To keep on track physically, I do a “minimum daily requirement” routine of exercises. No matter what, I do at least 10-15 minutes every single day. I allow myself to vary the exercises, but I never vary from doing this minimum. This daily goal is in addition to my weekly exercise goals. It keeps my momentum going, and inevitably, when I need to take time off from my weekly goals, it’s easier to get back into my routine, and continue to progress towards my long-term goals. It’s worked so far—it’s been about two years since I started, and I’m still at it.
Some days, the routine doesn’t feel very challenging, so I add more reps or add some weights, still keeping it to under 15 minutes. This morning, it was one of those days for pushing myself harder. It occurred to me, as I did my pushups, that my routine works a lot like timeboxing does in Scrum.
If you’re not familiar with the Agile process Scrum, it segments chunks of work into Sprints of equal lengths of time, as determined by the team. Instead of fixing the scope of a project, the iteration time is fixed. Something demo-able is delivered at the end of each Sprint.
So, you may ask, how is my couple of sets of pushups every morning like a two-week Sprint for a software development team?
Well, just as I do my exercise set every morning, the development team gets into a rhythm of delivering something tangible every single Sprint. As time goes by, I have stronger muscles, and similarly, the development team grows stronger as a team. The developers, Product Owner and QA all get better at setting realistic deliverables for a Sprint. Over time, they plan better and deliver more in the same time period, just as I can do more pushups now than I could when I started!
If you want to read more about timeboxing, this article is a good place to start. It has more than you could possibly ask, including links to some information about Temporal Motivation Theory, as developed by Piers Steel and Cornelius J. König.