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Monthly Method Podcast is a show for solopreneurs, creators, and artists who have a burning desire to launch a project. The project your best life depends on.
Your host, Polina Bee, is a certified SCRUM master. She brings a proven record of launching successful projects, both professional and personal.
You will hear about tested techniques that lead to calm, consistency and results.
Subscribe to turn your idea into reality one month at a time.
Everywhere you look people are telling you to create long term plans. 10 year plans are broken down into yearly plans. Those are further broken down into monthly, daily goals. That's the common advice, but have you noticed that this advice never works out? Haven't we all spent hours, days creating beautiful Excel sheet, tracking pages, habit trackers, color coding them.
Polina Bee:Haven't we all done it? I sure did a lot of that in the past. Every new year would start with the it's new year, new me, new long term goal kind of exercise. And then this wouldn't last for more than a couple of weeks. And every year, it was the same.
Polina Bee:And I always blamed myself for not being disciplined enough, for not having the right goals, for not being committed. But that was until I got a job at a fast growing tech startup. There I learned that the most innovative companies of our times found out that this approach, this long term planning approach never works and they decided to do something different. You see in the corporate world, historically, there was the same approach. You plan for the next 5 years.
Polina Bee:You create the budgets, the plans. You have a bunch of meetings. You create a bunch of versions of these documents, and you can spend months at at the end of the year preparing for the next year. And a lot of companies still do that. I'm not saying that it's obsolete.
Polina Bee:But that was also the case in the software world. And then these software engineers, being engineers, they decided to question this whole assumption because they found out that, yes, they spent all this time in meetings. But the moment they start implementing this plan in January, it never works out. The milestones are not hit. The advertising that they thought would work doesn't work.
Polina Bee:The software that they thought would be in demand is not in demand. And they realized that this plan doesn't work out because it's initially based on the crop load assumptions about the world, about the future, about the company, about the customers. And what happens if these assumptions are not correct assumptions? And it's unrealistic to expect of yourself that your assumptions are always correct. So they decided to ditch this whole long term multi month process and decided to do something else.
Polina Bee:They created agile framework for built in software. You can easily find it online if you type agile manifesto. It's basically kind of like the opposite approach to the traditional way of building software. That happened in the nineties, quickly spread into all of the software world, and now that's pretty much a default. That's how software is built.
Polina Bee:So long story short, what they did differently is that they decided to work in short term sprints. Those sprints last from 2 to 6 weeks, generally speaking. And you only need to plan for the next sprint. You don't have to plan for the next in years. You plan your work for the next sprint.
Polina Bee:You commit yourself to this work. You don't accept other tasks. You lock yourself in for the sprint. You ship it, and the goal is to ship, the product to the world at the end of the sprint. So you're not keeping it in a draft mode.
Polina Bee:You're not continuing to work on it. You ship it to the world. You see how the world reacts, how your customers react, what they say, how they use it. And based on this real life feedback, not based on your assumption, but on this real life feedback, you then plan your next sprint. And so you never have to plan for more than 2 to 6 weeks at a time and as a result those planning sessions are usually short.
Polina Bee:You review every sprint, you learn from it and your next plan is always based on these findings. Less planning, more doing, more learning. That's pretty much the core essence of agile. As I said, nowadays that's kind of the default method for building software. It was used in all the startups that I worked at.
Polina Bee:What boggles me is that it never spread out into the personal productivity world. I was so mad when I learned about agile in my early twenties. I was like, are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? You knew all this time from the nineties that this whole long term plan approach doesn't work, that it's a waste of time, that it's based on the crapload assumptions, that those assumptions are rarely correct.
Polina Bee:You created something completely different, so you have a solution and you never told the rest of the world about it. You just kept it inside your little software industry? I was so mad. How come the rest of us are told every new year to create this long term goals, to then break it down into the milestones, and then bend your head against the wall when these plans don't work out. And then we blame ourselves for for this not working out when at the core, it's an absolutely wrong way to do things.
Polina Bee:I was so firsthand at how effective it was. And it was such a drastic, comparison because I got this job after my job for a federal government, And it was day and night. Here at the startup, I was seeing how quickly. So every I I don't remember how long the sprints were. I think they were like 2 or 3 weeks.
Polina Bee:But every 3 weeks they were shipping, new products and like you can actually go to the website and see in real life how the product was changing. New features were added. Things worked faster, better. And so once I saw that I decided to ditch long term planning approach and use the same agile approach for my personal goals in my personal life. And that was in 2014.
Polina Bee:So it's been 10 years since I learned about agile and since I decided to start using it in my life. 10 years of trying it out and I never went back. It worked so well. I tried a lot of things. I experimented.
Polina Bee:Some things worked. Some things didn't. But I think right now I have a very solid approach of how you can apply agile to your life. And that's what I'm going to share on this channel. It's very easy.
Polina Bee:It's very effective. You don't have to buy complicated software. If you don't want to wait, I have a blog that I've been writing for the past 3 years. It has all the blog posts about sprint planning, scrum board, daily stand ups, print retrospectives. It's all free.
Polina Bee:It's all there. It's just in text format. So if you don't mind reading and you want to learn right away on on how to apply it to your life, I would suggest going to monthly method dotcom/starthere and there you'll find the core articles on this method. If you don't mind waiting for the videos I'll be posting them shortly. Bye.