I've been doing this for some weeks now and I've been pushing back answering one pretty essential question:

Why?

What does success look like for living a scrumlife? What does success look like for Scrumlife.fi the blog? How can I measure these things and what are the hypotheses I want to test?

Answering the first question is easier. What does living a great scrumlife look like?

But seriously, I'm not really that worked about how life itself is going to go. It'll be fine.

However, the problem with life management systems is that it's pretty hard to know the opportunity costs on how things would have worked out otherwise: if I didn't have this great system, would I have been able to achieve this nice thing? If I hadn't spent all my energy blogging about Scrum, would I have already written two international bestsellers?

Hard to say.

One actual goal I have is to increase intentionality and my ability to react to situations in a sensible way. I feel that using Scrum gives me great tools to do just that.

I don't really plan things in general. I just want to do something and see where that takes me. Scrum is a brilliant framework to do that. It lets me just wing it, but also keeps me focused and iterating and inspecting the results. Keeps me accountable. If I stick with the process I should probably end up somewhere where I actually do want to end up a bit more probably than if I wouldn't think about anything at all.

Second question takes a bit more thinking. How do I measure the success of this blog project? What is the value I'm trying to deliver by releasing these blog posts?

I will have to split that into two parts: delivering value for me and value for others.

The value for myself is easier. I want to have a positive feedback loop for doing the thing. If I see people reading this blog, I'm encouraged to keep writing it. Writing it directly feeds into how much I learn and how much actual benefit I can gain by using Scrum to manage my life. This blog also hopefully works as an addition to my portfolio and CV: "This guy sure seems to know his Scrum, let's hire him for contract work "etc.

The more interesting question is what value I'm trying to provide for you readers. Hopefully this isn't a completely solipsistic exercise of navel gazing but actually does provide some value for you guys too.

The first thing I try to provide is a new angle to thinking about Scrum. We all know Scrum, but maybe looking at it from a new and surprising angle highlights some stuff that might not be obvious from where you are at. Maybe the Scrum you see and live with could be shaken up a bit. Maybe there are things that are not working for you at the moment but could be tweaked or you could get excited about them if you see them work in a different setting.

We all also don't know Scrum. Maybe you do some other form of agile or then you have no idea what any of this is about at all. In that case maybe this blog can work as an introduction to Scrum, its terminology, its ceremonies and the thinking behind it. For that reason I already wrote a small primer on what Scrum is all about. I really feel that if someone new gets to learn about Scrum and gets interested about it, it is a net positive for the world. Scrum is such an interesting and effective framework.

Finally, I hope that this blog will be an inspiration to try out some other wild combinations. I really enjoy experiments like the old Year of Productivity blog or the Theme system by the Cortex guys, so if combining Scrum and life management inspires anyone to combine something else in a new way, I'd be delighted to hear about it. Combining agile or Scrum for renovations etc. has already been done, but have you heard about anything new or can you think up any other potentially fun combos?

Anyways, now I guess I just need to think up how to measure these things and what will I count as a success. Might need a second post to handle all that...