I love a good to-do list. I really like checking items off and seeing progress at the end of the day. But I’ve been feeling like I’m not being as productive with my time as I could be.

One approach to address this is to do a time study. Every 15 or 30 minutes you write down what you are doing. You do that for a week or two, then analyze and decide what improvements you can make.

Ugh.

I just don’t feel like doing that.

Almost a year ago I started writing down my top 3 things I wanted to accomplish for the day. The list had various names. “Daily Wins”, “Accomplishments”, and then just “Monday.”

That worked pretty well. I found I could usually get those three things done, whatever I wrote down.

I had this feeling that I could use my time better though.

I got the idea of Scrum for One from a person I mentored who was transitioning from the military to the civilian workforce. He drew up tasks for a Kanban board to help him navigate the transition. Tasks were scheduled for various weeks to keep the transition timeline on track.

Although I have a few home projects that could benefit from an approach like that, my immediate need was to figure out if I could be more productive with my time each day.

Start With Measuring

I decided to first measure how much I was getting done each day. To do this, I employed an estimation technique used in Scrum. Here’s how it works.

I wrote down tasks I had in mind for the day. For each task, I assigned a relative number of points. The points I use are from the Fibonacci sequence – 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…add the last two numbers together to get the next. The idea here is not to estimate the exact amount of time something will take, but rather how much bigger or smaller one task is versus another.

One of my daily tasks is “post on LinkeIn.” I assign a 1 to that because it’s not a big task. If “take a walk” is on my list, that is a bigger task than posting on LinkedIn so I give it a 2. Writing this blog post is a bigger task than either of those so I give it a 3.

To start, I made a deal with myself that I was only to measure, not judge how much I accomplished or didn’t accomplish from the list. Each day I wrote down how many points I accomplished.

An Interesting Thing Happened

After I did this for a week (including a weekend), an interesting thing happened.

I saw that one day I had a few more points than for the current day. And I thought to myself, “You can do better…just a few more points!”

And what do you know, I was able to do a few more tasks from the list.

I started becoming more productive, even though I didn’t consciously do anything about my non-productive time.

Let me explain that a little more. If I did a time study, I would find I watched TV for so much time, flipped through some catalogs for stuff I don’t need, and scrolled through an app on my phone. But then what? Use my willpower to not do that? You know how it goes – once you put your attention on something sometimes you end up doing it more!

By starting with simply measuring what I was getting done, I transitioned into challenging myself to do more without even consciously thinking about it.

I’m only a few weeks into this experiment, and here’s what I’ve observed so far:

  • Getting more things done with intention feels good!
  • Estimates aren’t always right. On the days with lower point completion totals, sometimes I didn’t do as much as other days, but sometimes I underestimated the effort for a particular task. I can use that information to create better estimates for similar tasks in the future.
  • Creating a habit to create the list in the morning and do the “retrospective” at the end of the day wasn’t too difficult (pretty sure it’s a lot easier than writing down what I’m doing every 15 minutes!)

My next steps include continuing to experiment with this approach to productivity improvement. I may start keeping track of the “carryover” – that is, what didn’t get done one day. If a pattern emerges with the carryover tasks perhaps I can address it in some way.

engineer your life

  • Give this approach a try if you’ve been looking for a way to get more things done that you want to get done
  • Or tweak the approach to make it yours!