Discussion on: The Power of the TODO List

[Jan Wedel]

This sounds exactly how we work in a scrum team with the agile board of Jira.

• You see what you need to do
• the Done column motivates you
• you have the additional "scope change" indicator that allows you to tell the management why you're late ;)
• Each task has little dots for every day in one state that shows that this is too big or has some unresolved dependencies.
• no text files :)

[James Hood]

Good observation! It really is very much like a personal agile process. I'd say it's more like Kanban than Scrum though. However a team scrum/Kanban board is no substitute for keeping this personal TODO list. Especially as your career advances, I find there's a lot that goes on the TODO list that wouldn't normally end up on the scrum board, e.g., mentoring, interviews, talks, etc. Also, never underestimate the power of text files! They are by far the lowest friction medium I've found. It's always faster to edit a text file than to update even the fastest scrum or Kanban UI. There are downsides of course and the post is about the method/practice rather than the specific medium used.