situation few months ago, when I thought finding 15 minutes of time to enjoy a cup of warm coffee was pure bliss, when I couldn’t figure out where my time was flying and how did the day end without me achieving all the tasks. Yes, I did use a lot of sticky notes, my work table was full of it. I tried to get through them as fast as I could!

Then, I decided to go through Personal Agility course, it sounded like a little reality check I needed. Developed my Peter Stevens, CST, I was a bit curious to see what new “Framework” I am going to learn. During the session, we had PAS priorities map exercise, where I wrote all the things that I had to do that week, and after the exercise was over, it was clear to me as to “WHAT REALLY MATTERS (WRM)”.

Such simple and yet powerful technique to organize your tasks, I put myself as the Product owner and started having the conversation. What is the value of this task? How urgent is it? If the stack is full, what am I willing to let go in order to accommodate the latest high priority task?

This exercise reminded me why I loved coaching and teaching Scrum! It reminded me of the roles, it brought the prioritization to the front of my mind.

Even though I thought I was planning very well, I realized I wasn’t doing it effectively, I was planning and changing the course as often required, I wasn’t inspecting and adapting. Now this has become a weekly routine.

Every morning I take 3 most important things to do and finish them every night. If they are big items, I break them into checklists so I can complete some part of it. This is my weekly sprint. It helps me keep my focus and aligns me very well with my family, who are my biggest stakeholders!

I still have same number of hours in the day, but the quality of life has improved tremendously, not to mention the transparency that a PAS physical map has brought into the family.

I took PAS to work, thought let me try to use this at work and see if I get any results. The first thing I tried to do was use the stakeholder canvas which helped me understand the needs of the leaders who I was coaching. This also helped me think about the challenges and impediments being faced by them. Once I build a stakeholder canvas, it was easy to align and work towards shared outcomes.

I highly recommend Personal agility training for folks to get a flavor of how to organize their work and life. It definitely challenges your beliefs and will give you a fresh perspective into prioritizing work. It has worked for me and I can easily see how I was losing time in just trying to pick which item to focus on next as compared to now, when I have my backlog refined and ready to go !