Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and Life

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Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and Life

by J.D. Meier, Michael Kropp (Foreword by)

3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 · rating details · 53 ratings · 19 reviews

In Getting Results the Agile Way, author J.D. Meier introduces Agile Results(r)-a simple system for meaningful results It's a systematic way to achieve both short- and long-term results in all aspects of your life-from work to fun. It offers just enough planning to get you going, but makes it easy to change your course as needed. It also provides fresh starts for your day,...more In Getting Results the Agile Way, author J.D. Meier introduces Agile Results(r)-a simple system for meaningful results It's a systematic way to achieve both short- and long-term results in all aspects of your life-from work to fun. It offers just enough planning to get you going, but makes it easy to change your course as needed. It also provides fresh starts for your day, week, month, and year. Even if you already use another time management system, Agile Results can supplement it to increase your impact and sense of fulfillment.In today's world, change happens quickly; learn how to be flexible and responsive to new opportunities. Don't just check off tons of stuff from your to-do list; do the things that make a difference. Stop trudging your way through life; bolster your energy with habits that will carry you forward each day. Quit sacrificing your personal life for your work life (or vice versa); give each facet of your life its due and find balance. In other words, learn the skills to go the distance in an ever-changing world.The beauty of Agile Results is that you don't have to adopt the entire system to see the benefits; just start with the following three basic tenets. First, adopt The Rule of 3 and you avoid being overwhelmed and become mindful of your results. Second, adopt the Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Refection pattern and you set the wheels in motion for weekly results while giving yourself a fresh start each day and each week. Third, set up boundaries for your Hot Spots and begin to experience work-life balance. When you're ready for more, flip through the chapters to learn how to use stories to design your day, week, month, and year; how to find your motivation; how to improve your productivity; and many more.Agile Results is a time-tested system that J.D. Meier has honed through his years at Microsoft: learning from some of the best minds, leading virtual teams, and mentoring people around the world. It is a system he can bet on time and again. This guide is the playbook for getting results that he wishes somebody had given to him so many years ago. Now, he's sharing it with yo(less)

Paperback, 272 pages

Published October 6th 2010 by Innovation Playhouse

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Dec 28, 2012 Erika RS rated it 3 of 5 stars

(Note: this review is based on an an online pre-print draft of the book.)

This book discusses a system for accomplishing things that focuses on "results" rather than "tasks". The idea is that by explicitly defining and regularly revisiting your top three results for the year, month, day, and week, you can make better decisions about what tasks you should do from moment to moment.

The core pattern that Meier presents is the "Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection" pattern. Using this...more (Note: this review is based on an an online pre-print draft of the book.)

This book discusses a system for accomplishing things that focuses on "results" rather than "tasks". The idea is that by explicitly defining and regularly revisiting your top three results for the year, month, day, and week, you can make better decisions about what tasks you should do from moment to moment.

The core pattern that Meier presents is the "Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection" pattern. Using this pattern, you focus your week by defining three results at the beginning of the week. Each day you define three results for that day. On Friday, you assess how well you did. You are free to change your key results for the day or week at any time, but you must do so intentionally.

This system has two key strengths. In systems that only focus on tasks, tasks can become stale without you knowing it. Setting goals daily and weekly allows you to keep your key results fresh.

The other strength of this system is that the weekly reflection encourages continual improvement. The reflection is more than just a time to see how many things you were able to check off. It is a time to determine which practices worked well or did not.

I have been using that pattern, and it is already helping me to be more effective. For example, I had one week where I had to be checking email frequently. I had another week where I did not. Now we all "know" that checking email frequently kills your productivity, but by choosing daily results and taking time to reflect on them I could really see the difference between the two weeks.

Thus, for me, the power of this system is that it forces me to regularly glance at the forest instead of focusing on the trees. Now, I honestly do not remember how much GTD emphasizes reflection, but I do know that what I got out of reading Allen's book was the lower level task management system. Sometime, I want to reread Allen's book and do a deeper comparison of the two systems. However, the aspects of the two systems that I currently use are wonderfully complementary. The way I use it, GTD helps me manage my input and answer the question "What could I do now?" Getting Results gives me a concrete way of answering the question "What should I do now?"(less)

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Aug 11, 2012 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars

My best friend is a person who is, to all appearances, effortlessly organized. When we were roommates in college, he was up early, finished his homework in a demanding scientific discipline (while studying Chinese on the side) before dinner, and went to bed promptly by 9:00 p.m. after a leisurely dinner and a couple of hours of science fiction. This book is not for him.

Being the opposite of my best friend on the organizational scale, much of my life has been spent on a journey to bring life into...more My best friend is a person who is, to all appearances, effortlessly organized. When we were roommates in college, he was up early, finished his homework in a demanding scientific discipline (while studying Chinese on the side) before dinner, and went to bed promptly by 9:00 p.m. after a leisurely dinner and a couple of hours of science fiction. This book is not for him.

Being the opposite of my best friend on the organizational scale, much of my life has been spent on a journey to bring life into focus and clean up my act. I am a modest, but not obsessive, consumer of organizational self-help books, from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow to David Allen's Getting Things Done to Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project.

J.D. Meier's Getting Results the Agile Way, based on his experience as a program manager at Microsoft, strikes me as a thoughtful and important contribution to the genre. Meier does not despise the minutiae of task management, but he attempts to transcend it. His emphasis is on identifying measurable goals, working toward them systematically, and evaluating the results regularly. In addition, he emphasizes the importance of recognizing that time and energy are finite resources, and he writes at some length about both effectiveness — doing the right things — and efficiency — doing them well.

Part of being both effective and efficient is boundaries and balance. If you work to exhaustion, it affects your ability to perform in every other area of your life. If you do not get at least a minimum amount of sleep, you won't function effectively. If you do not have some fun, your motivation will plummet. And if you do not pay attention to your relationships with other people, they will atrophy. While these observations may seem obvious, it nevertheless takes a certain amount of planning and discipline to ensure that people schedule a ceiling to the amount of time spent at work and a floor to the amount of time spent for fun, sleep, and other people.

Beyond his emphasis on the importance of short and long term goal setting, Meier is also an astute observer of the self-defeating mind games that prevent people from working effectively toward their goals, and he breaks down a number of simple strategies for addressing them, from settling for something less than perfection on a first iteration to plunging into work to escape analysis paralysis.

In all, Meier's book achieves what should be the goal of every good organizational book: it does not settle for tidying our schedules, but insists that we examine our goals in the hope that we will choose to live more meaningful lives.(less)

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Jan 20, 2013 heidi rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: ebook, reviewed

This book is very fractal. It introduces a concept and then circles back to it a couple times in increasing depth. It's a logical structure, but you end up feeling like you've read everything a couple times. Perhaps this is better for readers who skim.

My other overall comment is that most productivity systems written out of software make me resentful because they assume that my home-life schedule is something that can be managed. I think I speak for a lot of working parents when I say that my sc...more This book is very fractal. It introduces a concept and then circles back to it a couple times in increasing depth. It's a logical structure, but you end up feeling like you've read everything a couple times. Perhaps this is better for readers who skim.

My other overall comment is that most productivity systems written out of software make me resentful because they assume that my home-life schedule is something that can be managed. I think I speak for a lot of working parents when I say that my schedule is something that I manage the same way surfers manage waves.

Useful concepts I will take from this book:
Outcomes, not activities. You don't want to be doing something, you want a finished product to show for your work. Write your tasks to reflect that.
Fix time, flex scope. You have the time you have. Instead of changing that, change how much you are trying to get done in that time.
Use your vision of the end result to drive your motivation and self-analysis.
Don't wait for inspiration. Even uninspired work is more useful than nothing.
Pretend to think like someone else to work your way through problems you are stuck on. Pick problem-solving heroes and ask yourself what they would do in a similar situation.
Work from an abundance mentality. Instead of assuming there is only so much of anything to go around, ask yourself how you could make more.
Growth feels awkward.

Things I could have lived without:
I thought that even for the structure of the book, there was a lot of repetition.
I found the emphasis on exercise and diet pretty ableist. Not everyone can "work out to maintain their health".
I was completely vexed by the assumption that emotional work was a knowable obligation. That may be true for other people, but I think that system would come up against a lot of grief given one week with kids who have the flu. To me, emotional work is much more interrupt-based, and when it's happening, it's the thing that's blocking everything else.

Read if: You are looking for a way to think about organizing and timeboxing yourself that is derived from Agile development methods. There is a lot to be gained from some of the concepts presented here.

Skip if: You will feel angry at a book that assumes you are in charge of your time allocation. You are not feeling patient about repetition.

Also read: Cheaper by the Dozen for another way to think about time use.(less)

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Jan 29, 2011 Irene rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads, 2011, business, psychology

3.5/5 stars (reason for 0.5 star deduction explained later in this review*)

I don't often read self-help type books, but "Getting Results the Agile Way" sounded interesting (thanks to Goodreads and the publisher for the free book!). I am still in an early stage of my career, but it's never too early to implement 'best practices'. This book is not earth-shattering, but it does have a lot of simple yet effective ideas for improving productivity and information management.

An example of one of these...more 3.5/5 stars (reason for 0.5 star deduction explained later in this review*)

I don't often read self-help type books, but "Getting Results the Agile Way" sounded interesting (thanks to Goodreads and the publisher for the free book!). I am still in an early stage of my career, but it's never too early to implement 'best practices'. This book is not earth-shattering, but it does have a lot of simple yet effective ideas for improving productivity and information management.

An example of one of these simple ideas is to have just three objectives per day. I used to have huge daily to-do lists, with untouched items carrying over to the next day (or the next one after that...). It was hard to manage, and inevitably, some items just never got done. Now, I have just three 'most important' items to do per day, and everything else (usually, things that are of middling importance and that require trivial work/effort) is put into a backlog, which I keep track of in the company wiki. When I have time, I tackle these items.

That leads me to another important thing I learned from this book: batching. When I unexpectedly have a slot of free time, I try to do similar items in batches. It seems obvious and logical, but I never did it consciously as a process.

Actually, most of the ideas and best practices that Meier offers in this book is obvious once you think of it. However, that doesn't mean that they're not valuable. More than merely stating the obvious, Meier presents his ideas as a methodology that is adaptable and flexible.

I've only implemented some of these Agile techniques in my work routines; part of me rebels at the thought of 'planning' my personal life, though I know it's applicable to household projects, finances, health, and so on. This is definitely a book I will return to as a reference and reminder of how I can be more productive, efficient, and satisfied with how I spend my time and energy.

As a final note, this book is written by someone who's been in the software industry for some time; if you are flummoxed or irritated by corporate-speak, consider yourself forewarned.

*0.5 star deduction: Mr. Meier, please employ a copy editor for the next edition! There are many sentences that should be corrected, such as "It happens over a serious of experiences." (A series of.) and "See the forest from the trees." (From the trees.) Also, cliche overload: "Robbing Peter to pay Paul", "Burning the candle at both ends", "Keep your eye on the ball", "Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater", "Roll with the punches", et. al...(less)

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Apr 27, 2013 Artur Matos rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: productivity

People organisationally challenged like myself need to have a system to keep ourselves on track. For the past few years I have been doing GTD, which has been tremendously helpful but I feel it's lacking in some respects, mostly on setting priorities and ensure things are done. The system presented in this book is quite different from GTD and in some sense diametrically opposed, the most notable difference being that you are forced to think about outcomes for the day, month, and year, versus GTD...more

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Aug 15, 2012 Rem rated it 4 of 5 stars

There are a couple of very good ideas in the book. Actually this book was pretty good for me because I was trying to create something like this for myself, but couldn't formalise it, so the book hit some points. The big con of it is a huge repetitiveness. It's like author repeats the same ideas all over again 10 or more times. That's quite annoying. But in general - really good book, especially for those who need some fresh air of GTD system. :)

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Nov 07, 2011 Rick Austin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Very familiar to those of us experienced with agile software development and an application of those principles to improve personal results. A set of core principles and practices that are easy to remember and effective. As I fan of GTD I find this a refreshing approach to personal productivity. An easy read and one that you will certainly walk away from with noticeable improvements in productivity and focus.

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Oct 17, 2012 Jorge rated it 2 of 5 stars

The book mixes other "productivity" methodologies (GTD, Agile, etc.) and provides several innovative ideas, but after reading a third of the book I find myself reading the same ideas again and again. The freshness of the first chapters quickly turns into the "another self-help book" style.

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Apr 22, 2013 Jonahlyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Good book with some easy-to-implement ideas for increasing your productivity. The author makes it pretty clear that if you just need to put the ideas into action quickly, the How-tos in the appendix section is the best place to start.

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May 02, 2013 Dave added it

I gave up on this book. I felt like the author continued to repeat himself over and over again. And, I found the writing very dry. I think it would be a much better book with anecdotal examples.

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Nov 30, 2012 Natalie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: newly-read-2012

This was a good one - I liked the Unschedule and I liked the general method full of threes, but some of it rankles my GTD instincts of "get it done get it done now now now."

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Mar 17, 2013 Marjori Pomarole rated it 2 of 5 stars

Very solid system that has its bases on GTD by David Allen.

But the book itself is very poorly structured and I grew tired quickly of the repetition of the concepts.

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Sep 29, 2011 April rated it 1 of 5 stars

A few good ideas, but repeated over and over again (more than necessary to get the point across).

Available for free online, though, so that's a plus.

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Feb 07, 2013 Emily rated it 3 of 5 stars

OK for a get-in-a-better-place book. Just like backward planning to get better test results in schools, this just tries to apply it to life.

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Jul 04, 2012 Nathaniel Weiner rated it 5 of 5 stars

Simple breakdown but incredibly effective strategies to maintain a productive yet effective life

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Oct 05, 2012 Mlybrand Lybrand rated it 4 of 5 stars

Hopefully I can implement this. I am currently working through his 30 days book.

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Jul 17, 2011 Max Lybbert rated it 4 of 5 stars

Full of good and practical time management advice. Unfortunately, also full of management speak. It's not hard to translate t English, but slightly annoying to have to do so.

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Feb 07, 2013 Lori McD rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: job_career, kindle-book, own, 2013_read

3+ stars... still working through the exercises in this book. Will come back with a better review.

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Dec 03, 2012 Óli rated it 3 of 5 stars

Some good ideas but very repetitive if read from beginning to end.

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May 20, 2013 Doug marked it as to-read

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Shelves: kindle

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May 11, 2013 Brett Hagberg rated it 4 of 5 stars

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Apr 30, 2013 Omar Khafagy rated it 4 of 5 stars

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