Looking back at my “daily” sprints, it turns out they have been bi-weekly at best: Eighteen sprints in 120 days this year totaling 15 hours of work. It’s not a stellar achievement, I agree. As the very purpose of the sprints is to test things out, let’s try to find out why this is happening and what I can do to change things.

First a quick recap of how I manage my sprints by setting goals, creating accountability and blocking off time slots to do them.

Goal Setting – I define a goal for each sprint series by writing a hypothesis I want to test. For example, let’s say that a video of successive daily gardens would show interesting things as the five inner sections (my inner-self) change in ways that could maybe be explained by what was happening at the same time in the outer sections of the garden (the outside world). Defining a clear goal like that should keep me motivated and focused as I’d want to achieve the result.

Accountability – I review every 2 weeks the sprint series with my coach and we look at what went well, what can be improved and what I learned during the 2 weeks. The more sprints I do, the more material we can dissect and learn from. The debrief creates a sense of positive obligation for me to deliver interesting stuff to talk about.

Time Boxing – I block off 60 minutes of my time, usually early in the early morning, during which I apply these 3 rules to achieve maximum focus:

Rule 1: Write down the start and end time in my sprint tracker.

Rule 2: Set the timer to 3 minutes before the end. I do not have to think about the time and just as important, I will not go overtime.

Rule 3: Read the following precepts to avoid behaviors that I know will distract from the work I want to do:

• No showing up late.
• No going over time.
• No questioning of sprint hypothesis to test or planned deliverables.
• No day-job planning.
• No personal planning.
• No web surfing.
• No IT infrastructure work – Work with what I got.
• No change of sprint tools (e.g. restructure this log, tweak Time & Sentiment Tracker) unless it is a deliverable. If a change is needed, write it in learning or New Questions.
• No Tracking or charting work (Time & Sentiment Tracker or Oura Ring) unless it is a deliverable.
• No e-mails.

This combination of having a clear objective, having committed to someone and boxing in focused time is meant to help me achieve daily sprints. But, looking at the numbers so far this year, it is not working: I did an average of 2.1 sprints per series in 2024, a goal achievement of 15%.

During my last sprint series debrief, I decided to focus on doing the sprints. It’s not as simple as it sounds. The goal is to do 14 sprints, not to achieve something. If the sprints deliver a tangible result, like this post, that’s good but it’s not what I am shooting for. I’m just aiming to do 14 sprints in 2 otherwise hectic weeks and to forget the bigger picture. Doing the sprints is the goal, not what I do during the sprints.

The goal was this time: Do 14 sprints and fill them in with activity and content related to my possib.li work.

And the result? At the end of my 14-day sprint series I have done 8 sprints, not the 14 but already 4 times better than my 2024 average. So it seems I can do more by focusing less on the outcome and more on the doing part.

A couple of new questions popped up:

• OK, so I did 8 sprints instead of the usual 2 per series, but can I get to 14 by just doing them vs. looking at the bigger picture?

• Considering my daily schedule, is the objective of one sprint per day realistic?

• Spending one hour every day on my personal possib.li project takes time away from my other activities – Which ones are most impacted and am I OK with it?

Stay tuned to see how things evolve over the coming series.