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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.
Hi there! It's been a while since you heard my voice on this podcast. I just wanted to pop in here and give you some updates on what's going on, where I've been and what I have in the books for this year.
I'm still very grateful to all my subscribers who subscribed to this podcast early on. And I know for a fact that there are still people who are finding this podcast. Hi and welcome! Please know that I'm still doing this agile thing. It's just happening on the blog rather than the podcast. And I'll dive into why in a second.
My name is Polina. I am the founder of the Monthly Method.
And I've been missing from this podcast for a bit over a year. So what happened? Okay, let's look at last year 2023. Well, big news. I had a baby. My daughter was born in May. As you can imagine, there was a lot of prep work for which I used Agile as well. And I also wanted to record lessons for the monthly method because I knew that I couldn't take The same amount of one-on-one clients as before once my baby came, so I wanted to have something in place so that people, if they want to learn about agile and how to apply it to personal productivity They have something to go to. So I spent early part of last year recording lessons, uploading them to the platform. And now you can pretty much access it anytime from anywhere.
You can find all the information on the monthly method. So that took a big chunk of my first few months. Then I had a baby, and it was my first baby. There was a steep learning curve in the first few months.
And then we had our busiest season at my main business which is seasonal. And the peak of the season is during the summer. So I went from having a baby to the peak season. So it was fun times. But I was still posting on the monthly method blog whenever I had a chance.
Last year I talked a lot about physical analog scrum board and how I am in love with the concept. I have no idea why it took me 10 years to actually try it out for myself because when I learned about agile 10 years ago, it was in a startup that used a physical scrum board in their office.
So it was real sticky notes, real board, and they were moving things around throughout the sprint. And that's how I learned about Agile. And that's how I fell in love with it. For some reason, it took me years of trying different digital tools and all of that. And then eventually I tried the analog scrum board and it completely transformed everything.
I just love it. I tell all my students to try it and the ones who trust me and try it, they don't go back. So go to the blog if you're interested, I have a bunch of blog posts on the topic of how to set up the board, some little secrets and all of that. It's on there - monthlymethod.com/blog.
What else happened last year? Well, I discovered Pickleball. That was such a huge positive thing in my life, kind of happened out of nowhere, but I'm so glad I signed up for the beginner's lessons in our local community center, and boy, it is fun, so much fun, and no, for everyone who's wondering You don't have to be retired in order to play pickleball.
Yes, often I'm the youngest on the court, but it doesn't limit the fun that I'm having. It's a lot of fun. And I think the reason why it's spreading like wildfires is because It's so easy to learn.
You get good very quickly. That's kind of like a fun thing that happened and then this year what's happening this year.
Well, we are preparing again for the busy season at the main business. Which is an equipment rental company for anyone who's wondering. It's a local business, nothing to do with the monthly method or agile or anything, but I use Agile to run that business as well. So the busy season is coming, so summer is gonna be busy.
Not a lot of time left for content creation for the monthly method, but I did launch a YouTube channel this year. It's called Agile for One. Please subscribe if you're interested. It's been on my backlog for the longest, longest time, for years, I would say. I wanted to launch a YouTube channel for a long time.
And so this year I decided, okay, you know, I'm never going to have ideal conditions. I decided, you know what? I'm gonna start it. I'm gonna do it on my own terms. I'm not gonna promise to stick to some schedule because again, I have a baby now and business and a home to manage. I'm just gonna work about like an hour a day.
on the monthly method content. Sometimes it's going to be a newsletter. Sometimes it's going to be a video. A lot of the time is going to be spent on editing videos and that's okay. I'm going to work as much as I can with the time I have available. It's not going to be perfect, but at least I'm moving in the right direction.
I'm doing the thing that I wanted to do for the longest time and on the YouTube channel, I'll be covering the basics of agile. If on the podcast I was able to dive into some depth and Some mental tricks and tips, with the videos I just don't have the capacity to Record and then edit such Long videos.
I'm gonna try to keep it very short and very straight to the point because I want to minimize the editing that I have to do later on. And what I'm thinking is that I'm going to be posting the audio track for this videos on this podcast as well. If you're not into watching youtube and would rather listen to this information via podcast I'm gonna duplicate it here.
Hopefully I'm not gonna get in any trouble with YouTube for doing that but yeah, so that's what's going to be happening this year. There are already two videos on the youtube channel I just didn't want to start dropping audio tracks here out of nowhere before giving you this update
So that's that. For the summer the plan is to well be busy with the main business. Take care of the baby. Do as much as I have time to do for the monthly method videos and the newsletter. By the way, if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, I am much more active, on the newsletter. If you want to hear more often from me, you can subscribe to it at monthlymethod.com/ slash blog. I'll leave all the links in the description as well. I also use Twitter. Do we call it X now? Is it like an accepted thing now? Not sure. But yeah, I post on there. Sometimes I take pictures of my scrum board throughout the sprint.
Kind of like a reminder of how it looks like at different stages of the sprint. So if you want to have a refresher on a quite regular basis, follow me on Twitter. It's Agile for One. Again, I'll leave all the links in the description.
So that's for the summer and then we have the fall. I'll have more time to dedicate to the Monthly Method.
And here's what I'm thinking. And I wanted to share it with you to kind of see if you have any feedback, your opinion, and, see if you have additional ideas.
I am thinking of running group sprints. we go through the sprint together. We go through all the sprint rituals together as a group, but you guys would work on your goals, your projects. If you're an entrepreneur, you would work on the business stuff. If you're a full time employee and you want to manage some household projects, that can be done as well.
It's kind of like a gym, but for your projects and goals. And I like this gym metaphor, because we know that there is a ton of information available online on exercise. If you go on YouTube, you can find more information. workout videos than you can do in your lifetime.
The information is there. It's free. It's accessible. There is no point for you not to exercise. But for some of us, myself included, we prefer to buy gym memberships because we find that it's much easier to work out at the gym, and there are different reasons for that. For some people It's a fixed schedule for group classes.
They know that on monday wednesday and thursday There is a class that they like at 6 p. m And they have to be there by 6 p. m and they go and during the class because everyone around them is working out, they're less likely to stop.
So for some people it's group classes, the group dynamic and the fixed schedule. For some people it's just the environment. it's nice to go and be in the environment where everything is designed to be for Exercise for fitness. At home. It's hard to achieve that because your living room is designed for you know leisure Spending time with family and not necessarily for working out.
Some people prefer to sign up for a gym because then there is an external accountability with a trainer or with a friend who is their workout partner. And so this external accountability factor is what's pushing them. There are a ton of reasons why people decide to choose to join the gym to join some fitness studio Even though there is so much free information available online. The same thing applies with our personal projects, there is a ton of information online on how to manage them, how to be productive, and all of that.
Books, videos, even on my website, I have over 70 blog posts on how to apply agile to your projects. Now I'll have this YouTube channel where you'll have the same information, but in video format. So it's going to be free, very accessible, but yet it's very hard to do it on our own sometimes.
I think it's going to be so helpful to have this place where you get together with like minded people. You kind of go through the same cadence of planning your sprint, then going through the sprint, doing the sprint retrospective. We'll have , some sort of daily stand up. I'm not sure how it's going to look like with all the time zones, but we'll figure it out.
Then we'll have. deep work sessions. And that was actually inspired by my experience being a part of the writing group when I was going through my grad school. I was invited to this private writing group. So It was a professor's writing group. No students were allowed, but I got like a special permission, which made it feel even cooler. They would get together every Tuesday. I remember every Tuesday from 10 to 12, and they would work on their research. No emails were allowed and they used the Pomodoro technique.
25 minutes of writing. five minute break, again, 25 minutes of writing, five minute break. They would have coffee, a light snack. Because they realized that it's very hard. And mind you, that's professors whose full time job is to think and write papers, but they realized that with all the coursework, with all the admin stuff, with all the emails, they can't find time to work on their research.
During this two hours, once a week, that's where they got the majority of their writing done for their research. And that's what helped me to get a lot of my work done on my dissertation. It was so impactful for everyone.
Everyone. said that they benefited from this group work sessions. What I have in mind for the group sprints is that we should have those deep work sessions couple times a week, maybe for different time zones. That would be so amazing if we can get together and Get working on our sprint goals for those maybe an hour or two hours. Yeah, so that's another idea that I have in mind.
I just wanted to share what's on my mind for the future projects.
Let me know if you would be interested, because your feedback will determine If I'll go through this or not, I'll also share this with my newsletter subscribers. But other than that, it's really up to you to let me know if this is something that you will be interested in.
Another thing that keeps happening with me is that every week I keep having this conversation.
Where people work remotely, because now it's a common thing. And they are having a hard time. focusing, managing their time. It all feels like a groundhog day. It's hard to keep yourself motivated all the time.
In the office it's easier sometimes because you can get the motivation from other people, but when it's not, It's just you all day, every day. It gets challenging. So I keep hearing from people who are working remotely in my town that they're struggling with it. So I was like, okay, yeah, we sure need some sort of group dynamic happening here to kind of have a similar vibe to An office but without having to go to an office. That's another thing that contributed to this idea.
For all the feedback positive negative. Will it work? Will it fail? Whatever you have on your mind, email me at polina@monthlymethod.Com. I just miss hearing from you guys, send me an email, tell me your updates, where you are with using agile.
How you adapted it to fit your needs. Just love hearing your stories, pictures of your scrum boards if you have one. Yeah, just share.
I'm looking forward to reading all this emails, but for now, have a fantastic week. I'll start posting the audio version of the YouTube videos on here soon.
If you want to keep in touch newsletter is The most convenient way of doing that. Thank you for listening to my update. I hope it answered some of your questions. I'm not gone. I'm still here. The minute I have more time, I'll be back. Okay, bye!