Relentless Improvement

One of the goals of Scrum, in both a business and personal setting, is relentless improvement. This is the focus of the Retrospective when you reflect on what you can do differently during the next Sprint. It’s important though not to equate improvement with more. Often, improvement means just the opposite.

I’ve learned this in my Sprints as I’ve noticed how stressful it can be to keep adding goals and working on more and more every day. While I’ve often been able to keep up, I don’t enjoy the pace and instead of enjoying a feeling of accomplishment, I end up feeling drained. I’ve learned to cut back and separate what must be done from what I’d like to do. Naturally, there is a little disappointment in not bringing something into my Sprint from the backlog, but the reality is that in most cases it can wait, or be reduced or spread out. For instance, I used to demand 30 minutes a day of physical activity. On days when my work demands didn’t permit that, I would feel disappointed. By switching that goal to 210 minutes a week, I still get nearly the same result without the stress when work is busy.

The way you define relentless improvement will determine what and how much you bring into your Sprint. It’s important to realize that sometimes the quality of your life improves by doing less.