Month: June 2023

June 24, 2023

Greg Thomas

What Meetings do you Need?

Weekly meetings can be divided into two categories – ones where people need to hear from you and ones where you need to get something out of it. Sometimes they are one and the same, sometimes they aren’t. Team Status meetings where ten people give their updates, are meetings where someone needs to hear from you – you can try to automate it with an email or status report, but eventually, they want to hear your voice – that’s life – you’re never going to escape it. Then there are the meetings that you want to get something out of

June 23, 2023

Greg Thomas

Learn By Messing Up

You will mess up, that much is true. You can either learn from it or get mad at it, complain about it, wish that it never happened, or give up. Or, you can learn from it, you can figure out what you did wrong, and you can figure out a way to get better. “Masters” get mad when they mess up, but the learners, the ones that are learning for life, relish the chance to mess up and learn something new and grow from it.  

June 22, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Simple Timer

The simplest path to getting rid of distractions, focusing on the work you need to do, and feeling good about it afterward is right in front of you. Pick a time, start the timer and don’t stop until it beeps.

June 21, 2023

Greg Thomas

Where Agile Burndowns Break

We all aim for the lines to intersect on a Burndown, and if we’re doing it right they intersect in the middle. The goal of course is to start with what you work on and finish it by the end of your sprint. The problem with Burndown charts is that if you add work, they don’t change, the math is the same as any history says – you add more work to do in a short time frame, and some of it isn’t getting done without herculean efforts. But regardless, we run the burndown and spend all of 30 seconds

June 20, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Farmer’s Advice

If you want to reap the benefits in four months, you can’t start the week before, the month before, two months, or three months before. They’ve done the math, they know the equation, and there are no shortcuts, it’s a simple matter of working backward and starting from the date you want to deliver on. That’s the first part. The second part is doing the little bits, the daily tasks, each day, that will make the four-month journey possible. Miss a day, push out the date. Forget to water for a week, start over on some, and may you’ll make

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