In the few years I have known David Anderson, I've always been relieved by his self-effacing finger waggling. He is so much better at it than I. In this post he reminds us, again, that agile thinking isn't merely relegated to the office. And that agile requires you to put your own ideas in motion.
He also reminds us that, as with Agile, life is usually more deadline driven than it is budget driven. Successful people in life figure out how much they can get done in a period of time and they strive for that. No more, no less. You miss the deadlines and you miss the opportunities. The trick is ... we get to choose our opportunities.
Good Agile managers also understand that there is overhead, competing interests and other factors that impact the number of "ideal working hours" a person has. An Ideal Working Hour is the number of hours it will take to do the actual work of a particular task. An 8 hour project is rarely completable in one standard work day.
Life is also important, even beyond Valentine's day. Figure into schedules other elements of life and be tolerant when they come up. Other elements of life often need to tolerate work's sometimes demanding schedules.
In the end, agility always requires balance.
And when I meet up with my wife and she grills me for hours about every detail of what I did that day and provides me with every detail of her's ... that's our standup meeting.
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