Year: 2018

Yeah, the title is a little “Click-baity,” but, dammit, I learned 7 things, and I want to share them. More importantly, I feel like I should be able to tell my readers that there are 7 things they are about to read. So, yeah, here I am at the end of one heck-of-a year with […]

Over a year ago, my wife and I hired a company to convert our garage into a family room–estimated to be a 4 month project at most. That was 3-4 months faster than I estimated that I could do it myself.   A full year and a month later, the family room project is unfinished, […]

You know the scene in the sci-fi horror film where we recoil at the sight of the abandoned lab? Bottles filled with mutated embryos suspended in formaldehyde, fluid dripping from the ceiling, and steel cages ripped open from the inside let us know that whatever was supposed to have gone down in here. . . […]

This last week’s iteration of self improvement was an utter meltdown. Not only did I not accomplish what I set out to do, I went BACKWARDS in using Agile.  Each day went by, and I looked at my kanban board and said “Man, I really need to get back to that!” I made up excuses, […]

I’m excited to say that last week’s iteration went much better than the two previous. Like Dr. Arroway’s discovery, I’m finding things that I have been telling Agile teams for years are coming back to me in this little experiment. Despite Hurricane Florence killing our power for 27 hours on Saturday, I completed both of […]

Well that didn’t go as planned at all. Being out of town/out of the country is not conducive to staying focused on self improvement. What worked well is continuing to ensure my new workout regimen was feasible. It was not new work.  It was simply refining the model I had built.  Neither living in someone […]

I did a little retrospecting on last week’s effort, and came away with a few of things. I pulled away from the book writing user story to focus on a new blog post about using the wheel of Agile principles. I honestly thought it would propel me into writing the 5 pages about coaching alliances. […]

There is a great need for coaches in Agile.  Many teams find themselves “stuck” in their quest to work well together.  Others have developed bad habits and can’t quite see their issue, while still others might just want an objective view of how they are doing. Asking for coaching should not be seen as a […]

As promised, here are the two personal improvement backlog items I have chosen to work on this week: 1) As an out of shape, formerly athletic guy in his 50’s, I need to develop an exercise regimen that is realistic for my time availability and current fitness, so that I can feel better about my […]

Applying Scrum To Our Own Personal Development. This is based on a self-improvement experiment I tried a while back but struggled with. I now know that I didn’t break my work into small enough chunks–That, and I lacked discipline. So I want to try it again, but I want to invite any readers to try […]