Symbols, rituals, focus

Friday 3 January 2025 at 11:00 CET

Squirrels don’t care what year it is.

Neither do trees, rocks, sandwiches or planets.

Humans are special. We care about symbols. The Gregorian calendar is made up by us, and we give it meaning and importance.

So, as is traditional, my partner and I have resolved to get off our butts and start moving again.

The rings everlasting

My partner said something profound to me this morning.

She asked me if I’d “closed my rings” yesterday.

To those of you who are not neck-deep in the Apple cult ecosystem, this may be meaningless. Allow me to explain. The Apple Watch (which, like all Apple devices, does not come with a definite article, but has been gifted one by yours truly) allows you to set rudimentary daily goals, which it expresses as “rings”. There’s a red one for calories, a green one for minutes “exercised” (it has a loose, but workable definition of “exercise”) and a blue one for standing, which is entirely useless to me but not optional.

So when my partner asked if I’d closed my rings, I was proud to tell her that I did. And I asked her the same question.

Her reply surprised me, in a good way. She said something like, “no, but I don’t care.”

And then she proceeded to get ready for a run, bribe the toddler to allow her to leave, and sprint out the door as soon as the aforementioned sproglet’s back was turned.

We’ve both struggled with streaks: once the streak is broken, we give up. But here was something new: she’d just told me that despite our Resolutions™, she’d immediately broken one, decided it didn’t matter, and resumed it.

It got me thinking about Scrum, of all things.

Scrum’s best feature

You may be familiar with Scrum. On balance, I think the best thing to express is “I’m sorry for your suffering”, because it turns out that most of the people who’ve been exposed to Scrum (or another “Agile framework”) have actually been subject to various re-enactments of Kafka’s The Trial. But, as the apologists are incredibly quick to point out, that’s not really Scrum.

Scrum isn’t much, to be honest. It’s less of a “framework” and more of a set of somewhat-useful roles and practices. It is in no way a complete methodology for running an organisation; intentionally so.

And at its heart are a set of rituals.

There’s the much-derided daily standup, of course, but I’m more interested right now in two others: planning and the retrospective.

Scrum doesn’t define the length of an iteration. (It calls them “sprints”, but the less said about that, the better.) It’s up to you. Maybe 1 week, maybe 2, possibly 4, probably not 8. And what it means is how often you hold your planning and retrospective. Typically, the former is at the start of an iteration, and the latter is at the end.

In planning, you plan the work for the upcoming iteration. You look ahead for a bit. Possibly beyond the end, but not too far.

In the retrospective, you reflect on the iteration as it ends.

Together, these two rituals take around 5–10% of the working iteration.

And the rest of the time, the other 90–95%, you don’t look forward or backwards. You focus on right now.

By coalescing the acts of looking forward and backward, Scrum allows us to not do that the rest of the time, giving us the gift of focus.

Resolutions broken, and resolutions forgotten

It’s easy to think of a resolution as something that you must commit to, hold, and never waver from. But we are not computers, we are humans, and that’s not how we work.

We might skip a day of exercise (or writing, or abstinence, or whatever) because we’re unwell, or we’re tired, or we just plain forgot. And then it’s easy, perhaps natural, to beat ourselves up about it. We look into the past, judge ourselves, and find ourselves lacking.

Scrum has something interesting to teach us: that there is a time and a place for looking forwards, and another for looking backwards. And the rest of the time, well, it’s about doing the job.

I must confess: there’s one amazing feature around those rings. Every day at midnight, they reset to zero. You can choose to look back, but by default, you see your progress for today. “Yesterday is not important”, they suggest.

By recalling yesterday, saying “yes, that happened”, and then moving on with our work, it allows us to be free of the crushing expectations we set for ourselves. “I resolve to exercise every day” is, well, pretty inhuman (for most of us). But “I choose to exercise today”… that’s generous.

And then we repeat it, again and again and again. If we miss one, who cares? That was yesterday. Today we can choose again.

Every now and again, perhaps on a Sunday morning over coffee, we look back, and look forward, and adjust.

The rest of the time, well, let’s do what we can.