Feeling lethargic? Boost your productivity with 30-minute sprints

I am back to writing here after a real long time. Going forward, I intend to write regularly on productivity, my pet topic. Coming back from a long lay off, I want to start with a generic topic.

There are days at work, when you feel extremely lethargic and frustrated due to some reason. You are low on confidence as well partly contributed by the above two. Added to all this, let’s say that you have work, but the deadline is several days away and there is nobody breathing down your neck to check the progress by end of day. This is a classic scenario for many programmers, which, more often than not, leads to a familiar result – an extremely unproductive day. If the situation continues for few more days, you just end up having many such unproductive days and as the deadline gets closer, you try to get back on track, which you do manage to do. But ultimately the quality of your deliverable suffers for the simple reason that you did not devote all the time that you were allocated and you should have spent.

I devised a strategy for this. I call it “30-minute sprints”.   It’s one of those bad days when you don’t feel like doing work and nothing seems to be working. You just don’t have enough motivation or energy to get started on a big task for which the deadline is not in the near future. What do you do? Identify some really small tasks for your work. To give you an example, it could be as simple as adding 5 attributes to a Java bean or identifying the package for your first class. You certainly don’t need 30 minutes to do it, but just give it 30 minutes and do it. Identify more such tasks and repeat this for several more 30-minute sprints. If it is an extremely unproductive day, you can take this sprint as far as the first half of the day.

Wondering how this can help?  This can do wonders!  Here are the benefits of this approach

Sense of accomplishment: On a day nothing seems to be working for you, accomplishing a simple task in a 30-minute sprint gives you a huge sense of accomplishment.

Slow build-up of motivation: As you crack the simple tasks and achieve the goal of each sprint, you are getting your energy level back, concentration back and most importantly your motivation back.

Feeling of progress: In the kind of situations described, the very fact that you have not been doing anything can lead to more frustration, hopelessness making you even more unproductive. You are caught in a vicious circle, where the failure of the past rounds impede your progress further making your overal progress slower and slower. With the sprints, you get a feeling of progress with every sprint. It’s true you are making very little progress but the point is you are making progress and the vicious circle has meta morphed into a positive circle where you grow in confidence with each round.

As you go through the sprints, along with all the desired effects above, you start performing bigger tasks for each sprint and at one point get productive enough to stop sprinting and just go about the work at a brisk pace.

This strategy is applicable only for the scenario described and is very effective and practical as compared to other alternatives . At least, it has worked for me in the past. Besides, the duration of the sprint (30 minutes) is something which I came up with and which I am comfortable with. The strategy is as effective with other durations as well, as long as it’s not too short (Is there a simple task for a 10 second duration?) or too long (The sprint is not meaningful if it lasts 1/2 day). Have comments, feedback, thoughts? I’d be glad to hear. Feel free to write them in the comments section.

Tags: general