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Everyone deals with procrastination. Scientists have conducted a lot of studies in order to understand the reasons why people procrastinate in the first place and help them overcome those reasons. The results of such studies could help us eliminate procrastination altogether. Some do help, undoubtedly, but we are still facing it.
In the meantime, we are looking for the best ways to keep ourselves focused on our tasks. How? There are a lot of strategies and solutions that can help us manage workload effectively. One such solution that can banish procrastination for good is the Scrum methodology.
Scrum in a glance: What is it and how can it help?
Scrum methodology is a set of values, principles, and practices that can help you achieve more in a shorter amount of time. This is done by making sure that each and every task you have is small enough to be completed successfully.
Then, these tasks are inspected and adapted to suit the needs of a project, minimizing the risks of not completing these tasks properly. This cycle repeats until everything is finished. Sounds great, right?
1. What are the benefits of using Scrum?
There have been many reports (such as KPMG Global Agile Survey 2019) on how Scrum influences businesses that use it. Some of the benefits that are mentioned frequently include increased employee morale because employees have enough time to complete tasks every day and collaboration is highly encouraged.
With over 68%, as shown in the research, organisations state faster product delivery as one of the key drivers for adopting Agile methodology, which means the teams are building better quality products. Since inspecting and adapting is used all the time, and project control is increased, as corrections can effectively be made whenever it is necessary, customer satisfaction is 42%.
“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” – Pablo Picasso
2. How can Scrum banish procrastination at work?
As mentioned, fear is one of the most common causes of procrastination. You may be afraid you don’t have enough skills or competence to complete a big task, which can lead to postponing working on it.
There are many ways in which Scrum can help you stop procrastinating at work, from allowing you to build up your confidence to making you feel like you are part of the team.
3. Scrum principles and methods encourage the benefits of short-term efforts
The fact is that our brain finds it more difficult to process abstract things. Anything and everything that is yet to be shown or seen or has any inclination towards the future, creates a struggle. In a word, we find it difficult to commit to long-term efforts. Scientists call this present bias.
Scrum methods allow us to rebalance the benefits by creating a set of smaller tasks that one can complete. By doing so, the action and the reward for doing a pestering task feels larger than the struggle of tackling it.
For example, you have a task to design an entire website (which has several dozens of different pages) – that would take you weeks! However, if you separate this task into smaller chunks, and you go on to design a Contact page one day, About us the other and so on – you will not only boost your productivity, but you will also feel much better about your skills.
4. Scrum helps you to organize activities and work on tasks that you don’t find interesting
Let’s say you have to complete a task that is boring or repetitive. You avoid doing it and you keep postponing it until the very last minute.
Since Scrum promotes collaboration and a sense of unity (because everyone is working towards the same goal), just by having this mindset of you being a partner with everyone else in the team can do wonders.
You will change your perception towards these kinds of tasks and you may even start finding exciting ways to complete them, who knows.
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” – Abraham Lincoln
5. Scrum helps you pre-commit and perform what you preach
Scrum methods are created for the teams and teamwork. Together with a Scrum Master, the team determines the difficulty of the tasks and agrees on many action steps. This allows a person to add social benefits to certain actions and activities and follow through on a promise.
Brain’s reward system is highly responsive to social life and it matters greatly what other people think, even strangers. Procrastination is a self-sabotaging behavior that can lead to wasted time, increased stress and poorer work performance. Telling another person you will do something can propel the action of doing it, and Scrum methodology empowers such social commitment.
Ready, set, inspect and adapt
All the points listed above are crucial steps if you want to deal with the biggest obstacles that prevent you from achieving your full potential so you can boost your productivity and banish procrastination.
Do your research about Scrum and think about implementing it at work. Trust me, it will do wonders for your productivity.