Mark Bernstein at Eastgate Systems posted about a Tinderbox viewer that they are developing for the iPhone and iPad. Awesome!

Lately, I've been doing some research on how to write good user stories for Agile requirements and discovered a post on Mike Cohn's blog discussing his rationale for the user story template he prefers. I have one point to add to his comment on the value component of a user story being optional.

An important motivation for including the value component in a user story is what narrows and refines the scope of the story and adds clarity to what the story is intended to achieve. This helps to ensure that the intent of the story is understood by the reader. It might also prompt questions if the reader disagrees with the value and those questions might lead to better insight or understanding.

Mike provides several stories in his article. Reading these stories with and without the value component changes the way they can be interpreted quite dramatically. For example, consider the story "As an estimator, I want to see all the items we will try to estimate this season".

The value component of this story tells me that its real value is enabling the estimator to check the relative costs of the other items being estimated. Without this insight, I might assume that the estimator just needs a list of estimates organized by season--an interpretation that really misses the point.

Adding a few words to highlight the value of the user story seems like very little additional burden when compared to the problems that a misinterpretation might create.

I like Getting Things Done because it attempts to wrap everything in your work together into one cohesive whole. It does this by providing a model called the "6 Level Model for Reviewing Your Work". It provides purposes for different aspects of your work ranging from the next actions in a project through to your life's purpose.

I am amazed at how much is written about developing a purpose, vision, goals and objectives. So much so, that I am going to add my two cents to the discussion for anyone that wants another perspective on how to achieve this. In what follows, I promise to be short and to the point.


First, your life's purpose can be just a combination of your personal values applied to the roles you already have. I say "can be" because there are lots of different ways to determine your life's purpose. I don't view myself as too imaginative so I stuck with my values and applied them to my roles. Now I know how I think I should be fulfilling those roles and what values I should apply to them.

Second, your vision is where you want to go or what you want to achieve in order to fulfill your purpose. Liberally apply your values to your vision so that you retain alignment between your purpose and your vision. Stretch a little as you don't want to short change yourself. I say a little because you want your vision to be achievable on some level.

Third, your goals and objectives are derived from your vision. Basically, identify the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Your goals live in this gap and your objectives are the things you need to do to achieve your goals.

Fourth, goals sometimes spawn areas of focus and responsibility but you might also know what these are independently of your goals. A goal that is achieved in the sense that you accomplished it but want to retain some level of focus on it probably belongs in your areas of focus and responsibility. Some responsibilities are self-evident.

Fifth, objectives generate projects. A project is anything that requires two or more actions to accomplish. Since we are aligning our goals and objectives with our vision these projects ought to have a couple of actions associated with them.

Sixth, projects generate next actions. Your next actions are what you need to do to move the project forward.

Since nothing in life is forever, you should expect your purpose, vision, goals and objectives, areas of responsibility, projects and next actions to change. If you've figured things out correctly then your purpose should change the least and you should expect the amount of change to increase as you move though the list towards your next actions. Since change is inevitable you need to ensure that all levels reflect what is current.

Here is an example of why I really enjoy the practical and simple advice in David Allen's book Getting Things Done: today, I received a couple of invitations. One invitation is for a talk and another is for a weekend retreat.

I have to RSVP for the weekend retreat in a couple of weeks. Of course, I don't know if I can make the retreat so I need to defer the decision on whether to RSVP or not. The other invitation is something I will attend if my day opens up. How to effectively manage the RSVP other event so that I don't simply forget about them?


David has a section in Getting Things Done on things you can add to calendars. He suggests that in addition storing appointments, calendars can be used for the following.

• As triggers for activating projects.
• Reminding you events you might want to participate in or attend.
• As decision catalysts (big decisions that you need to make but which you want to defer until later).

Problem solved. I added both events to a calendar and stored the RSVP in a tickler file. I finish the whole exercise confident that I will get a reminder about the RSVP and the event at the appropriate time.

I find that using a separate calendar, different from the one that holds my appointments is useful. Then these optional events aren't in the way of my daily appointments and they don't distract me while I am working.

David Allen describes an excellent system for personal productivity in his book Getting Things Done. I make a point of trying to review different sections of his book every few months. I usually review parts of the book that describe methods that feel unnatural or awkward to me.  An unnatural or awkward activity is usually a good indicator of where an improvement is needed.

One area of Getting Things Done that I review frequently involves projects and the prioritization of the next actions for those projects. These activities always cause me to second guess myself. I often feel that my choices for projects and the priorities of their next actions are suspect. What I want is a way to validate the decisions I make when managing my projects. In seeking to validate my decisions I found surprisingly little guidance in Getting Things Done and ultimately settled on a solution using Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix (as described in his book First Things First).

In what follows, I describe how the stuff in my inbox ends up on my project list instead of my someday/maybe list and why I feel that’s ok in spite of the problems it creates. I also describe my solution and why it is effective.


I create a lot of projects. This is an outcome of the idea that a project is anything that contains two or more actions. Having a lot of projects creates a tension between them because they compete for your time when you evaluate the next actions needed to move them forward. This is a desired result of using Getting Things Done. If you have captured everything and you know what it all means then you can determine what to do next with a high level of confidence.

David provides a model for choosing next actions “in the moment”. This model includes four criteria to apply: context, time, energy and priority. It is a very effective model for selecting the next action of a project but it assumes that you are committed to completing the project and that you choose the priority correctly. Context, time and energy are self-evident.

With priority the only choice to make in managing my project list I became convinced that I had everything under control. However, over time I became aware that my project list got longer and my confidence in its usefulness decreased. I struggled to complete the actions for my projects and some projects languished. I didn’t feel like what I was doing was effective.

In reviewing how I managed my projects, I discovered that priority wasn’t the only issue. I remain convinced that context, time and energy were self-evident. The issue was the interplay between commitment to completing the project and the priority of the project’s next actions. In effect, I was making poor choices when assessing and reassessing my projects. You might be thinking that I am creating projects that really belong on my “someday/maybe” list. I might be.

The problem isn’t that I lack a someday/maybe list. It is that during the course of planning my work things arise that are actionable and look like projects. Sometimes they turn out to be less important when evaluated in the entire context of what I want to achieve, or things may have changed, or I may have simply made poor choices when I chose to turn them into a project. Whatever the cause, the end result is that projects sometimes came to my project list to die a slow and painful death.

Getting Things Done provides little guidance on reassessing projects. It says you should regularly reassess your current projects and get rid of any that are no longer current. What I wanted help with was a way to gauge the quality of the reassessment and to ultimately determine whether I was truly committed to completing the project and, if so, what the priority for that project’s actions was.

I found that Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix described in First Things First was effective in determining whether to commit or stay committed to a project. To use this matrix you determine a task’s importance and urgency. Stephen directs you to spend time on tasks that are important and urgent or important and not urgent. I combine Stephen’s Time Management Matrix with David’s idea of the project list, along with a rationale for my decision on importance and urgency. This provides a convenient way to assess and reassess why a project exists.

Having a single place to review my projects along with their importance and urgency proves valuable. It is an extremely effective and explicit method for evaluating both my need to commit to complete the project and for reassessing your current projects.

This provides the added benefit of ensuring that projects which are not important and urgent or not important and not urgent are easily identified and eliminated. A side effect of this approach is that it prevents errors in creating projects from taking up too much time—if a project makes it on the project list and it doesn’t have the correct importance and urgency it becomes clear that it shouldn’t be there.

If you link the rationale for each project’s importance and urgency to your goals and objectives or vision then you get the added benefit of ensuring alignment with your overall purpose.