Agile metaphor: Creating an Agile Board for books you read

Creating an Agile Board for books you read

I sat and thought how can I use Agile in my everyday life. I do a lot of reading so I decided to create a an Agile scrum board of the books that I'm reading. My sprints are scheduled for one month at a time. What I've found by using Agile scrum boards is it helps me to see how many books I'll be able to read in a month. With this approach I can look at the books length and determine how many I can read for that month. The new books that I purchase I place those books in the backlog. I will then prioritize those books based on my reading priority. I've found by doing this I'm much more focused on the books that I'm reading.

One thing I've started to do is creating Agile T-shirt sizes based on the size of a book and determine how many books I can complete in a month based on T-shirt sizes.  In Agile T-Shirt sizing you pick out the size of the book based on the length of the book. Here's how I'm doing my T-shirt sizes.
• Small – 50 Pages or less
• Medium – 100–200 pages
• Large – 200-300 pages
• X-Large – 300-400 pages
• XX-Large – 400 pages or more

Over a period of time I've determined my velocity by realizing that I can read about 600 pages per month. So in terms of T-shirt sizes it means that I can read two large books, three medium books or 12 small books per month. Or a combination of different sizes that equal 600 pages. By doing this I can be much more selective of the books I read. I believe just like in Agile software development I'll be able to increase my velocity over time. Not only does this work for books you can also setup a board for your daily tasks as well. Below is what my book reading Agile scrum board looks like:

I'd like to encourage you to try using an Agile scrum board with something you're attempting in your daily life.