update, Feb 18th, 2024 - since writing this post, I started developing www.merini.io, a tool that mixes the best of paper and physical scrum boards with the digital. I still practice a form of personal scrum, but I'm no longer using sticky notes or Trello, as mentioned in this blog post. I've been working on getting offline more often and for me, that also meant moving some of my favorite tools offline. I've been using www.trello.com as a SCRUM/Kanban board for a while and really enjoying the customizability of it's workflows, but every time I logged on, it required using the internet and invited distraction. I've been using the offline board for several weeks and I really love it. There's something about physically writing and moving the sticky notes that helps me mentally process them in a way that's more effective than typing. Brief Intro to SCRUM Agile and SCRUM processes have become really popular for managing software teams in the last decade or two and I've been adapting it to my own work style. I prefer it to a pure to-do list because it better reflects the psychology of how I do my work. There are easily googleable articles that go into more detail, but in short, the process is as follows. Make a list of everything to do. Make a sublist of what you'll do in the next given time period. (Usually between a full day and 6 weeks.) Do it. Don't work on anything that's not on your sublist. At the end of the given time period, evaluate how things went, and make a new sublist for the next time period. My Workflow For my personal workflow, I use more of a
