How often do you find yourself overwhelmed with work?
Gettings things done is a matter of survival at work. It causes stress and pressure. It’s provoking a high & constant mental charge that is polluting our work life. When looking for a solution, we will quickly find books with numerous pieces of advice, tools, and methods. But there’s one that companies massively use to manage complex projects. Which already gave multiple proofs of its efficiency. And it adapts perfectly to managing our daily tasks: the agile scrum framework. So I’ll show you how you can leverage this framework so you can manage your tasks without any problems.
What is the agile scrum framework in short?
The agile scrum framework is a set of rules aiming to make things easy to manage complex projects for companies. The purpose is to put on the market new small features of a product. Those are done regularly instead of waiting one entire year to deliver all of those at once.
Here are ten rules to help you manage your tasks leveraging the agile scrum framework:
1/ Create a to-do list to keep track of all your tasks. Let’s start with the most obvious one. As soon as you think about a job, do not wait to add it to your to-do list. Otherwise, you’ll get a heavier mental charge. You need to maintain this list updated.
2/ Keep only one file, tool, or location for your to-do list. Otherwise, you’ll end up with duplicates, older tasks that were not updated, or worse, you’ll skip some essential tasks.
3/ Each task in your to-do list should be small enough to be done in one day. If it’s not, then subdivide it into smaller tasks. A mission is always a subdivision of smaller tasks. Even with regular tasks, you should copy and paste them into your to-do list. It helps you check your advancement by putting the task as done.
4/ Define the criteria to consider a task as done. Should it be validated by your boss or someone else from your team? Should it be when you deliver the file? This step will help you draw a line to distinguish the task marked as done and those which will stay on your to-do list.
5/ Prioritize all your tasks and update your ranking anytime you feel it necessary. In scrum, we use tee-shirt sizes (S,M,L,XL), for instance, or the Fibonacci suite (1 ,2 ,3 ,5 ,8 , 13 ,21). S is considered as the less important and urgent task for example. Don’t forget to consider your tasks’ deadlines to evaluate the importance and urgency of a task. There’re three mains criteria to help you prioritize:
The urgency, the importance, and the added value of the task.
6/ At the beginning of each day, take a selection of tasks you expect to do from your to-do list during the day. It should be, of course, the ones from the top of your list and match your delivery capacity.
7/ If you frequently receive a new task during the day (which happens nearly all the time), prioritize it on your to-do list. If it’s ranked at the top of your list, you can add it to your to-do list of the day. Consequently, you’ll eliminate one less important task to balance your workload.
8/ At the end of the day, if you have remaining tasks that are not yet done, they will be your first tasks for the next day if you cannot finish them because they depend on someone else’s feedback. Then you can either create a new task or mark it as done… depending on your “definition of done.” (cf. rules n°4)
9/ At the end of the week, keep some time to do two things:
- Take a step back at the work done and your processes and identify the possible enhancements.
- Prepare your next week by reviewing your to-do list. You clean the tasks that don’t need to be done. You update the ranking of your tasks if needed, and of course, you add new tasks.
10/ Check how many tasks you can do per day, considering their complexity. It will help you anticipate any bottleneck in the future. It means that you can anticipate if you won’t be able to deliver on time.
You may encounter some problems along the way. So here's how to deal with them.
What if you experience difficulties in evaluating the priority of your taks? Then get help from your boss or your team.
What if you have too many tasks undone at the end of the day? The definition of done is incorrect; your tasks are too big, or you select too many daily tasks.
What if a task was done, but the quality is not there? Once again, it depends on your definition of done. Maybe you should add that a task is done when it was reviewed by yourself or someone else.
What if someone changes the perimeter of your task while you’re doing it? Stop the tasks you’re doing and keep them for the next day. You should resume your work only when you clearly understand the perimeter.
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