What is in Your Sprint?

Let’s say you’ve been doing this a while and you’re feeling successful. You complete your daily tasks, and at the end of each Sprint you are able to look at a long list of accomplishments. You record your observations in your Retrospective and feel pretty good. But it’s important to realize that this more than an exercise in just checking off boxes. Are you creating something every Sprint that is a tangible product that you can use to either move your life or the life of someone else forward? Are you truly making progress toward your greater goals? Are you living according to your values every Sprint?

To answer these questions, you must look at the items in your Backlog and ask yourself if you are indeed getting closer to achieving or having them. Recall that the idea of Scrum for Your Life is to focus on the activity daily that leads to the accomplishment of your goals, but those activities must be sufficient to do that in a meaningful way. Otherwise you’re just going through the motions.

So in your next Retrospective, ask yourself if you’re challenging yourself sufficiently. Could you do something more, or something more difficult. Overloading your Sprint can be discouraging, and the same is true if it’s under-loaded. If it’s under-loaded, you won’t get the greater sense of success that comes from this program, and that too is discouraging.