Scrumify Your Health: Sprint 3

The one with all the sleeping

Coming off of Sprint 2, which was about feeling more energetic, I understood that I needed to improve my sleep in order to have more energy at the beginning of my day.

So for Sprint 3, my goal was to get an excellent night of sleep. This meant trying to standardize my bedtimes and waking times to create a more reliable circadian rhythm, and adopt other practices that would help the quality of my sleep increase.

You’ll notice I started to have a lot of carry-over items from the previous Sprint, and I think this is pretty unavoidable. Since we’re not dealing with many one-time tasks but rather habits we want to build, the same activity has to be completed over and over, even if it runs into another Sprint.

My new habits were mostly about getting to bed on time, getting up at the same time every morning, and reducing my stress level before going to sleep. My new self-imposed bedtime was quite early at 10pm, but it was necessary since I wanted to get up at 6am and have an hour of peace before my daughter had to get up for the mad dash getting ready for school.

You can see here that my daily metrics expanded, as I needed to track my sleep each day to see if I was making progress (and to ensure that how rested I felt actually aligned with what my smartwatch told me).

In terms of how I felt… well, I felt really good! Getting to bed early really did give me more energy when I woke up, and I could feel it in the mornings.

Later in the week, I felt I had more capacity to improve things further, and found some tips for better sleep. The most doable were definitely to stop drinking water well before bed, and to go to the bathroom right before sleeping. And indeed, by the end of the week even my watch agreed that I was sleeping better, and registered its first “Excellent” score.

Halfway through the week, I pulled a muscle in my back while working out and had to back off my workouts for the rest of the Sprint. This was definitely top of mind for what I might need to focus on in the next Sprint, as my own muscles turned into a dependency I had to manage.

The Sprint Review has become a great opportunity to look at the big picture, as more data starts to show up in the graphs over time. I’m getting better views of how my saturated fat consumption actually pans out, and I’m able to draw clear correlations in both directions between stress and sleep.

I had assumed that improving my sleep would reduce my stress the next day, but it’s even more clear that following a day with low stress, my sleep is much better.

And as the number of data points I’m collecting has gone up, I shifted the daily metrics to be part of the Daily Scrum, which removes some of the weight from the Sprint Review.

It’s nice to see the framework adjusting to fit the work and the constraints.

Next Sprint, I’ll have to deal with that pulled muscle dependency.