So, some of the more observant readers may remember Joey talking about something he calls a Scrum Board. I don’t remember it; I’m not entirely sure I’m spelling it right, but for the purpose of this entry, that’s what it’s called.
The Scrum Board has such a brilliant function that I want to write to you about it. It’s one of Joey’s ways of managing his team. At the start of each fortnight they get together and write a list of all the things they’d like to get done, and then as a team they decide how much priority should be given to each. They put the list up in order of priority on the To-Do list on the Scrum Board.
Over the course of the next two weeks, whenever someone finishes a job, they don’t have to go to Joey to ask what he would like them to do next, because they already know – they go to the Scrum Board, see which is the highest priority task in their skillset, and move the item from “To-Do” to “In Progress.”
“What has this to do with Resolutions?” I hear you ask. Well, it’s that time of year when people who are wont to do so, write a list of resolutions they’re determined to accomplish in the next 12 months. For the first time in my life I wrote such a list for 2016, and achieved the first on the list about half an hour before I fell off a cliff and relegated the rest of the list to unattainable status. So this year I’m going to learn from Joey’s example, and my only resolution (well, apart from getting my shoulder strong enough again to do 10 pull ups, and, you know, organising a wedding) is to get my own Scrum Board.
I have the habit of focussing on the “urgent” and not the “important.” For example, I usually leave washing my socks until the situation is urgent. So if I need to do a load of washing, everything else has to wait. But if I was to really think about it, I’d say that having clean socks is actually less important than having time to pray without distractions. Over and over in my life the things that are really important get side-lined in favour of what seems at the time to be urgent.
So I’ve convinced Darren to buy into Joey’s idea, and we’re setting up a Scrum Board, with a list of things we want to accomplish each fortnight in order of priority. At the top of the list is at least one night a fortnight when we do nothing but spend time together, chat about what’s going on in our heads, what we’re anxious about, connect with each other (we’re actually very good at doing all of the above on more than a fortnightly basis, don’t worry!) - and then pray together about it. If we haven’t prayed together it doesn’t get ticked off the list.
Whatever your judgements about Darren’s and my shocking neglect of prayer, I hope you understand my point about priorities and can take Joey’s system and adapt it for your own situation, and that for all of us 2017 is a year where we prioritise what’s really important.
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