This library brings together my writing on productivity and Agile. Over the years I’ve explored how teams and individuals can work with more clarity, focus, and flow.
You’ll find practical tools, reflections on Agile culture, reviews of books and apps, and stories from my own life and work. My aim is to cut through complexity and share approaches that real people and teams can use straight away.
Start here
If you’re new to my writing, these posts are a good place to begin. They capture how I think about Agile and productivity – practical, human, and rooted in real experience.
- A new chapter: opening my productivity and agile coaching programme
I can help you find clarity and calmness in your life and work. - An overview of my planning and productivity system in 2021
A walkthrough of how I manage my own tasks and priorities. - How I start my weekly review
The small ritual that keeps my system grounded. - Agile is a toolbox
Agile isn’t one method or process. It’s a set of tools you can use to fit your context. - User stories change people
How writing user stories changes more than just projects. - A retrospective model for Modern Agile
A simple, flexible approach to running meaningful retrospectives. - Book review: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
What I learned from Newport’s call to do fewer things better.
Agile
🌱 Agile mindset, principles, and culture
Perspectives on what makes Agile more than a process — how values, simplicity, and continuous learning shape how teams thrive.
- Joy, simplicity, compassion: Trinitarian gifts in the agile workplace
- Agile is a toolbox
- Agile is about culture not processes
- Simplicity and maximizing the work not done
- Shu ha ri—three stages towards agile maturity
- The Joy of Work
- Self-organising teams
- Scrum makes one promise only
- How agile helps us build the right things
- Steadily delivering quality
- Marginal gains for development teams
- The primary purpose of a development team is…
- A small thought about clarity from today
🛠️ Agile practices and techniques
Guides to user stories, planning poker, prioritisation methods, and other building blocks of Agile practice.
- Should agile user stories follow the Single Responsibility Principle?
- User stories change people
- The importance of small user stories
- INVEST in good user stories
- What is a Definition of Ready?
- Using a process map to help create definitions of ready and done
- The difference between acceptance criteria and definition of done
- How do you know when you’re done?
- Planning poker
- Planning poker—why and how we estimate
- MoSCoW planning poker
- MoSCoW prioritisation is on effort
- How to create new MoSCoW prioritisation statuses in Jira
- Agile planning poker
- Velocity and why it’s important
- What are story points?
- Agile release planning with multiple projects
- How and why we QA
- Spikes: supporting agile practice
- Pair programming: supporting agile practice
- Impact mapping at the first Lean Agile Dundee
- Business process modelling at Lean Agile Dundee
🔁 Retrospectives and continuous improvement
Models, ideas, and reflections to help teams learn from experience and adapt together.
- A retrospective model for Modern Agile
- Retrospective idea: Sailboat
- Retrospective idea: one-word
- Retrospective idea: starfish
- Continually improving our work processes with retrospectives
- Continually improving our work habits with retrospectives
- When retrospective objectives stack up
- Using Trello for team retrospectives
👥 Team facilitation and collaboration
How Agile teams plan, communicate, and collaborate — including facilitation tips and practical examples.
- Agile Team Facilitation
- What rules do you have for meetings at work?
- Using Zoom polls for planning poker in Agile teams
- The challenges of resource management in our Agile team
- How we schedule work requests from other projects
- Exception reports, or what happens when a project goes off-track
- How we name our sprints
- Meet our sprint planning document
- Sprint planning in Scrum
- What happens during a sprint review?
🧑🎓 Learning and community
Book recommendations, cheat sheets, and experiences from Agile meetups and podcasts.
- Seven of my favourite books on Agile
- Lean Agile Edinburgh meetup at Royal London, March 2018
- I was a guest on the new Ways of Agile podcast
- DSDM Agile project management cheat sheet
- New job
- Version numbering schemes: an observation
Productivity
🛠️ Tools and apps
Reviews, tweaks, and scripts to help you get more from everyday tools like Todoist, Trello, OneNote, and Gmail.
- Keeping your PC apps up-to-date with Winget and WingetUI
- Espanso text expander
- Groupy—grouped tabs for any application in Windows
- Organising tabs by groups in Google Chrome
- Trello classic label colours v2.0.0
- Trello coloured lists for Tampermonkey updated to v4.x
- Hurrah! Vertical tabs are coming to Microsoft OneNote
- Microsoft To Do review
- Todoist sections are a game-changer in how I organise myself
- Todoist vs Trello vs Wunderlist for managing small tasks
- Using eM Client with Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts
- Moving from Outlook (Exchange) to eM Client (Google)
- Kiwi for Gmail—initial impressions
📚 Books, methods, and reviews
Reviews and reflections on productivity approaches from GTD to Deep Work, and what they mean in practice.
- Book review: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
- Book review: Ultralearning by Scott H Young
- The 12 Week Year and Deep Work
- Review of GTD Agenda
- Pomodoro technique for productivity
- Eisenhower matrix in personal projects—what does urgent but not important mean?
- How I took back my life
🗂️ Systems and workflows
A look at my own planning systems and how I run weekly reviews, go paperless, and focus on what matters.
- An overview of my planning and productivity system in 2021
- An overview of my planning and productivity system in 2019
- My paperless(-ish) office with OneNote and NAPS2
- How I start my weekly review
- Focus on one thing, not everything
- Why capturing everything changed my life
- One small system that kept me steady this week
- My Sunday weekly review
✉️ Communication and habits
Small, practical ideas for better email, writing, and daily routines.