Product Management
How to Overcome Your Bad Habits with Agile? — A data guy’s approach
How many times have you tried to break bad habits, or make new ones? Have you ever considered eating more healthily, losing some weight, quitting smoking, or finally grabbing that rusty guitar in the corner to learn your favorite Bob Dylan song?
We all struggle with our habits. Some of us may have it easier on ourselves, while others give up on the first sight of failure. It takes a lot of willpower and determination to achieve our goals, but the method of how we try to achieve them can have an influential result on the outcome. Here’s what you might have been doing wrong.
Why Waterfall is a WaterFail
Some of us working in data and analytics fields often make this mistake: we have multiple goals, and we plan the heck out of them. We research many articles (what you might be doing right now), consult friends and professionals, lay down a strict schedule, and get confused by confronting ideas. We might be unable to decide what path to take and end up piling up information without actually taking a step towards our goal. We exhaust ourselves with planning every single moment of the execution.
The problem with the Waterfall model is exactly this: planning must be finished before we even start the actual work. This phase is prone to be done without fully understanding our goal, to begin with.
I want to be happy in life!
You might have similar, vague ideas in mind, but may end up with actions and requirements that do not contribute to your personal happiness. You rather take general steps that you heard might help but are not tailored towards you. Be clear about what you want to achieve, identify steps that lead you there, and gather just enough information so that you can start walking the walk!
The “21” days myth
This myth is attributed to Maxwell Maltz. It states that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. There is a great article debunking it, so I will just summarize the main points:
3 weeks is a short enough period to be achievable and a long enough period to be believable. In reality, it takes around 2 months for a new behavior to become second nature. Most people quit as they do not see results quickly enough.
The good news is: you don’t have to be perfect as occasional mistakes do not have a big effect on long-term habit-forming. Just find a quick way to get back on track and keep doing what you do, without being harsh to yourself. Be patient and accept your flaws.
You are the product of your actions
Consider your life a product. You have tasks to deliver new features (habits) to said product. You want to ship ready parts (implemented habits) as quickly as possible to satisfy your product owners (yourself, family, friends, boss, girlfriend/boyfriend, etc.).
Little by little, you can set up a Life Roadmap, where your long-term goals are defined, and you can link smaller tasks you want to achieve in accordance with said long-term goals. Take into consideration, that this Roadmap can change over time, and, as an actual agile Product Roadmap, it is never fully finished.
As a … I need … so that …
First, write down your aspirations, what you want to implement or change in your life, creating a Product backlog. These should be prioritized based on importance, but you can change the order if it helps. For example, I enjoy starting a project with some quick wins that give momentum and initial satisfaction that fuels the rest of the work. So you might not want to “eat the frog” right away, but generate some quick wins, then focus on the larger challenges.
Anyway, you should have a prioritized list of stories (detailed actions with associated benefits), that follow the structure mentioned in the title of this paragraph. A few examples might be:
As a productive person, I need to make my bed every morning, so that I accomplish the first task of the day, giving me a small feeling of pride and gets my surroundings in order
, or
As a resilient individual, I need to avoid news and social media in the morning, so that I start the day in a good mood that carries on towards the rest of the day.
Time for a Sprint
Now that you have a list of well-defined user stories, pick some from your product backlog that you will work on during the first sprint. This might be done by order, or you can pick small habits which can complement each other. For example, if you would like to be more knowledgeable and have a better sleep at night, you can switch off your devices 1 hour before going to bed, so that the emitted blue light does not interfere with your sleep. In your — now Netflix-free — one hour, you can read some of those books that you have on your shelf gathering dust for too long now.
The length of a sprint should be around the time it takes to form a new habit. Don’t worry if you have no clue about this in the beginning. You can use rules of thumb such as the 66 days, or even the 21 if these are smaller habits that you think can be implemented in shorter times.
The next step is to estimate the size of the activities: how hard do you think it is to incorporate them into your routine? How long does it take to be comfortable with them taking part in your life? Those sizes can be along the lines of a Fibonacci sequence or any numbers that can work for you. With knowing the effort and time requirements of each task, you should be able to start scheduling your first iteration.
Bear in mind that the way you define activities and sizes should not feel like “work” per se. If you are not at ease with strictly following these principles, pick and choose what suits you and invent your own ways of prioritizing/estimating that you feel most comfortable with.
Iterate for perfection
Once you have it all settled, it is time to work on your tasks. Start developing your features from the sprint backlog in the time that you estimated for them. This is not the time required to form the actual habit, rather how long it takes for initial success. For example, if your sprint’s goal is to be more physically active for 2 months, one iteration could be 2–3 weeks when you try your best to fit this routine into your schedule. During the next iteration, you might change things up based on your experience: if you did not like running, try TRX, squash, or other activity that might help you achieve your goal easier. Switch up frequency and length of occasions as you see fit.
Daily (or weekly) Scrum
Try to free up some minutes in your day (or week) to reflect on the signs of progress you made. Many times we only look in the future to see our goal still far away from ourselves. It is healthy to look back and appreciate what we have done so far. Change is fueled by pride, not shame.
Another aspect is to assess what went wrong during the process and examine it carefully. If your goal was to eat more healthily, why did you end up ordering a large pizza and eating it all by yourself last Thursday? What were the circumstances, inner thoughts, and motives behind that action and how can you avoid it next time you have the temptation? (tip: mindfulness exercises can help with craving thoughts).
Last but not least, think about the next time when you take a step towards your goal. When will you do it, what will you do, how will you do it, and is there any blocker in front of you that might prevent it? Try removing all barriers to make your tasks as effortless as possible. If you want to go for a run, prepare your shoes and clothes the night before. When the time comes, you just hop into them, not allowing you to have doubting thoughts while you are dressing up.
Sprint Review / Retrospective
Once you are finished with alliterations in your first sprint, try seeking answers to three questions:
- What went well? Recognize your achievements, even if they are small, and be proud of yourself.
- What did not go well? Discover why you diverted from your plan and the inner motives behind your actions.
- What are the actions to take? Find practices from your step 1 features you can leverage to implement for other goals. Understand the “why” behind step 2 features. Remove any obstacles, or iterate on the tasks, keeping the original goal in sight.
Don’t forget to celebrate and treat yourself to completing your first Habit-Sprint! You earned it!
The only thing you have to do now is to repeat the process: look at new features from your product backlog to work on (or pick delayed ones from your previous sprint), plan the next iterations, and continue changing your life step-by-step!
Conclusion
Our habits define us, they give structure to our life and they are a staple of how we see ourselves. Some habits create opportunities for growth, friendships, and betterment, while others are destructive.
All that being said, I think that framing personal development in the context of agile can help people to plan and make progress — and therefore minimize abstraction and anxiety often caused by figuring out how to move towards your desired goals. This way of thinking obviously won’t charm everyone — but that is the case with all self-development techniques anyway :)
I hope this article can aid you in your life to pick up good habits and get rid of negative ones more easily, using a few ideas cherry-picked from Scrum and Agile project management.
