Tag Archives: Productivity

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True Catalysts of Change

True Catalysts of Change. At beginning of 2016, this was one of my goals. As we draw it to close, I am happy to look back to a list of books I have read. These are the true catalysts. They have the power to change your world!

When you review this list. Notice that I do not have agile/scrum related books on my list. That’s easier to learn. The harder part is shifting the mindset. These books will help you there. With the right mindset, you will go further than you can imagine now. You will surprise yourself!

I read about two books per month. And, spend almost $0 for reading those books. [Hit me if you want to know how]

For now, here are the top 5 books from my list with tremendous power to influence and change your world in 2017.

  1. Creativity Inc – Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
Creativity Inc - Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Creativity Inc – Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

2.Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Switch, Transformation,GetHyper, Agile, Get hyper

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

3.Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown 

Essentialism, Agile, transformation, getHyper

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

4.Onward: How to Starbucks Fought Its Life without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz 

agile, gethyper, transformation

Onward: How to Starbucks Fought Its Life without Losing Its Soul

5.The Rich Employee by James Altucher

True Catalysts of Change

The Rich Employee

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The Art of getting MORE done with LESS

Can Agilists use Check Lists? Can checklists help them perform at a much better level? To answer this question, we will have to visit the two bookends of User Stories. Please grab copies of your team’s Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD).

Two book of end User Stories

Two books of end User Stories: DoR, DoD

A user story should not be allowed to go onto a sprint backlog unless it meets all the items listed on DoR; in order for it to be marked as READY. On the other end, teams are supposed to mark a user story as DONE only when it meets all the criteria a laid out in the DoD. Aren’t these checklists? Can we expand them to other areas of doing Agile?

Why use the Checklists?

If NASA can use checklists to send satellites into the outer space. If surgeons can use the checklist to eliminate contamination in the surgery room, why can’t we, the Agilists, use the checklists to eliminate the worst, minimize the waste, and improve our productivity? As Atul Gawande describes in his book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, the knowledge exists, but often times we fail to apply it correctly.

We need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies.
– Atul Gawande,  The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Listed below are some additional benefits of using Checklists.

  • Helps you analyze what you are doing, why you are doing and then eliminate unnecessary steps and optimize it by combining some of them.
  • Makes work results more predictable.
  • Helps you in making Repeatable, predictable process.
  • Helps in delivering consistent quality and results.

Outline path to Success

Checklists, in essence, can help you improve your performance. They outline the path to success, with minimal resistance, because they are infused with your experiences and learnings from the past.

As Edward Deming once said, “don’t look at the individual, look at the system.” You can start with a simple checklist, and infuse them with your experiences and learnings. Refine them as you use them by incorporating the lessons learned with each use.

checklists

make it-use it-refine it-agile checklists

You can create a checklist on pretty much anything! If I know that I’m going to be doing a specific activity more than once, I would create a checklist.

I follow a simple process to create them. Start with an outline of what tasks you would have to carry out to complete the activity. You don’t have to put in a lot of time and effort and come up with an elaborate checklist. Once you have the initial outline, just do ‘the thing’! And, as you do it, refine the list.

Yes, the initial list may not be complete. Yes, it may not be elaborate. But you have a checklist that you can improve on and make it better as you do it again and again. To ensure the ‘continuous improvement’, one of that last item that I almost always have is:
Is there any way I can improve this checklist?

Automate or Delegate

In his highly successful book The Four Hour Week, Tim Ferris suggests four simple steps to freedom:  Eliminate-Simplify-Automate-Delegate.

One of the side benefits of having checklists is that it helps you delegating the activity or individual tasks. It also helps you eliminate the unnecessary steps as you use them and optimize them. Once you have used a checklist to complete the activity couple of times, one of the three things could happen.

  • Automate:
    Find a way to automate the activity.
  • Delegate:
    If you cannot automate this process then find a way to delegate it to somebody who can follow your checklist.
  • Do It yourself:
    If you cannot delegate it and you are ‘forced’ to do it,  you should be able to finish it quickly and efficiently as you have optimized your checklist. This should allow you to finish the activity quickly, with a higher quality, minimizing, if not completely eliminating, the waste.

Enabling and Empowering

Checklists are enabling and empowering! They are ‘concentrated doses’ of experiences and learnings, acquired over multiple iterations. They help you in improving your Sprint Planning, the Backlog Refinement, Sprint Review, and many other events and activities.

Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in
– Atul Gawande,  The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Create one, use it, and you will realize how liberating they are! Let us know your experience in the comment below. And, don’t forget to share it with your peers and community.

Why reinvent the wheel? Get this booklet (containing various checklists) and get a jump start!

Add to Cart

Playbook for Scrum Teams – Get it Today!

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10 Apps for 10x Productivity

Increase Productivity on the Go with these Apps

I introduced you to my top three apps in my earlier post. Let’s continue where we left off, and let me introduced you to remaining apps on my list.

4. Google Photos

10 appsBeing Agilist who loves art and doodling, I take a lot of pictures. And, the limited storage space on my mobile devices could be a problem! This is where Google Photos comes to my rescue!

You can configure Google Photos to sync pictures from your mobile device automatically to your Google Drive. With auto sync configured, I can take a picture and my mobile device automatically uploads that to my Google account. Oh! by the way, Google gives you unlimited storage space for this auto sync!

The advantage is that you don’t need to keep on all those pictures on your mobile device. You can take as many pictures as you want, and they are always available to you from any device, anywhere, anytime!

5. iTalk

iTalkI use this app to record audio on my mobile when I have the sudden burst of creativity when you don’t have paper and pencil handy. You don’t want to slow down in those moments, you want to take notes at the Speed of thoughts! iTalk is my go-to app when I am having these bursts of creativity! All you have to do is talk into your mobile and capture those thoughts.

This app also connects to your Dropbox account allowing you to ‘extend’ storage on your mobile device. You record and it pushes it to your Dropbox! Once recorded, you can hire someone else to transcribe it. This way you could be ‘writing’ your article on the go while waiting at the airport lounge or while stuck in the traffic. Record your thoughts using iTalk, push it to Dropbox, and get more Done!

I use this workflow a lot! I record my thoughts, push the audio recording to my Virtual Assistant (VA) and he transcribes those notes yielding initial draft for my article.

Record your thoughts + Upload to Dropbox + Push to VA = First draft of your article

6. Trello

TrelloWith Trello, you can create your own Kanban board and use them to collaborate with your teams. Create different cards and move them around based on the priorities. There are no emails to send back and forth. You can add notes, checklists, as well as documents. You can even filter your cards based on specific tags or labels.

Essentially, Trello can become your work hub, where you organize your backlog, communicate with your team members, and orchestrate the development of your Minimum Marketable Product (MMP). And, you can be doing all these on the Go as well!

I use the mobile app all the time on my iPhone. This allows me to stay in touch with my team members constantly. As I mention earlier, I push my audio notes to my virtual assistant (VA) all the way to the other side of the world; using a Trello card on a board that I have shared with my team members.

7. Expensify

ExpensifyThis app has been my savior many times. Benefits of Using this app are manyfold:

  1. Minimize the use of the paper
  2. Often times I’m traveling for work and need to capture all the expenses. Just capture them quickly with this app, with the picture of the paper receipt and few details to categorize them appropriately. At the end of the week (or month), Expensify can generate a report and that becomes your expense report.
  3. It also helps me at the end of the year when it is Tax time! The first thing I do for tax filing is going to my Expensify account and download all the expenses for that year. All you have to do is download a report that gives you all the expenses categorized and ready to go into your Tax form.

8. Key Ring

KeyringWe all have ‘fat’ wallets! Unfortunately, instead of money, they are filled with all the plastic cards :-Did you know,  average American carries 17 plastic cards in his/her wallet. You can move all those cards to an electronic world as well, using Key Ring app. Just add your cards into Key Ring and trash all those physical plastic cards, unflatten your wallet, and get rid of that back pain!

9. Google Drive (Google Docs)

Google Drive / Google DocsI use Google Docs extensively for all my notes, documents, and spreadsheets. As we all know Google Docs is all cloud based solution and allows you to collaborate with your team members. Google gives you considerable amount of space for free that is more than enough for most of us

10. IFTTT (If This Then That)

IFTTT-If this Then thatIFTTT allows me to get rid of some of the repetitive tasks from my day. It allows me to delegate and automate some of that mundane task. Using simple recipes, you can automate most of the routine tasks. Use it and you will fall in love with it!

To Summarize…

Here is my list of 10 apps that can launch you into the world of Hyper Productivity.

  1. Evernote and One Note
  2. Scannable
  3. Office Lens
  4. Google Photos
  5. iTalk
  6. Trello
  7. Expensify
  8. Key Ring
  9. Google Drive
  10. IFTTT
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