Magic Desk Decluttering

She looked rather sceptical: “I need an example.” she said. “Let’s try this on my largest impediment, emptying my desk drawers. They’re full of thing that need to be done sooner or later, but it’s so much, I don’t know where to start.”

We emptied the drawers: papers, bills and other stuff including an old MP3 player waiting to be sold, empty seed packages…

Because important things should be done first, The Desk had to be prioritised: Out came the set of (planning) poker cards I received as part of the training material¹, and we went through every single bit, always answering the same question: “How important is this?”. About half of the things went to the dustbin right away. These things had entirely lost importance. Most of the other items were not really that important, leaving only a small number of very important items. And now that they were identified, it became obvious that they could be done in no more than a single day. My wife said: “This is so much better than ‘normal’ prioritising using just 3 or 4 categories. It made me realise, than 90% of the things I planned to do were absolutely unimportant, being estimated with less than 3 points.” It’s very important to estimate using the correct measuring unit: In this case it was the value the items represented, the return on investment.

The lesson learned: At least one aspect of Scrum is useful for extremely small teams, even a single person. I’m not suggesting to use Scrum for everything, but why not optimise the tasks you don’t like doing, like cleaning the desk?

By the way, my wife’s desk has been clean and tidy ever since.

If you tried agile methods in private life too, I’d like to hear about it.

¹ These cards are labelled with 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100 and ‘?’ which clearly shows that the most important items are really much more imporant than other elements.