Scrumify Your Health: Sprint 2
The one that is all about the energy
In my first Sprint, I spent my energy on getting things set up and trying to figure out some structure and baselines for this experiment.
Now it was time to see if I could meet the goals that Jeff Sutherland tries for in his version of Scrum for health, namely increasing energy and reducing stress.
For Sprint 2, I decided to focus on retaining more energy throughout the day.
It was clear that energy and stress are inversely correlated, so I started by building some metrics that might help me identify my main causes of stress, with plans to use that information later to find ways to improve.
For actions I could take now, I considered things like starting to see a physical therapist again, better managing a contentious relationship with my ex, and trying to bring a meditation practice into my life. But in the end, the items that got done over the course of this Sprint were about staying conscious about what I was eating, preparing for predictable things that cause me stress when I do them last minute, taking walks and reading books more often, and getting regular exercise at a sustainable pace.
Note to readers: Images in these articles are clickable to view in a larger size. I highly recommend it, as each Sprint gets heavier and heavier in terms of data collected.
Through the week, I started tracking my food in an app on my phone. I’ve thought about doing this before, and I imagined it was going to be just awful. Having to measure all my food with a scale or a measuring cup before I eat it sounds so onerous, I knew I wouldn’t keep up with it if it was really difficult.
But I had an idea - I searched to see if there might be an AI that would allow you to just take a photo of your food and it would do all the logging for you. And apparently there is!
There are actually a few, and one of them is incorporated into MyFitnessPal - which also integrates with my Garmin software - so I decided to try that. You have to pay for the premium subscription for access to the AI, but almost any price would be right for me if this worked.
Unfortunately, for some reason MyFitnessPal was having some kind of error processing payments when I tried to sign up, so I decided to just log by hand for a little bit and try again later. But the experience of logging was actually not that bad. It’s a pain for the first few days, but if you have routines or certain foods you eat frequently, it actually just becomes easier and easier to log what you’ve already logged before.
So in the end, I never used the AI, and I don’t know how well it works, because I determined this wasn’t so bad logging manually. I did have to pay for a new kitchen scale (about $20) but I needed that anyway.
My daily actions wound up being pretty simple. Stretch my neck (where I have an injury already), take a walk for 20 minutes each day, and write down what I eat. This was definitely sustainable.
Even when I added going to the gym, I only wanted to go every other day and didn’t plan to lift too heavy at the beginning, so it was still pretty easy.
As I neared the end of the Sprint, my likely goal for the next Sprint was coming into view - improving my sleep. So I read up, found some action items I felt I could implement, and brought those in near the end of the week.
In Review, I collected lots of trend data from my Garmin watch and from MyFitnessPal. Here I could see how improving my sleep would likely have a positive effect on my stress and energy levels. I also noticed high stress and low energy levels by the end of workout days, and thought maybe I could have more energy through the day if I delayed my workout until the evening.
I also collected trend data I knew I would need for my other goals, like reducing my weight/BMI, and bringing my cholesterol levels down. I saw I was down 2kg already from my peak weight, but knew that this could potentially just be water weight and it comes off very fast in the beginning. As for cholesterol, I did some research to find that my major aggravators would be in saturated fats, so I have to be careful about how much of that I am consuming.
I did my Retro the morning of the day I started Sprint 3, so you can see I above that I already tried my experiment to move the gym time into the evening. It wound up completely ruining my sleep that night. I was going to need to find a new way to handle the high stress levels that followed gym sessions.
My main takeaway from this Retro was that items sit in Doing for a long time. It’s not because I’m not working on them, but rather because my Definition of Done says that new actions must be repeated for 7 days before considering them Done. The actions themselves take very little time when I do them, but they are in progress for a long time before I can really think of them as habits I’ve adopted.
As a result, there will often be no new task to complete for days at a time, because I just have to keep doing the ones I already started. I think respecting Work In Progress limits is still important, but this is more about sustainability than focus.
In the end, did I meet my Sprint Goal? (Reminder: it was “feel more energetic throughout the day.”) Well… maybe.
Using the Body Battery charts throughout the week, we can see that I have more days when I started with a very high energy score.
I also found some moments when I was able to recharge my battery without being asleep.
Further, I learned a lot about what causes my energy to deplete rapidly, so at least I could try to find some strategies to counteract it.
Come back next week, as I go into Sprint 3 with a focus on getting a good night’s sleep.