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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.
This time of year, we tend to obsess way too much about picking the perfect first goal. But here's what I've learned. It doesn't really matter which goal you pick . And today I want to show you why the goal itself. It's almost irrelevant and why something else matters so much more if you want long-term success.
What should I focus on in my first sprint?
When people join my sprints, be it private or group sprints, the number one question is always.
What should I focus on during my first print? What goal should I pick for my first print? And the answer that always puzzles people is that it doesn't really matter because the first sprint is not necessarily about achievement. It's about getting your first real feedback loop.
The moment the fantasy meets reality, we all have this imaginary life that we are living in our head and we always have so many assumptions about how much we can get done, about what works for us, what doesn't that this fantasy. Dictates our goals. But when we actually put something on paper or on the scrum board and actually start attempting to achieve this goal, that's when the rubber hits the road.
And that's when we learn how much time we actually have, how much energy we truly have on a daily basis, how many commitments are hiding in our week, how much time all these household chores take how overly optimistic our brain is about time.
For the first time we have real data
So not all first sprints are a glowing success because probably. They're messy, imperfect, but incredibly valuable because for the first time we have data about our life, real data, and once the sprint ends, we can look at our scrum board. What worked? What didn't?
What surprised me? When was I at my best? What completely drained me? What helped me to move these items all the way to done? And why is this task is still in the to-do column?
You create a more pieceful and honest life
And you learn valuable lessons that you can take into the next sprint. And the second sprint becomes a little tighter.
The third becomes even tighter. And by the fourth sprint, your sprint capacity estimation is very close to how much time you really have available. There is not a big gap between your fantasy and the real life. These two are more aligned. And as a result, you can create more realistic plans. You can stick to your plans. You can see things through. And this result in a much more peaceful life, in a much more content life. In the life where you are calm and proud of what you achieve every single month, and you see progress because that's the number one thing that people come to me and say is that I just, it's not that I want some incredible results.
I just want to have this feeling of progress on a monthly basis that I'm working towards the things that are important to me, that I'm not just spinning the wheels in the busy work, and that's what you achieve one sprint at a time.
And the reason it works is because you are building your own productivity system that works for your personality, your circumstances, your rhythms, and your energy
The purpose of the first sprint
The first few sprints, it's not necessarily about achieving certain goals. The main goal is to uncover and learn your success key, your secret code, if you will, the conditions under which you work best.
Think of a sprint goal as a dumbbell. When you go to a gym, you don't really care about how the dumbbell looks like. It can be green, it can be blue, it can be made out of plastic, it can be made out of metal, doesn't really matter because the dumbbell is not the goal. The goal is to gain muscle and become stronger.
And similar with our goals. It just gives us something. To lift during the three weeks during our sprint that by lifting this thing, we can observe ourselves and learn things about ourselves. When do I tend to procrastinate? What motivates me? What drains me?
What structure supports me? And once you know that. You can pick any goal and achieve it. And you've probably seen a bunch of examples in the real life of this happening. How many people became successful in their careers? And then successfully lost weight and got in shape or vice versa.
First they got in shape and got their life in order in that area and then they changed careers. They've built a business. So they applied these principles in this other area of their lives, or a lot of example of people going into the army and then coming back and doing something else quite successfully.
And the order doesn't really matter. Do you lose the weight first and then focus on your finances? So the other way around doesn't really matter. Pick one thing and uncover your secret key, your secret productivity code, and then achieve this one goal and then transfer this learning to the next goal and achieve it in half the time that it took you to achieve the first goal.
Once you know what works for you. You can simply copy, paste it into your next pursuit.
The lunchtime rule
And I want to give you some examples from my life for when it worked like that. When I was in high school, I liked to finish my homework by about 4:00 PM so that I can go outside and spend time with my friends, and I wanted to have my weekends also free so that I can be outside with my friends. So it worked really well for me in high school. I was an a plus student, so I had no excuse not to transfer the same rule to my university.
I had a very social life at university. I had a lot of parties to attend and I didn't want to skip on any of them, so I needed to get my homework done by about five 6:00 PM so that I can go and, attend these parties and have a wonderful experience being a university student. And then I've applied the same fixed schedule system to my career and then to my grad school and now to my business as well.
Same rule, same outcome, but different goal. So I just copy pasted what worked for me in the past in my new pursuits. And then reflecting back on that, during my grad school journey, I thought that having a deadline really helps, but having it at like five, 6:00 PM still gave me a lot of time to procrastinate on my dissertation work during the day.
So I would always find something different to do in the mornings. And then I would have lunch, and then after lunch I would feel lazy, and then at 3:00 PM I would finally force myself to sit down and do something. The whole day felt like a long stretch of procrastination, even though it ended at around 5:00 PM So I thought, why not take the same idea
off a fixed daily deadline and move it closer. And I am a very food driven person and I decided to connect it to the lunchtime. So I would tell myself that I need to write my 300 to 500 words. Remember exactly what the number was, but it was somewhere in the range between 300 and 500.
And how I picked it is that on a very good day when I felt fresh and productive, I would put the timer for one hour and I would count how many words I can type in that one hour for my first draft of my dissertation. And that became a good benchmark. So if I could do it in one hour, there is no way I wouldn't be able to do it by lunch.
Because if I start working at nine till lunch, that's at least three, if not four hours of work. And I just need to have one hour of focus time. So on, on days where I'm not this sharp, I would like spread it out to two hours, but still, it's very, very realistic. And the rule was that I would not eat lunch till I have this number of words added to my first draft.
And this worked. It worked so well. Again, I'm a very food driven person and there was not a single day where I skipped on lunch, but I always finished my word count for the day, and that really transformed my whole grad school experience because I did not have this mental drag of unfinished work
throughout my day, I would be done with the most important thing till lunchtime. And because of that, I was able to finish my grad school earlier. I was able to defend my dissertation and finish a semester earlier. And then I give the same advice to my younger sister and she was able to finish her dissertation on time and it worked really well for her as well.
I know it sounds a bit harsh this rule that if you don't achieve this by lunch, you don't eat lunch. But again, I've picked a goal that is very realistic to finish in four hours and I wasn't trying to push myself or anything, and throughout this I always ate lunch, but I also saw consistent progress on my dissertation.
So since then I've borrowed this no lunch rule and I have applied it to a bunch of other goals in my life.
Quitting social media to gain focus
Another example from my grad school was that when I first started my grad school, I had to read a bunch of academic articles.
And because I had the break between my undergrad and my grad school, I wasn't used to reading academic papers. I was working and I lost the skill and the mental capacity of reading complicated academic articles, and I've realized that if I had the goal to read and understand and then write about this complex topics, I would need my brain to be at a higher capacity to do that. And me using social media was actually working in the opposite direction. It shortened the attention span. It made a bunch of things boring. It was basically doing the opposite of what I needed my brain to be.
So I decided that, okay, for the duration of my grad school, I would quit social media. For me it was mainly Instagram 'cause that's where I was spending a lot of time. And so I quit social media. And what do you know? My attention span started to increase and then after about a month I was able to understand complex academic articles and I was able to pick up on reading books again, like , long for my books and I would read it for pleasure in the evenings.
So overall, really successful strategy for that kind of goal. And then the grad school was over. I was back on social media, and then recently I've realized that I have specific goals in my business that demand
a very sharp brain. I dunno how to put it in other words, and what do you know? Like I open my tool set and I see like from my past and because I've been doing this sprint thing for 10 years, so I have a wide, a range of tools that I've applied to different sprints and different goals.
And I was like, okay, where in the past. Did I have to increase my mental capacity for things? Okay, it was during grad school. What did I do? I did this thing, and so for me, I knew that I had to quit social media because it worked really well for me in the past for this type of goals. So that's what I did.
Proof that skills are transferable
And the skills are transferable. Again, the things that work for you in your career are likely to work for you in your weight loss journey or in your home decluttering journey. And I have proof for that. It's been one full year of me running the focus room. That's my private membership where we do group sprints together. It's been 12 full sprints and I have members on there that have been with me since the very beginning. So I have the privilege of observing their sprints for the last year. And after watching people move through the entire year, setting different goals, I can confidently say the goal never matters, but the learning always does and the learning compounds. So let me give you a few examples.
From job search to decluttering
There is one woman who started with a very simple goal that was related to her job search and the first few sprints.
All her goals were kind of related to the job search, and then once that was on track, then she decided to focus on declutter in her home because that's something that she neglected for a while due to some health issues. But now she felt like she can handle that. And the skills and the little lessons that she is learned about her productivity from the job search goals help her to declutter her home.
And then she decorated the space a little bit. And it's funny, you can actually like, whenever she joins the call so you can see her background changing as the year progresses and getting more and more, organized and beautiful. It was like visual proof that things are changing for the better. And now in this season of life, she's focusing on publishing her work on medium. So that's a new pursuit of hers. And again, she's taken all the lessons from the job search, from decluttering the house to this new creative pursuit. Totally different goals, totally different seasons of life, but the lessons she learned about herself keeps on compounding.
Every new project becomes easier because she knows more of her secret code. What works for her.
From weight loss to career change
Another member began with her health. So the first few sprints I remember, she was kind of like trying different things when it came to eating and exercise, and I worked with her one-on-one prior, so I know she's been tweaking things here and there
Trying to find that secret code and every sprint got her closer to this framework that works for her. And then eventually she was able to structure it in a way where exercise is consistent. Eating healthy is consistent. She found a way that works with her personality, so now she's taking these lessons.
And applying them to her career. For the last few years, she's been considering changing her career from being a software engineer to being a product manager. And now she is actively doing that. She's taking the lessons from the weight loss journey and transferring them to the career change journey.
She has taken the product management certification and getting her resume ready for the new opportunity.
Other examples
And inside the membership, I just see people doing home renovations, losing weight, building businesses, writing books. The themes change with the seasons, but nothing is ever wasted because every sprint is a layer. A layer will peel back. To get closer to the truth of who we are and how we function. Because nobody handed us an instruction manual when we were born.
So it's our job to discover our own operating system. And once you discover and once you discover even the small part of it, like you can see like this much, you can start applying this little thing to every other goal of yours, and they become a lot easier to achieve.
The main objective of the first sprint
As you go through the first sprint, the main objective is to focus on your energy. When you crash, what drains you, what gives you energy, what, makes it easier or harder to do focused work? Look for predictable trends and patterns, and then once we learn that, then the next sprint becomes tighter, more aligned with who you are and your life circumstances.
Eventually, the goal is to create a formula. Kind of like to achieve this type of goals, I need A, B, and C. And that becomes your personal framework, and it's way more reliable than any book guru coach or a productivity trend because it's based on your actual life data. And in my opinion, it's the most risk adjusted approach because if something worked for you in the past, chances are it'll work for you in the future.
It's reality tested. Not fantasy driven. So yeah, uh, your first sprint goal truly doesn't matter.
Pick something finite, something you can finish in three weeks, because that's my preferred sprint duration.
Pick any Dumbo. Again, when you go to the gym, doesn't matter the color of the dumbbell, the material of the dumbbell, it just needs to be a dumbbell and start lifting because you are not learning how to achieve
that specific goal. You are learning how to achieve every other goal in the future, and having that long-term vision, is what's gonna help you stick with the process and see small lessons in your daily attempts to do things and see them as valuable investments in your long-term success.
Have a wonderful week. I'll talk to you later.