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With a lot of teams theses days being highly demanding of our time and what little of it we get in the day. We’ve come up with a system that’s flexible enough that one can use daily life and while at the office.

Since agile is about managing projects, resources, and one self in a dynamic manner. We’ll focus here and ask that you remember what is proposed can be adopted to fit one’s existing system or improve one’s own efforts in life.

To begin with one could already be familiar with user stories, pomodoro method, and kanboards. However, neither are absolutely needed they do pair well with this method.

How to start

First identify the action items using one’s preferred method. Use the GTD method to establish what prioritization is needed. Around the office we use user stories and keep those in an issue tracker but one could easily use a bullet journal for personal items or kanboard instead.
Key thing here is that one is able to index where, whom, what, and the deliverable for one’s action item.

From there one then creates a calendar item using a time boxing system (read more about this on our articles on time management). This calendar item should be one that’s sharable (ie gmail/outlook, sticky note on a physical calendar) and accessible by all involved. We’ll use gmail for our further example but again use what works for yourself.

The typical calendar item would slice out the needed time to perform the action item, update the owners of the deliverable, and give the individual time to go over their inbox of other action items. Furthermore the indexed name, location, or url should be included in the calendar location for reference and the body of the event should include the below message:

Attendance from teams is not required. This is setup for myself to allocate a dedicated time to address your item 
without distractions and also provide a quick notification list for status updates.
This is part of my #30Days2Agile challenge from the DevOps Leadership SIG and I thank you for understanding and cooperation.

The included Online meeting invite allows us to review any deliverables or other items as needed.
Please see the link in the location for further details about the scheduled actionable(s) I’ll be delivering.

Finally do the item at the allotted time. If the time is shorter or longer than what was allocated update post timebox to reflect. This part comes in hand later on in the sprint (week/month/etc.). Given one uses a digital system then they should have a notification ready to help them shift focus with each time boxed item.

More advance uses of this include:

• Open communication channel and mailing list that’s focused solely on the deliverables needed doing the time box
• Time accounting for one’s effort. This one is important when one is doing personal retrospectives. Since one can see and tally up the time spent on the types of user stories then one can see their strengths and weaknesses which helps identify improvement or specializations.

Wish to learn more, then subscribe to us on linkedin, join the subreddit, and come out to the DevOps Roundtable at the Dallas Makerspace.