Agile as Lifestyle: patterns, principles and practices for stress-free success

Organizers: Laurent Bossavit
Audience: All welcome.
Duration: 90 minutes

Summary:
Many agile teams report increased productivity and decreased stress... shouldn't we also expect the same benefits in all areas of our lives, not just work ? If you still experience too much stress at times, feel overwhelmed by your various personal projects - or if you have found effective ways to cope - you will be interested in this session. We explore patterns, principles and practices leading to a harmonious balance of our various activities: work, family, fun, personal growth... As a starting point we will consider GTD (Getting Things Done), a very popular "system", and its similarities with Agile practice.

The aim of this session is to explore the links between Agile and GTD (or other personal effectiveness systems) and see what we can steal in each to improve the other.

Benefits
Participants and organizer will

  • trade tips on managing personal projects with increased effectiveness and reduced stress
  • explore similarities between Agile and GTD (Getting Things Done) or other similar systems
  • have fun
Content
The session schedule is as follows:
000-005 Brief introduction; the "rocks" parable; "Personal Effectiveness Systems" (PES) and their limits
005-015 An overview of GTD - Projects, Contexts, Actions, the 3 D's
015-020 Overview of major similarities and differences between Agile and GTD
020-025 A short demo of one GTD implementation
025-035 Collect topics (principles or patterns from both Agile and GTD or other PES) for further discussion
035-040 Divide into a maximum of 4 groups, identify someone in each group as Scribe and one as Facilitator
040-060 Brainstorm in groups: how to apply Agile principle X to an "agile lifestyle" ? or use GTD ideas in Agile ?
060-080 Groups present findings (timeboxed, 5' per group)
080-090: Wrap up