Sunday 17 February 2013
Getting things done
One of the tenets of agile delivery is that communication is valued over documentation. It's a great thing to hold to, and helps you spending too much time writing about what you're going to do, instead of just doing it. It also helps you maintain flexibility; if you haven't spent months writing about what is needed, then you're more likely to do what's needed now, rather than what was needed when you started.
But valuing communication over documentation doesn't mean that there's no documentation. Agile story walls are a flexible way of tracking what's going on at any given point. They're fantastic in an office, but not that practical in your home. In fact, it would almost count as clutter.
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| Does anybody really have space for this at home? |
What we need is a just enough approach to tracking what needs to happen to go from an idea to done. And that's where getting things done comes in.
Getting things done is a time management technique that takes your to do list and makes it more effective. To do lists are great, but have a lot of traps. Some people write lists, but don't prioritise. Some people mix high level projects with low level tasks. Others underestimate the amount of effort involved in achieving a to do item. Often, you can get to the end of the day and have a list of incomplete items.
The getting things done approach allows you to group your to dos by project, with each item prioritised within. This gives you the very next thing you need to do to get a thing done. There's plenty of scope for flexibility within the system, and loads of tools for managing it. I'll look at ways of setting up a getting things done system in my next post.