How To Adopt the 12 Core Practices of Agile Results

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” — Zig Ziglar

Hey there, my friend! I want to share with you an incredible approach that can revolutionize how you approach productivity and fulfillment in your life.

The 12 Core Practices of Agile Results are a game-changer.

In our fast-paced world, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and struggle to keep up with the constant demands and expectations.

That’s where Agile Results comes in.

It’s a practical and powerful system that draws inspiration from the principles of Agile methodologies, positive psychology, and proven productivity practices.

With Agile Results, you’ll learn how to navigate challenges, seize opportunities, and make consistent progress towards your goals. It’s not just about getting more done; it’s about achieving meaningful results that align with your values and aspirations.

A Sustainable System for Success

What sets Agile Results apart is its holistic approach. It’s not just a collection of tips and tricks; it’s a mindset shift and a set of actionable practices that empower you to take control of your time, energy, and focus.

It’s about finding the right balance between productivity and well-being, and creating a sustainable rhythm for success.

So, my friend, if you’re ready to unlock your full potential, enhance your productivity, and create a life of purpose and fulfillment, the 12 Core Practices of Agile Results is your guide.

Together, we’ll explore each practice, uncovering valuable insights and actionable steps that will transform the way you approach your work and life.

Get ready to experience a new level of productivity, joy, and fulfillment. Are you ready to embark on this transformative journey?

Let’s do this!

12 Core Practices of Agile Results

The 12 core practices of Agile Results are:

Action Lists: Action Lists are powerful tools for organizing and prioritizing your tasks and actions. They help you break down your goals and projects into actionable steps, making it easier to stay focused and productive.
Daily Outcomes: Daily Outcomes are the specific results or achievements you aim to accomplish each day. By setting clear and meaningful outcomes, you can direct your energy and efforts towards what truly matters, ensuring a sense of progress and fulfillment.
Growth Mindset: The concept of a Growth Mindset emphasizes the belief that our abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication, effort, and continuous learning. Embracing a Growth Mindset allows us to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, and see failures as opportunities for growth.
Monday Vision, Daily Wins, Friday Reflection: This practice involves setting a vision for the week on Mondays, defining specific outcomes for each day, and reflecting on your progress and lessons learned on Fridays. It provides a structured approach to planning, executing, and reflecting on your work, enhancing productivity and personal growth.
30 Day Improvement Sprints: A Monthly or 30 Day Improvement Sprint is a focused period dedicated to personal growth and improvement. During this time, you can set specific goals, learn new skills, and make progress towards your long-term aspirations.
Reference Collections: Reference Collections are repositories of information, resources, and insights that you can refer back to whenever needed. They help you store and organize valuable knowledge, ideas, and inspiration for future reference and learning.
Scannable Outcomes: Scannable Outcomes are clear, concise, and easy-to-read descriptions of your desired outcomes. They help you quickly understand and track your progress, making it easier to stay on top of your goals and priorities.
Strong Week: The Strong Week practice involves dedicating a specific week to focus on your most important projects and goals. It’s a time to eliminate distractions, increase your energy and focus, and make significant progress towards your desired outcomes.
The Rule of 3: The Rule of 3 is a simple yet powerful guideline that suggests focusing on no more than three key priorities or tasks at a time. By limiting your focus, you can ensure better clarity, effectiveness, and progress in your work.
Timebox Your Day: Timeboxing is a technique where you allocate specific blocks of time to different tasks or activities. By setting clear time boundaries, you can increase your productivity, avoid multitasking, and improve your ability to stay focused and efficient.
Triage: Triage is a practice of quickly assessing and prioritizing tasks or requests based on their urgency and importance. It helps you make informed decisions about where to invest your time and energy, ensuring that you address the most critical and impactful matters first.
Weekly Outcomes: Weekly Outcomes are the key results or accomplishments you aim to achieve each week. They provide a clear focus and direction for your work, helping you make progress towards your goals and maintain a sense of achievement.

Why Adopt the 12 Core Practices of Agile Results?

The core practices of Agile Results help you build a personal results system for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly results.

It combines practices from software engineering, sports psychology, and positive psychology, as well as principles, patterns, and practices for time management and personal productivity.

It’s holistic in that it combines time, energy, and techniques to produce more effective results at work and home.

By investing in your life Hot Spots (mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships and fun), you end up with a system for sustainable results.

In addition, you consistently renew your skills and energy as you spend more time in your strengths and the things you enjoy, while learning and responding to changing environments.

Stop taking on more until you finish what’s on your plate: eat the hot stuff first and let stuff slough off.

Letting the right things go is realistic, practical, and effective; people that don’t let stuff go, tend to be the ones that fail—everything ends up a priority so there is no priority.

Get more effective at cycling through what’s on your plate, so you can flow results.

It’s this little idea of reducing open work and executing the work you have way more effectively.

Some ways to do this include the following: reduce task switching; play to your strengths (as this renews your energy, and you get these things done faster than other people can); say “No” effectively (by pushing for your strengths and setting/getting clear on your requirements for success: “I can do this, if …”); and know your capacity (by cycling through The Rule of 3 each day, each week, each month, each year).

How To Adopt the Practices the Agile Way

To adopt the practices the Agile way, it’s not necessary to implement them all at once. However, the more practices you embrace, the more profound the impact on your results and performance will be.

These practices work together in harmony, forming a cohesive system that sets you up for success. By integrating the practices into your routine, you create a structure that supports your productivity, growth, and ability to navigate challenges.

Even if you stumble or face setbacks along the way, having these practices in place acts as a guiding framework to help you quickly rebound. It provides a reliable system that assists you in regaining your momentum and getting back on track towards your goals. With this support system, you can effectively recover from setbacks and continue your journey of personal and professional growth.

Summary of Steps

Step 1—Review the 12 Core Practices
Step 2—Create Your List of Scannable Outcomes
Step 3—Adopt Daily Outcomes
Step 4—Adopt Weekly Outcomes
Step 5—Design Your Week

Step 1—Review the 12 Core Practices

Familiarize yourself with the 12 core practices of Agile Results.

Here are some additional notes about each practice to help you really internalize the idea of it:

30 Day Improvement Sprints. Pick one thing to improve for the month. Each month, pick something new. This gives you a chance to cycle through 12 things over the year. You can always repeat a sprint. The idea is that 30 days is enough time to experiment with your results throughout the month. You might not see progress after the first couple weeks while you’re learning. A month is a good chunk of time to check your progress.
Action Lists. Track your actions with tickler lists. Consider the following action lists: Daily Outcomes, Weekly Outcomes, Queues, and Scripts.
Daily Outcomes. Each day is a new chance for results. Use daily tickler lists for action items, and create a new list each day. Each day, ask yourself what are three things (The Rule of 3) you want to accomplish? Always start your list with your three most important outcomes for the day. The key to an effective Daily Outcomes list is that you keep your three outcomes for the day at the top, while listing the rest of your to-dos below that. This way you have a reminder of what you want to accomplish.
Growth Mindset. This is simply a decision. You decide that you’ll learn and grow. If you get knocked down, you’ll get up again. You decide that no problem is personal, pervasive or permanent. Life’s not static. Neither are your results.
Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection. Decide what you want to accomplish for the week. Make progress each day. At the end of the week, reflect on your results.
Reference Lists. Some information is not actionable. This is reference information. It might be helpful information, and good to know, but if it’s not actionable, then it’s reference. You can store your reference information as tickler lists. Here are some example reference lists you might keep: Ideas, Notes, Weekly Results, Monthly Results, and Yearly Results.
Scannable Outcomes. Think of this as what’s on your radar. At a glance, you should be able to see what you want to accomplish and what you’re spending your time and energy on. Outcomes guide your action. Keep your outcomes scannable at a glance. Organize outcomes by your work, personal, and life Hot Spots. For example, create a list of outcomes for your life frame (body, career, emotions, financial, fun, mind, and relationships).
Strong Week. Each week focus on spending more time on activities that make you strong and less time on activities that make you weak. Do the same with people. Spend more time with people that make you strong and less time with people that make you weak. Push activities that make you weak to the first part of your day. By doing your worst things first, you create a glide-path for the rest of the day. Better yet, you don’t have activities that weaken you loom over you throughout the day. More importantly, by following activities that make you weak, with activities that make you strong, you can rebuild your energy and spread your energy throughout the day. During your Friday Reflections, you should evaluate your energy levels. Assuming that your regimen for eating, sleeping, and working out aren’t getting in the way, are your activities during the week strengthening you or weakening you? You can do a few things. You can try shuffling around when you do certain activities. For example, you might move them to the morning or move them later in the day. You might try pairing up on some activities. You also might find that some activities really are a drain on you and you should limit them. Worst case, consolidate activities that drain you to your mornings so that you can get them over with when you are strongest. Follow them up with activities that strengthen you so you get your strength back.
The Rule of 3. This Rule of 3 will help you stay focused on the vital few things that matter. Identify your three key outcomes. This is the heart of your Daily Outcomes. Identify three key outcomes each day, each week, each month, and each year. This helps you see the forest from the trees. The three outcomes for the year are bigger than the three outcomes for the month are bigger than the three outcomes for the week, are bigger than the three outcomes for your day. This also helps you manage scope. It’s all too easy to bite off more than you can chew. If you nail the three items you wanted to accomplish, then go ahead and bite off more. Think of it as a buffet of results and you can keep going back, just don’t overflow your plate on each trip.
Timebox Your Day. If you keep time a constant (by ending your day at a certain time), it helps with a lot of things: work-life balance (days can chew into nights can chew into weekends), figuring out where to optimize your day, prioritizing (time is a great forcing function) Carve up your day into big buckets (e.g., administration, work time, think time, connect time), and then figure out how much time you’re willing to give them. If you’re not getting the throughput you want, you can ask yourself: Are you working on the right things? Are you spending too much time on lesser things? Are there some things you can do more efficiently or effectively? Without a timebox, you can easily spend all day reading mails, blogs, aliases, doing self-training, etc., and then wonder where your day went. Using timeboxes helps strike balance. Timeboxes also help with pacing. If you only have so many hours to produce results, you’re more careful to spend my high energy hours on the right things.
Triage. Triage incoming action items: Do It, Queue It, Schedule It, or Delegate It. Do It, if it’s the next best thing for you to do, or now is the most opportunistic time, or if it will cost you more pain, time or effort to do it later. Queue It (add it to your queue), if it’s something you need to get done, but now is not the right time. Schedule It, if you need a block of time to get the work done. Delegate It, if it’s something that should be done by somebody else.
Weekly Outcomes. Create a new list each week. Each week is a new chance for results. Always start with your three most important outcomes for the week (The Rule of 3).

Step 2—Create Your List of Scannable Outcomes

In this step, you implement the following practices: Reference Lists, Scannable Outcomes, and The Rule of 3. The key is to identify the outcomes that you want for your life Hot Spots, work Hot Spots and personal Hot Spots. Hot Spots are simply areas of focus, projects, or activities that you need to spend your time and energy on.

Identify Outcomes for Life Hot Spots

For each Hot Spot, identify up to three outcomes (results) you want:

Mind

Body

Emotions

Career

Financial

Relationships

Fun

Identify Outcomes for Work Hot Spots

For each project or major activity at work, identify up to three outcomes you want:

Project/Activity #1

Project/Activity #2

Project/Activity #3

Identify Outcomes for Personal Hot Spots

For each project or major activity at home, identify up to three outcomes you want:

Project/Activity #1

Project/Activity #2

Project/Activity #3

Step 3—Adopt Daily Outcomes

In this step, you implement the following practices: Daily Outcomes, The Rule of 3, Timebox Your Day, Triage, and Action Lists.

Create a List of Daily Outcomes

Each day, identify and write down your three results you want for the day. If you already have a to-do list system, simply add your three outcomes to the top. This serves as an Action List to remind you of the three key things you want to accomplish for the day. Here is an example:

Date
2009-09-12

Outcomes
1. First draft of chapter, 30% complete.

2. Great lunch with an old friend.

3. Training material reviewed and signed off.

Actions

Write initial bullet points.
Research the training requirements.
Find the contacts for sign off.
Etc.

Keep the following points in mind:

Each day, create a new list and name it the current date. This keeps it simple and lets you review your week by each day.
Each day, identify the three most important results.
Don’t carry over everything each day. Let things slough off based on priority.

Each day you will create a new list of outcomes for the day. The three outcomes help you focus and prioritize everything you do. Make a fresh list each day. Let things slough off. You can carry over an outcome the next day, only if it’s one of the three next best things for you to do. The big thing to keep in mind here is that these three outcomes are your tests for success for the day. You get to define what your best results for the day are. You might decide your most important outcome is that you accomplish nothing. It’s up to you how you set your bar, but the idea is to be mindful and exercise your choices thoughtfully.

Timebox Your Day

Treat your time as a limited budget. Spend it on the things that are most important to what you want to accomplish. To do so, set limits, either in terms of minimums or maximums.

Carve up your day into big buckets (e.g., administration, work time, think time, and connect time); then, figure out how much time you’re willing to give them.

Here’s an example:

Overall Workday
8 hours maximum

Administration
1 hour maximum

Planning
30 minutes minimum

Execution
4 hours minimum

Meeting
1 hour maximum

Keep the following points in mind:

Set an overall limit for your work day. This is your time budget. This will help you prioritize where you spend your time during the day.
Treat it as a baseline and stay flexible. For example, some days you may need to spend more time in planning. The idea is to know where your time goes.
Change the amount of time you spend on things. This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to change your results.

Triage Your Incoming Actions

You most likely have to manage incoming action items throughout your day. Triage incoming items against what you want to accomplish for the day.

Technique	Description
Do It	Take immediate action on tasks that are the next best thing to do, time-sensitive, or require minimal effort.
Queue It	Add tasks to your queue if they are important but not urgent or can be done at a later, more opportune time.
Schedule It	Allocate dedicated time in your schedule to complete tasks that require a significant block of uninterrupted focus.
Delegate It	Assign tasks to someone else if they are better suited for the task or if you have the ability to delegate the responsibility.

Step 4—Adopt Weekly Outcomes

In this step, you implement the following practices: Weekly Outcomes; Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection; Growth Mindset; The Rule of 3; and Reference Lists.

Create a List of Weekly Outcomes

Each week, identify and write down your three results you want for the week. This serves as an Action List to remind you what’s important for the week.

Date
2009-09-14

Outcomes

Training courseware complete.
Lawn and garden in top shape.
5 power hours added to my week.

Adopt Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection

Use the Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection pattern to drive your weekly results. On Mondays, identify the three most important results you want for the week.

Each day, identify the three most important results you want for the day. On Fridays, reflect on your results and identify what’s going well and what needs to improve. Use what you learned from your Friday Reflection to improve the next week. It’s a cycle of improvement.

This is how you employ your Growth Mindset for continuous learning.

Monday Vision

On Monday, identify three outcomes for the week.
Visualize: if this were Friday, what would you like to look back on?

Daily Wins

Each day, identify three outcomes for the day.
Prioritize everything you do against the three outcomes.

Friday Reflection

On Friday, identify three things going well and three things to improve.
Reflect on your actual results against the results you wanted.

Step 5—Design Your Week

In this step, you implement the following practices: Strong Week and Growth Mindset.

Fix Time for Eating, Sleeping, and Working Out

One of the most effective patterns for improving your week is having consistent times for eating, sleeping, and working out. If you set those in place and work everything else around that, you have a great start. This is how many of the most effective people structure their week. They know how much sleep they need, so this helps them figure out what time to go to bed the night before. By making time for your work out and eating, you’re helping ensure that you invest in yourself. One of the most common patterns for successful people is they workout first thing in the morning. This gives them a continuous block of “me” time from the night before into the start of their day.

Set Boundaries and Limits

Set boundaries and limits in terms of time for any life Hot Spots that need attention. Here is an example:
Minimums and Maximums (per week)

Mind
—

Body
Minimum of 3 hours

Emotions
—

Career
Maximum of 50 hours

Financial
—

Relationships
Minimum of 3 hours

Fun
Minimum of 3 hours

Keep the following points in mind:

When you set a minimum in the right categories, you avoid getting unbalanced and improving other categories.
When you set a maximum in the right categories, you learn how to become more effective. For example, if you only have eight hours to throw at your day, you learn to use them wisely.
The worst mistake it to throw more time at problems. The key is to reduce time spent, while increasing value and improving efficiency and effectiveness.