Category: Agile & Lean Life
Welcome to The Agile & Lean Life category. This category is a collection of all blog posts about applying advanced startup management and software development techniques in personal life to improve personal productivity and odds of success.
Why is that important? There is no harder challenge in business than to build a new disruptive high-tech startup. Building a new startup doesn’t only take courage, innovative ideas and attracting a lot of funding, but also a systematic scientific approach to finding the right product – the market fit.
Managing personal life and becoming successful is also not a piece of cake. Many techniques, approaches and lessons from the lean startup and agile development can be applied to personal life. They can help you achieve a completely new level of personal performance, productivity and success.
Sounds interesting? Before browsing the articles posted under this category, I suggest you read the main idea of how you can benefit from the transference of advanced business knowledge to personal life management.
Blog posts under this category are organized by date published. As a better alternative, you can check out the AgileLeanLife Productivity framework track, where blog posts are arranged in a more logical and systematic sequence, so you can acquire knowledge and concepts for applying lean and agile methodologies into your personal life in a more step-by-step way.
Besides that, the AgileLeanLife productivity track also offers a collection of other productivity tips and tricks, outside the scope of agile and lean life.
Humans get creative ideas. Humans have inspirations. Data and metrics do the validation. Instincts are experiments and data is proof. Zero always invites imagination and when you are at zero, there is a huge space for egos, opinions and arguments to fight based on assumptions. But wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s why every assumption and prediction needs to be tested. When you decide to put everything to the test, there is no need for an argument. You can have a heated discussion to brainstorm the best ideas and inspirations, but then you just have to do experiments to find the thing that enables you the fastest progress towards your vision and goals.
Achieving your goals and visions is never a straight line, but always a path full of detours, setbacks, step backs and adjustments. If you want to achieve your goals, you need many creative ideas for how to overcome different obstacles. You often have to innovate your way out of unexpected troubles. Doing the same things over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity and absolutely a recipe for big failures and a lot of emotional pain. The best way to stay lean and agile while following your goals is to use the “branching and forking” principle. The principle comes from software development or, more exactly, from versioning control.
Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is a very popular technique in business to better understand the purchasing process from a customer’s perspective. It’s especially popular for online businesses. It’s a technique that helps companies and organizations improve their customer experience and boost their sales. You can use a very similar approach to develop a superior strategy for the goals you want to achieve in your life. I call it Goal Journey Mapping (GJM) and in this article, we will focus on how to prepare a professional Goal Journey Map..
By writing "short life stories" based on your vision item list, you strive to achieve the following: With an internal dialog, you want to clarify in detail what exactly is the outcome you want and with an external dialog with all the parties involved, you can synchronize desires, plans and goals. You also want to add all the strong whys to the goal, making it your life mission and adding strong emotional power to it. You can also add list of all the gains you will enjoy by meeting a goal and all the pains you will avoid. Not to mention that short life stories can help you immediately think of implementation, they're something you can easily visualize in your head and put on your personal Kanban board. They're a great input for making a Goal Journey Map.
I’m have no doubt you’re a very curious person and that you want to try and experience many things in life. There is nothing more fulfilling than following a diverse and rich life experience. One great exercise to do is to make yourself a vision list (or a bucket list) with all the things you want to achieve in life. It can be a simple document, a notebook with pictures or even a Pinterest board. With all the items on the vision list, there is a big question of how to prioritize things you want to achieve and experience. How to decide what to follow first. Which goals should be your number one priority? Like with everything in life, I suggest that you are smart and strategic about it. You have to be one step ahead of life, instincts and randomness. This article will help you to decide which goals …
