Where to post this feels tricky. The terms in my post title -- "Product Backlog" and "Sprint" are very IT-specific terms from a popular business management philosophy (Agile) and methodology (Scrum) for creating software.

However, I am intentionally trying to adopt and adapt these concepts to my own life goals, personal improvement efforts and general day-to-day "get shit done" task lists.

Has anyone else done this? It only just now occurred to me to search the 'Net to see how unusual this idea is, and of course, I'm seeing plenty of evidence that I'm not the first person to think of it.

For the non-IT folk, here's the nutshell version. Large, long-term software development projects get broken down into bite-sized tasks, those pieces get prioritized and best-guesstimated as to each one's difficulty, and then short-term "Sprints" (each generally 1 week to 1 month long) are devoted to completing a selected subset of those tasks.

As an on-going process, the overall project goals and tasklist (the "Product Backlog") get reviewed, re-evaluated and re-prioritized, and past efforts are regularly evaluated for effectiveness, and the lessons learned get incorporated into future planning.

Probably the most significant piece of the Agile philosophy is the iterative process. Never lose sight of the overarching goal, but focus -- hard -- on those bite-sized pieces, always review your own efforts and learn how to improve your process of getting things done, and always be ready to modify all mid-term and long-term goals as the journey unfolds, as new information comes to light.

... And I realize I'm meandering, perhaps, a bit too much into the philosophy of software development ... but I hope it's clear how well this could translate over to personal development, life goals, self-help, stuff like that.

At any rate, that's what I'm doing over the next two weeks ... I'm running my own personal "Life Goals" Sprint, adopting the various tools and terms and ideas built into Agile -- and specifically, the Scrum-style implementation of Agile (which is more philosophy than process). Depending on how it goes, I may well be doing this for a long time to come.

Would love to discuss the idea, get feedback, pros and cons, yada ...

When I started working with development teams 3 years ago, I started learning all about agile and scrum. I'm currently a product manager working with two dev teams that loosely follow scrum. Since we don't have an official scrum master, I somewhat fill that role too. I've done my best to learn as much as I can about it and so far I'm a big fan. However I feel like most of the things I hear about it are from the scrum and agile community, which means I don't hear too many negatives. What's your experience with these been and if you were in the right position, how would you try to structure people to produce software?