If you’re a busy professional, following a productivity system like GTD or the Pomodoro method seems like one of the most effective ways to sustain your productivity.
However, if you’re in a creative or leadership role, these systems can be extremely challenging to adopt because your work cannot always be divided into specific tasks and time increments.
If you struggle with traditional productivity management systems, the agile results method will likely work for you. It’s a goal-driven system that uses continuous improvement to ensure you’re always focused on the tasks that drive your success.
The system consists of five steps:
This article will walk you through how to implement each of these steps and suggests tools to implement it.
Coming up with three goals to focus on each month can be challenging so, agile results uses hot spots to focus your brainstorming. Hot spots are the areas of your work that are most important to you. They can be long-term projects, KPIs, responsibilities etc. that play a huge role in your success.
Limit your hot spots to three to five areas that directly contribute to your goals for the next one to five years.
Here’s an example that a department leader might have:
All of these hot spots are specific so that it’s easy to create measurable monthly and weekly goals. Once you’ve picked your hot spots, choose three results to focus on each month that directly contribute to them.
The results you choose should be broad enough to inform all of your weekly and daily goals.
Using your monthly goals, map out three projects you need to complete each week to achieve them. Setting weekly priorities makes larger goals more achievable and ensures you stay focused on the right activities.
To be effective, your goals must be:
Depending on how dynamic your schedule is, you can choose all of your weekly goals at the beginning of the month or at the beginning of each week. The latter option allows you to shift your priorities based on your progress the previous week, new information you gain, and other occurrences that may influence your ability to achieve your monthly goals.
Weekly goals give you focus, however, it’s easy to get so busy putting out fires and dealing with miscellaneous responsibilities that, by the end of the week, you haven’t made much progress.
To avoid this, the agile results method recommends choosing three tasks each day that directly contribute to your goals. The tasks can be small, as long as they enable you to achieve your three weekly priorities.
Not only does completing daily results-oriented tasks boost your productivity, it’s also a great motivator. Leaving work every day knowing that you’ve accomplished something significant lets you experience sustained satisfaction in making progress toward your goals.
If you regularly fail to complete your daily results, be honest with yourself and determine if you’re not finishing them because they’re too ambitious or if you’re not setting aside enough time.
If it’s the former, reevaluate how realistic your monthly and weekly goals are and adjust them accordingly. However, if it’s the latter, block out some time on your calendar each day to work on achieving that week’s results.
If your schedule is full, use often underutilized times, such as between meetings, gaps before or after lunch, the first hour in the office, or other times specific to your schedule.
Continuous improvement is a core value of the agile methodology. To ensure that you’re focused on the right projects, you need to constantly reflect on your progress and assess if you’re tracking to reach your goals. If you’re keen to deepen your understanding of agile principles and techniques, exploring Agile Certification Courses can provide valuable insights and frameworks to enhance your reflection practices.
Research shows that people who frequently reflect on what they learn at work perform an average of 23% better than those who don’t. This performance boost exists because engaging in reflection enables you to frequently pivot your approaches and drive better outcomes.
Here are some questions to drive your Friday reflections:
Your goal for your Friday reflections is to identify ways to improve the following week. So, you should be deeply critical about what you’ve accomplished in order to learn as much as possible.
Read More: How to Use Continuous Improvement to Catalyze Success
Since the agile results system is based on achieving progressive goals, falling behind on just a couple of weekly tasks can prevent you from achieving your goals.
One of the most effective ways to stay on track is to tackle your hardest projects first. According to the American Psychological Association, willpower is a limited resource and, as time goes on, you’re increasingly likely to avoid difficult tasks and give in to distractions.
To prevent a lack of willpower from hindering your progress, you need to:
Completing your highest priority tasks as early as possible increases the likelihood of consistently achieving the results you need to reach your long-term goals.
Using the agile results system, you can reliably achieve all of your long—and short-term goals without the logistical and time burden of mapping out your entire day.
If you’ve decided to give the agile results system a try, the first step is setting it up. Below, I've explained how to do so using three different tools.
I’ve found that Kanban tools like Trello and Monday the easiest way to implement the agile results system since it allows you easily see your monthly, weekly, and daily goals in one place.
At the start of every month, I review my team’s quarterly goals (my hot spots) and use them to choose my monthly results. Then, every Sunday night or Monday morning, I choose my three weekly goals and fifteen daily tasks. Choosing all of my daily tasks gives me the flexibility to choose which ones I complete each day based on my bandwidth.
However, if you prefer more structure, you can pick which tasks get completed each day at the same time that you choose your weekly goals. If you do this, you can add daily due dates to the cards.
To track my progress, I label each of the cards with red (not started), yellow (started), and green (complete).
Learn more: Trello vs. Microsoft Planner
If you don’t use Trello, you can adopt the agile results system using your calendar app. Here’s how to track your results:
If your calendar has other features, you can customize these steps to make your goals look more organized and/or to track your progress.
If you want advanced features, such as being sent reminders, tracking progress over multiple months, or tracking milestones (such as x weeks of successful goal completion), you may want to use a goal-tracking app like Strides or GoalsOnTrack.
Since the features vary depending on which one you choose, the key to using them is to start by setting up your monthly, weekly, and daily results. Once that’s done, enable any other features that will help you be successful.