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TL;DR ✨

A large goal becomes manageable when it is divided into an annual plan, shorter milestones, and small tasks that can actually be completed. This article adapts that idea from Scrum to personal planning without turning planning itself into a second job.

The practical workflow combines regular reviews, timeboxing, reminders, and habit tracking. The important part is not a single “perfect” application, but a simple system that is easy to return to every day.

Setting and Achieving Goals Through Daily Routines¶

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

✨ Lewis Carroll¶

✨ 🚀 Introduction¶

This article discusses the process of creating a personal workflow through a system of regular repetition and habits. It draws inspiration from Scrum and then applies that process to a specific example with practical illustrations. Finally, it shows a computer-based workflow for selected routines using selected tools.

This topic deserves a brief, broader introduction. Unfortunately, details concerning related peripheral information are beyond the scope of this article and may perhaps receive a separate treatise sometime in the future.

Everyone has a set of internal values, a kind of constitution defining what is and is not a priority in life. This constitution is the fundamental criterion that defines goals. Those goals are then planned over specific intervals and pursued gradually.

This article focuses specifically on the process of setting and achieving goals through routines, skipping the part about the internal constitution.

✨ 🔁 The Scrum Process in Practice¶

To gain a basic understanding of the subject, the article uses two specific pieces of information from Scrum:

Scrum lifecycle1
Scrum agile process2

✨ 🔁 Scrum Lifecycle¶

The big picture of the entire process can be illustrated as follows:

It starts in the backlog, where the body of work accumulates. These activities are later planned for an iteration, a time-boxed interval. Before a sprint, which is a shorter interval than an iteration, a set of items from the backlog is planned in greater detail so that the activities can be clarified. A review is held at the end of the sprint, followed by a retrospective. The entire process then repeats again and again.

✨ 🔁 Scrum Process¶

Here is the high-level view from the Azure documentation. The following paragraphs describe it.

This is essentially a top-down process. The individual boxes differ in their time horizons.

The process begins with the definition of a very long-term goal at a certain level of generality and abstraction. This may, for example, be a milestone. Its time horizon is usually several months or even years. The next unit is an epic. It is also long-term, but it already has defined goals and a specific period that usually spans several iterations. Individual features are then derived from epics. These are less general, more specific goals with a time boundary, usually corresponding to one iteration cycle (typically three months). Individual PBIs (product backlog items) are then defined from the features and assigned to specific sprints; within those sprints, work is performed on tasks.

✨ Examples:¶

✨ Milestone Example:¶

This is a very general milestone definition in which the goal is achieved by developing one software module. The milestone does not have defined objectives; it has a defined time frame from November 4, 2024, to January 31, 2025. The image shows that the milestone contains three epics.

✨ Epic Definition Example:¶

The epic inherits the milestone's time interval but makes it more specific. It defines what is to be achieved, meaning that it has defined goals and a more meaningful description. It usually has certain prerequisites, things that must be completed before work on the epic can begin.

✨ Feature Definition Example:¶

Continuing toward greater granularity, here is an example of a feature:

✨ PBI Example:¶

A PBI is more specific and focuses on one step toward fulfilling the objective of the feature.

✨ Task Example:¶

A task is the smallest unit whose time requirements can be estimated. It is relatively quick to complete and usually ends with a pull request and code review.

✨ 🔁 Deriving Units Inspired by Scrum for Personal Development¶

The entire Scrum crash course has a single purpose: to serve as inspiration for achieving personal goals. Applying the Scrum process to personal growth and development reveals many analogies and similarities. The following sections examine them.

✨ 🔁 Scrum Process Analogy¶

When the Scrum process is viewed at a more general level, it produces the following table:

Scrum item	General description	Relationship to personal development
Milestone	Full-year definition of goals	Planning the following year once a year.
Epic / Feature	Merged into one unit: a bounded interval defining what is to be achieved.	An interval during which a particular goal is to be achieved.
PBI / Task	Individual steps toward achievement, with a metric (time boundary).	Tasks (in Reminders) and events (in the calendar).

✨ 🔁 Scrum Lifecycle Analogy¶

The Scrum lifecycle also provides inspiration for defining planning activities used in personal development:

Scrum item	General description	Relationship to personal development
Product backlog	Activities in the backlog waiting to be planned	New tasks that emerge over time.
IP planning	Planning an iteration.	Annual planning.
Sprint planning.	Planning a sprint.	Weekly planning.
Daily scrum.	Daily stand-ups.	Daily planning.
Retrospective.	Looking back.	Reviewing what happened during the previous week.

✨ 💼 Organizing the Work¶

✨ Annual Planning¶

Annual planning takes place once a year, usually around Christmas. Yes, these are typical New Year's resolutions, but they are not particularly useful unless they are sufficiently specific.

Annual planning also requires an understanding of one's own internal values.

One very useful tool for an annual retrospective and personal development planning is YearCompass.

This reflection, which may take several days, produces a concept covering different areas of life. Such areas include:

✨ 1. Work¶

Travel
Education/career development
Friends/family
Health

✨ 6. Mental development¶

For inspiration, the general structure of an annual plan might look like this:

Plan for 2025

Overall vision for 2025

> definition of the general vision (similar to a milestone definition).

Context X:

- [ ] Goal 1: Similar to an epic/feature definition.
* Implementation steps:
    * Step 1: Similar to a PBI/task.
    * Step 2: Similar to a PBI/task.
    * Step 3: Similar to a PBI/task.
* Evaluation metrics:
    * Metric 1: Similar to a PBI/task, but an extract of the goal definition expressed as a metric.
    * Metric 2: Similar to a PBI/task, but an extract of the goal definition expressed as a metric.

A specific example of a fictional plan:

Plan for 2025

Overall vision for 2025

> Overall, the author wishes to become wealthier, improve his physical fitness, and develop his career. As a result of these efforts, he wants to end the year owning another rental property and having expanded his company with additional employees by completing studies that will create new work opportunities as a by-product of the effort. In terms of health, he will train more to improve his immunity, which will help him take a break from work and ensure better cognitive function.

Challenge for 2025: "Not to drink a single glass of wine."

Example for the work context:

- [ ]   G1: Release project X
* Implementation steps:
    * S1: Produce a website and release it to the public on June 30, 2025.
    * S2: Distribute information about the project using tools such as PPC.
    * S3: Find at least three clients who would be suitable users of the product.
* Evaluation metrics:
    * M1: Website launched on June 30, 2025.
    * M2: At least three clients acquired by the end of 2025.
        * One client by August 2025.
        * Another client by October 2025.
        * The final client by December 2025.

In this way, a plan and its goals are established at the beginning of the year, moving from the general to the specific. It is helpful for the goals to be "SMART":

S - Specific.

M - Measurable.

A - Achievable.

R - Relevant.

T - Time-bound.

It is useful to visualize the goals in each context in a simple table together with their milestones. This is essentially an annual roadmap, or a personal delivery plan.! It is also practical to transform these goals into tasks, for example. That makes them easier to work with during weekly planning.!

✨ Monthly and Weekly Planning¶

Monthly planning is optional, and each reader must decide whether it makes sense to do it. Because the author excludes monthly activities and limits his process to weekly ones, the following section describes weekly planning.

For inspiration, the structure of a weekly plan might look like this:!

✨ Daily Planning Review¶

Takes place daily.
Its purpose is to plan a specific day.
It involves going through items from various inboxes, checking new events that arrived during the day, planning them or responding to changes that occurred, and fine-tuning the day's plan.

✨ Daily Retrospective¶

Takes place daily.
Its purpose is to look back and see what needs tidying up, where something needs to be revisited, or whether any follow-up tasks need to be created.

✨ Weekly Planning¶

Takes place weekly.
Establishes the plan for the following week.
The annual planning roadmap is always taken into account so that the plan remains aligned with the goals defined for that year.
Activities are prioritized, usually according to the roadmap for the year, which should have the highest priority.

✨ Weekly Retrospective¶

Takes place weekly.
Its purpose is to recap the entire week.
It evaluates what was good and what was not, what succeeded and what failed, and adapts the weekly planning accordingly.

✨ Monthly Planning¶

May or may not take place, depending on the reader's preference.
Its purpose is to align the annual plan with reality. After all, people propose, but circumstances dispose.

One article that may inspire a more detailed adaptation of this cycle is Daniel Gamrot's blog post. His material on weekly routines also provided the author with some inspiration for introducing the process described above. Everyone's flow is individual and specific, and it is impossible to write a single, comprehensive recipe that works for everyone. Inspiration from others can be very helpful when creating a working flow.

✨ Workflow in Daily Practice¶

To understand this section, three terms must first be defined:

✨ 1. Task¶

Event
Timeboxing

✨ A Task¶

Is an activity that is not time-bound, or whose time boundary is difficult to define.

Examples:

Call [Mr. K] on January 28, 2025, at around 9:00 a.m.
Buy carrots at the store [when at the store], with no date specified.

For the task-list model, this article demonstrates the available options in Apple's ecosystem using the Reminders application.

Reminders can be organized in different ways, depending on each reader's preference. As inspiration, the author provides an example of his own Reminders setup. It contains three lists:

Delegated (for checking work that he has delegated to someone else).
2025 (for the 2025 plan and its goals).
Inbox (the main list).

The Inbox list is divided into five categories:

Planned (for scheduled items).
Important for long term but waiting (something long-term that is waiting for another event).
Periodic (activities that recur regularly each month).
Someday/maybe (events that he might look at sometime when he has a free moment or feels like it).
Others (everything not classified elsewhere, meaning the main inbox where everything new arrives).

✨ An Event¶

Is an activity that has a defined time boundary.

Example:

Meeting from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in Prague at address X on January 1, 2025.

For events, the available options are demonstrated using the Calendar application on iOS. Calendar organization is an individual choice. Some people prefer Google services, some prefer Apple services, and others use different tools. There are many alternatives. What matters is having one place where all calendars are consolidated.

Timeboxing

Is the process of assigning an activity a specific time slot and then working on it. In other words, tasks are entered into the calendar when they have a clear time boundary.

Example:

Complete payroll-record processing tasks from 8:00 to 8:30 a.m. on January 15, 2025.

The concepts of a task and an event are often mixed together, which causes confusion during planning.

✨ Weekly Planning Process¶

The main inputs are:

A roadmap containing the goals for 2025.
Reminders.
Depending on individual preferences, other inboxes as well, such as a ticketing system or a project module in another piece of software.

The process begins by aligning the annual goals. The author goes through them, reviews how their completion is progressing, and, if necessary, aligns long-term goals with reality.

A plan for the following week can then be created from these inboxes. For example, the plan can be established by taking the set of new requirements and allocating slots for them in the following week's calendar through timeboxing. Here is an example of how the calendar allocation looks for one of the sample long-term personal goals in the health category:

Sauna
Gym

The screenshot also shows an example of timeboxing for completing a thesis, followed by individual daily and weekly routines.! In this way, every time-bound task from the "Others" category in Reminders is transformed into an event. The task can then either be:

Deleted.
Renamed so that it matches the corresponding calendar event and moved to "Planned."

✨ Daily Planning Process¶

At the beginning of the day, the author first checks how well the weekly plan matches reality. Things often have a tendency to become completely disrupted and rearranged within a single day. If everything still fits, he checks the inboxes for anything new.

The inboxes may be different from or identical to those used for weekly planning. Here are some additional examples of inboxes beyond those used for weekly planning:

Email inboxes.
Items from Reminders.
Notes from Notes.
Incoming material from communication channels (Slack, MS Teams, Obsidian).
A ticketing system, project module, or other inputs can again be included.

These inboxes produce a list of matters to handle that day. New activities are categorized and planned.

Does everything look all right? Then it is time to get to work.

✨ Example of a Typical Random-Task Scenario¶

The following is a typical personal-workflow problem during daily planning that almost everyone struggles with.

Suppose the day starts at 8:00 a.m. and a plan is set for the entire day. At 10:00 a.m., an event occurs, such as an urgent phone call, announcing that something is extremely pressing and needs to be resolved so quickly that yesterday would already have been too late. How should this be handled? Naturally, events differ and the context matters. Someone contractually obligated to provide help-desk support and frequently handle operations is in a completely different situation from a freelance software developer who can balance his time more freely. Unless infrastructure serving clients in South America has just gone down, new requests can be handled efficiently. The following takes a broader view of this very common process:! At the beginning of the day, a plan is made for that day. New activities that need to be handled often appear after daily planning. The following sample recipe shows how a new activity can be processed:

Is the new activity urgent for the person requesting it? Or is it merely something that occurred to the other party and needs to be passed on in the hope that it will not be forgotten?
- If the activity is not urgent for the author either, he places it in the Reminders inbox with a low-priority tag and looks at it during weekly planning.
- If the activity is urgent, he continues to the next question.
Is the activity also urgent for the author? In other words, is it a request that, if not completed quickly enough, would harm the achievement of his annual goals, contractual obligations, reputation, and so on?
- If not, it again goes into the weekly plan with a low-priority tag, and perhaps the problem will resolve itself after a few days or a solution will be found another way.
- If it is also urgent for the author, he continues to the next question.
Can it be resolved within five minutes?
- If so, he resolves it immediately.
- If not, it goes into the inbox with a high-priority tag and is planned and processed first thing the following morning, unless it is so urgent that it must be resolved immediately.

✨ Example of a Typical Random Event Conflicting With Internal Values¶

A typical problem occurs when, for example, a sauna session is planned for Thursday afternoon and someone unexpectedly calls to say that they have a concert ticket. How should such a dilemma be handled?

In theory, it is very simple.

The author consults his internal values and looks at their ranking and order. Which has the higher priority?

?? Health or friends ??

If health is the higher internal priority, he declines the concert.

If friends are the higher internal value, he changes the plan and goes to the concert.

Naturally, this hypothetical example does not fully reflect reality.

In practice, it is always a mixture of many values.

The invitation to the concert might come from a very attractive woman. [internal value: relationships].
The invitation might be free 🙂 [internal value: finances].
A friend from far away whom the author has not seen for a long time might have contacted him, making such a shared activity very welcome. [internal value: friendship].

✨ Daily Review Process¶

The daily review takes place once a day, usually at the end of it. It can be used for various situations, including:

Tidying up files and other clutter after a full day of work.
Extracting and processing notes from meetings.
Briefly looking back over the entire day and evaluating how it went.
Tidying up or clarifying newly arrived items in Reminders.
Fine-tuning meetings for the following day or days.
Organizing notes in the Zettelkasten.

✨ Weekly Review Process¶

The weekly review process is similar to the daily review, except that it examines the entire week from a broader perspective and evaluates how much the author's activities are bringing him closer to achieving his annual goals.

✨ Computer Workflow Using Tools for Building Routines¶

An earlier article about organizing a workspace for an ordinary Joe discussed arranging monitors for different contexts. This article now expands that knowledge slightly with another interesting insight based on routines.

Suppose the annual goals define the following regular activities:

Read for at least 30 minutes every day.
Work on a doctoral thesis for at least one hour every week.
Spend at least 20 minutes every week learning something new, for example on Udemy.

The routines are already established, weekly planning is performed every week, and the events are timeboxed in the calendar.

Two tools can be used to support this workflow on a computer:

✨ Streaks ¶

This is an application for building habits. It is essentially a TODO list with a setup similar to one that can be created in Reminders.

The main advantages of Streaks are:

At a defined extended interval, it sends a notification so that an activity can be performed. It does not have to be tied to a specific day; something may simply need to be done once a week.! It can visualize habit development and completion over time! It displays completion in a calendar view! One useful feature is that the application is available on all devices in the Apple ecosystem. KPIs for carrying out different routines can therefore be configured as widgets on whichever devices are preferred.

Here is an example of the three routines defined above, based on personal goals for 2025:!

✨ Workspaces ¶

The application is used to create a general category-based group containing all relevant resources needed for an activity.! Here is an illustrative video showing exactly how the application works.

✨ Example Combining Streaks and Workspaces¶

The use of both applications will be demonstrated while building the habit of "reading for at least 30 minutes every day."

The process is simple:

Set a specific recurring time for reading in the calendar, for example once a day from Monday to Thursday, or every night before bed from 8:00 to 8:30 p.m.
Configure a workspace that opens the relevant applications when reading.
Start the timer in Streaks while reading.
Follow the routine.

✨ Here Is a Screenshot of Timeboxing in the Calendar:!¶

This is what the configuration of the relevant applications in Workspaces looks like when starting a reading session:!

🔍 And This Is How the Reading Timer Is Started:!¶

✅ 🏁 Conclusion¶

The article has sought to provide an inspiring example of a routine, with specific examples for greater clarity.