
Scrum for One: How to Apply the Scrum Framework to Personal Projects - tacon
https://zapier.com/blog/scrum-framework-personal-projects/
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doseofreality
Having to suffer with Scrum at work is bad enough. This sounds like a great
idea for people who hate themselves.

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ncphillips
While I'm sure some of the specific practices used by scrum teams are valuable
on personal projects, the broader notion of Scrum for Personal projects seems
strange to me.

Scrum gets it’s name from rugby. During a rugby scrum, the entire cross-
functional team works to move the ball down the field. If there's just one
guy, he isn't in a scrum, he's just sprinting. Besides that stretched
metaphor, half of the key statements in the agile manifesto are about
collaboration and working with people. Having “Agile for one” doesn’t really
make sense.

While planning ahead and doing retrospectives is definitely a good idea for
personal projects, doing those things doesn't mean you're doing scrum.

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dv35z
Would love to see if anyone has a good & sustainable system by doing this in a
notebook. My system is a small notebook, with 1 week “sprints”. Inspired a bit
by bullet journal. A sprint section is the start/end date of the week,
underlined. Unearneath are two columns - left is for important & urgent. Right
is less important / less urgent. Within these two columns I free-list my
todo’s, with a checkbox next to each. If I can think about it, sorting by
importance/urgency, descending. As I go through the week, I add things, check
stuff off, etc. At the end of week, I start a new week sprint. For not done
items from previous week, I rewrite them into the new sprint. I try to order
them but most important/urgent at top.

I’ve been doing this since 2015. Works great for me. Previously, I’d tried
digital systems like Asana, Trello, text files, etc. In the end, I’d use them
for awhile (or for part of my life) then stop after 6 months. This one - for
better or worse - has stuck. I’d love to hear about other peoples paper based
systems like this. If nothing else, to iterate and improve!

Issues/gaps with my system I’d love to fix: How to handle personal vs work (1
book containing each? Or separate?). How to indicate size of effort? How to
handle projects (grouping of tasks) vs free tasks? How to handle long term
initiatives (e.g. “learn spanish”) in the same system? How to handle recurring
tasks (e.g. call distant friend X every month)?

Screenshot of my notebook:
[https://imgur.com/a/XmOMR](https://imgur.com/a/XmOMR)

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jamiepenney
I really like the sound of this! I've been using a bullet journal for my
contracting work and it's been great, and yours sounds like a good system for
managing personal projects. I've tried using digital tools and run into the
same problem as well - too much ceremony which I don't have a lot of time for
outside work anymore.

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nextos
I'm using a quite similar approach, a kanban board implemented as an org-mode
agenda to manage both my personal and professional life.

I'm really happy with this method, as it's avoids overplanning and too many
open tasks. Those were two pitfalls that I experienced using GTD.

Also, org is really flexible, so it's possible to implement a variety of
workflows. And it has excellent facilities to put stuff quickly into your
inbox: org-capture and org-protocol.

