Scrum for One: How to Apply the Scrum Framework to Personal Projects

Having to suffer with Scrum at work is bad enough. This sounds like a great idea for people who hate themselves.

While I'm sure some of the specific practices used by scrum teams are valuable on personal projects, the broader notion of Scrum for Personal projects seems strange to me.

Scrum gets it’s name from rugby. During a rugby scrum, the entire cross-functional team works to move the ball down the field. If there's just one guy, he isn't in a scrum, he's just sprinting. Besides that stretched metaphor, half of the key statements in the agile manifesto are about collaboration and working with people. Having “Agile for one” doesn’t really make sense.

While planning ahead and doing retrospectives is definitely a good idea for personal projects, doing those things doesn't mean you're doing scrum.

Would love to see if anyone has a good & sustainable system by doing this in a notebook. My system is a small notebook, with 1 week “sprints”. Inspired a bit by bullet journal. A sprint section is the start/end date of the week, underlined. Unearneath are two columns - left is for important & urgent. Right is less important / less urgent. Within these two columns I free-list my todo’s, with a checkbox next to each. If I can think about it, sorting by importance/urgency, descending. As I go through the week, I add things, check stuff off, etc. At the end of week, I start a new week sprint. For not done items from previous week, I rewrite them into the new sprint. I try to order them but most important/urgent at top.

I’ve been doing this since 2015. Works great for me. Previously, I’d tried digital systems like Asana, Trello, text files, etc. In the end, I’d use them for awhile (or for part of my life) then stop after 6 months. This one - for better or worse - has stuck. I’d love to hear about other peoples paper based systems like this. If nothing else, to iterate and improve!

Issues/gaps with my system I’d love to fix: How to handle personal vs work (1 book containing each? Or separate?). How to indicate size of effort? How to handle projects (grouping of tasks) vs free tasks? How to handle long term initiatives (e.g. “learn spanish”) in the same system? How to handle recurring tasks (e.g. call distant friend X every month)?

Screenshot of my notebook: https://imgur.com/a/XmOMR

I'm using a quite similar approach, a kanban board implemented as an org-mode agenda to manage both my personal and professional life.

I'm really happy with this method, as it's avoids overplanning and too many open tasks. Those were two pitfalls that I experienced using GTD.

Also, org is really flexible, so it's possible to implement a variety of workflows. And it has excellent facilities to put stuff quickly into your inbox: org-capture and org-protocol.