A concept that comes from the “agile” software development methodology is the concept of a “sprint.” A sprint is when you define a period—commonly, one week, two weeks, or one month—and you start that period with a set of goals to complete by the end. They’re usually not the only things you do during that time, but the core focus or the theme of what you will do during that time. So, for example, if a software development team has a list of 110 bugs they need to fix and features they need to add, they could just go in priority order. Or they could say that over the next two weeks, they’re focusing on 10 critical bugs, as well as 9 new minor features, with all of the features relating to one particular aspect of the software. Such is the theory of the sprint, named like that because you’re basically running to hit the goal during that time.
Sprints, like the Agile methodology itself, was developed for software developers but is a very useful concept in non-software related projects as well.
Just imagine this all-too-typical case: you have a never-ending list of work to do. Sounds typical for anyone given some responsibility, right?
What if you just decide for yourself one Monday that this week, you’re going to prioritize work X, Y, and Z, all of which relate to one particular aspect of your work. If you’re doing online marketing, maybe it’s a revamp of the search ads campaigns. If you’re writing articles, why not have the editorial calendar reflect a thematic week—or even better, why not create an editorial calendar if it doesn’t exist already? (Proactivity is one of the meta-themes of this series)
The sprint has an ostensible goal: to get you to work more, harder, during the sprint. Hence the name, a short, intense race. But I just ignore that aspect of it, personally. That feels to me like a psychological game designed to incentivize to work hard those who don’t work hard themselves naturally. The sprint for some is designed to make you work hard. But I don’t think you particularly need to, so let’s ignore that aspect of it.
Without that aspect (the sprint without the sprint) there are two great reasons to just think in terms of weekly, biweekly, or monthly sprints. First, it forces you to think more broadly about your work and your goals. Secondly, it commits you to particular deliverables, which makes it harder for you to come up with human nature to avoid them—yes, you are indeed human, and doing that is part of the human condition.
When you do a sprint, don’t forget to announce it to everyone if you’re doing it for your own work. That will build respect for you and it will help you hold yourself to the goals of the sprint.
There’s an even more effective way of doing sprints, thinking about them weekly and monthly. The sprint within the sprint! I start every month by thinking about what I want to achieve that month, and of course, writing up a doc about it. And then, every week, I do the same, but on a much more granular and micro level. Why not give it a shot?
