Agile Thinking meets personal development using GTD

Seye Kuyinu
2 min readFeb 19, 2020

How do you apply Agile principles of continuous improvement, constant inspection and adaption to personal development?

How do you create meaningful backlogs and to-do lists for personal life pursuits?

This sketchnote shows how I merge three major concepts: David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle and Agile principles.

  • Start with your Why!
  • Write your life story. How does this story start, where is it now and how is it going to end.
  • Identify your 7Fs(Faith, Family, Field, Friend, Fun, Finance and Fitness). They are the core areas of our lives that should be balanced.
  • Create a backlog of things in these areas that will create balance.
  • All meaningful SNA(strategic Next Actions) are tied to 7F initiatives. SNAs are your to-do’s tied closely to your initiatives. They should be simple tasks that require no additional input from any other task. Like ‘Call Mom’ or ‘Purchase xyz license’.
  • Whenever you’re putting things in your to-do or whenever great ideas cross your mind that suggest execution, ask yourself the question ‘how do they fall into my meaningful goals? How do they align with my 7Fs?’
  • Do you need to have a backlog containing every single to-do? Refer to GTD’s 4Ds- if it will take less than 2 minutes, Do it. If it will take more than 2 minutes, Defer or Delegate. If it’s just mere information, Delete.
  • Find time every week to reflect- to course correct. How did you do last week? Did you achieve what you planned for? Then celebrate! Did you fail? Then what could have been done better?

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Seye Kuyinu

While I am whoever I am, I play different roles. Sometimes an Agile Coach, sometimes as a Hypnotherapist. Sometimes I muse about the glory of who we really are