Hi! Today, we are going to talk about another agile concept called Sprint Capacity. We're gonna learn about how it's applied in agile teams and also we're gonna look at how you can apply it to your own personal productivity.   Let's go. 

 As always, let me walk you through how sprint capacity works in agile teams. So, let's say you are a software development company. You have a team of engineers who do the development work and you use agile principles such as Sprint Planning, Backlog, and all of the other things that I've already covered on this podcast.  And before each sprint begins, you do the sprint planning session.  One of the earliest steps in the process is that you evaluate your sprint capacity.

 So let's assume that a sprint lasts for  three weeks and you say, okay, what do we have going on for the upcoming sprint? You will look at how many people are on vacation.

Is anyone sick? Are there any big corporate events that will take the whole day or a few days? You know, some companies like to go on yearly retreats or they might have some planning sessions that last few days. Another thing that you can look at is any big product launches that are coming up.  Usually what happens is when you launch a new product, the support requirements are quite high because you know things break down when you first build them. There are some unexpected things that went wrong and so you need to have some engineering resources available to fix it as fast as possible in order to guarantee customer satisfaction. So you need to account for that. 

After looking at all these factors, you say, okay we know that two people are on vacation. There is a board meeting. There is this  wide planning day that is coming up.  There's also a long weekend, so it means that one day is gone from the sprint. So given all these factors, we know that this sprint, we can commit to X units of work.  And these units of work, they're calculated in different ways. Each team chooses their own way to calculate units of work, but in the  big picture doesn't really matter how you calculate the units of work. It matters that you use the same approach from sprint to sprint, and you can track progress from sprint to sprint. And these units are used to calculate sprint capacity. 

When you calculate Sprint Capacity  you are estimating the amount of engineering time available for a given sprint. The amount of work a team can deliver in the sprint and towards the completion of backlog items. Another way to say it is that capacity is the maximum amount of work a team can deliver in a given sprint. 

 So at the end of this exercise of the Sprint Capacity Evaluation, you should have a certain number, number of hours, number of unions of work, whatever you decide on, but you say, okay, this upcoming sprint, we are gonna focus on 20 units of work because that's how much engineering time we have available because we have skewed and fills on vacation.

We have  John on paternity leave.  We have Kate doing support  for this new product launch. We  also have this holiday party and we have a long weekend where no one is working on Mondays. And because of all of these, the realistic number of work we can commit to is 20 units of work.

 Next sprint we have more resources available. No one is on vacation. So next sprint,  we have the capacity to commit to 30 units of work.  

How you can apply Sprint Capacity to your personal productivity

Now let's look at how you can apply these principles to your own life, to your own projects, goals, and productivity. Okay?

 So if you look at how we usually set goals or how we were taught to set goals for the upcoming year, quarter, month day, what have you is to imagine the ideal self or to aim as high as possible and say that, okay, in one year,  I'm gonna go to the moon  in terms of my goals and projects.

It's always some kind of like a very ambiguous, large goal that just sounds very impressive makes you feel cool and valuable and all of that,  then you commit to it and too quickly burn out because the scope is just too unrealistic. And also not just the scope when you set a goal for a year, for example, you then automatically divide this goal into 12 equal chunks. Assuming that you'll do the same amount of work in January, where it is that winter outside, it's boring, you have nothing to do and of course you have more time. And you assume that in January and July, in July where you have five weddings, 25 birthday parties, three camping trips to the international travels. And you say, I'm gonna do the same amount of work towards my goal in July and in January.  So you get what I'm saying, it's quite unrealistic.  So what I started to do after learning about sprint capacity and also what I'm asking all the members of the monthly method sprint do is  before we even review their backlog and all the tasks they might want to do for the upcoming sprint, I ask them to evaluate their sprint capacity.  These are some of the questions or things that I ask  them to do.

I ask them to look at their calendar for the upcoming month and see how it looks like. How busy are they at work or school? Are there any major school work related deadlines that they need to prepare for? How many meetings do they have? Any holidays, family trips, people coming over, dinner commitments, birthday parties. I also ask them to review the calendar and find any emotionally, draining activities that they know. once they do this activity they're done for the day, it's so draining that there is no way they're gonna be able to think straight, be full of energy and be working on their personal goals.

I remember in my last job, every two weeks I had this meeting that I absolutely dreaded. It just took out so much of me that I was like, you know what   every time I was done, and the meeting lasted from, I think, three to five, so it was at the end of the day and all I wanted to do was just grab a glass of wine, sit on the couch, turn on some Netflix, don't talk to anyone and just zone out because it was like one of those meetings where it was just too much.  I did not enjoy it. And I knew it because it was happening every second week.  It was very consistent with the way I felt afterwards. So I was like, okay, you know what? I'm just not gonna plan anything for that Tuesday afternoon. I will allow myself to have the space and that's ok. It's gonna be less stressful than to put a bunch of to-do items for me on Tuesday for Tuesday night, and then be stressing out that I'm tired but at the same time I have all these to-do tasks assigned. I'm like, no Tuesday evenings, if I have the energy, I can always do things from other days. Then that's gonna be a bit extra. But realistically speaking, Tuesday evenings are not very productive because of this one meeting or if I know  a lot of entrepreneurs who I work with, they have some business-related the activities that are very training for the creative type. It would be the bookkeeping for more organized and meticulous people. It might be a content creation that drains them out. So sometime in your week or every two weeks or in your month, there is an activity that you have to do, but it's so draining that you are done for the day after you are done with this activity. Just account for that. Account for that in your sprint capacity calculation. I also ask people to estimate how much time it usually takes them to commute, cook, eat, clean, shower, do laundry and do other daily adult tasks. Also very important, estimate how much time you need for breaks, rest, sleep, and weekends. And I recommend to be very generous here.   One of the best thing you can do for your sprint planning is to prepare for being tired and not in the mood And I've done a separate podcast episode on it. It's called " Stop Having this Flawed Assumptions When Setting Goals", I recommend checking it out. But once you start as a human, you will be tired a lot, especially if you have a full-time job. You are a full-time student. Your sprint capacity is much lower than a sprint capacity of someone who has 24 hours to manage. It's up to them how to manage their time. So sprint capacity for self-employed or entrepreneur is gonna be higher because they have to manage their entire day. Then a sprint capacity of someone who has a full-time job, because if you have a full-time job and you don't really get to choose how you spend your 40 hours that you work well, those 40 hours you can really include them in your sprint capacity. All you have is your evenings and maybe one day on the weekend. That's it.

And so after you look at all these activities, commitments draining activities, travel plans, people coming over, all of that, you can calculate your spring capacity. And you say for this upcoming month, I have around 20 hours of sprint capacity, or it might be 10, or it might be 50. The beauty here is that each sprint is gonna be different. Your sprint capacity is going to be different in July than in January. It'll be different based on your work. Some months are busier than others. And that's fine. That's the beauty of knowing your sprint capacity beforehand is that you can plan your workload accordingly.   Let's say it's 20 hours, you then go to your backlog and you say,  let's look at the backlog and see what are the most crucial items that I need to get done this upcoming month. What they really want to focus on. And then you start assigning estimates to each of the backlogs that you want to do. Let's say you have maybe an item to clean out the garage, you say, okay, that's going to take a conservative five hours of work. Then you might have an item to update your resume. That's maybe two hours of work. And you go through like each of the tasks and then you say, okay, 20 hours of work, what can I fit in?  and Then you can only choose a very limited number of tasks.

So you choose 20 hours of work and that becomes your sprint goals or sprint tasks.

I can not emphasize how liberating it is to have the stop point. Some boundary where you tell yourself no, that's where we stop. These five tasks we can't really do much more here. And that's where we stop  because think about it, think back to the time when you had your four shots of espresso.  It was a nice Sunday afternoon and you're like, okay, let me plan the most perfect upcoming week and you were like, yeah, I'm gonna go to the gym five times a week. I'm gonna cook all my meals at home. I'm gonna finish the renovation in my living room. I'm gonna declutter my closet. I'm gonna meet with all my friends. I'm gonna organize a party. I'm gonna read three books and you put so many things on your to-do lists even though you have a full-time job and all of it. And it's like, there is no endpoint. You can always add more. And there is this some sort of good  feeling that you  have when you add more and more tasks, but then Monday rolls around,   look at this to-do list and you were like, what in the world was I thinking yesterday? It's so overwhelming. I don't know where to start. And there was no way I can do it in a week.  So you just like throw away the to-do list and continue with your life.

But when you have the sprint capacity in mind, you have a very manageable list of items to do. And so, you know that you've already accounted for your work, for all the lunch breaks that you need to take, for all the rest breaks, for cooking your meals, for the commute, for any other deadlines and appointments and meetings.

So, you have a very reasonable  to do list and that's quite amazing. If you get it done sooner and great, you feel amazing, but the opposite of it is to have this enormous to-do list that has no base in terms of the capacity of your capacity for the upcoming day, week, or month. It's just like some wishful thinking . You always feel like a failure because you always have this never-ending list of tasks to do.  You always fall behind. It's just not a very pleasant experience because you always have these negative emotions to where this huge to-do-list, what you end up doing is never looking at it.   Hiding it behind some stack of papers and just trying to forget it.

So, if you want to have a very different mindset toward your to-do list, start with the idea of Sprint Capacity. I'm telling you, it's going to serve you as a boundary, as a stop sign for where you say, okay, no more, no more tasks, no more to-do list, no more project. I can always put them on my backlog list and  I have another episode on this topic.

I can always record them. They're gonna wait for me patiently till the next sprint planning session. But for this sprint, this is my Sprint Capacity. This Sprint Capacity dictates how many tasks I accept and commit to for this upcoming sprint. 

Okay guys, so that's all I wanted to share with you today. If you want to dive deeper into agile principles and how you can apply them to your own personal productivity, join us for the upcoming sprint.

All the information is available at monthlymethod.com/enroll.

Have a fantastic week and I'll talk to you next Monday. Bye.