Tag: Donuts and Dragons

Personal KPIs

~ Adam ~ 1 Comment

I’ve spent a lot time reading about daily habits and routines recently. Both Atomic Habits and Routine Machine strongly advocate spending a small amount of time each day to contribute towards your larger goals. I like the idea, after all as an agile geek I fully support the importance of transparency. Otherwise, how can we expect to inspect and adapt?

I mentioned some of my 2021 goals recently. Some of these are perfect examples where I must display if not daily, then weekly behaviour if I’m going to hit them. Donuts and Dragons isn’t going to write itself, I need to put words on the page day after day. My reading goal isn’t magically going to happen, I need to spend a little time each morning listening to audible or perhaps reading in the evening.

To this end I’m experimenting with a Personal KPI spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet I’m tracking various KPIs such as “Donuts Words Written” and “Time Reading”. I’m also tracking various KPIs around health and daily routine. Am I hitting Inbox Zero every day?

My spreadsheet gives me a daily score, however most beneficial I believe will be the weekly rolling averages. I don’t have to write a blog post every day, however I aim to write at least three a week. I don’t have to listen to my audiobooks every morning but I do want to make sure I’m listening for an appropriate time each week to hit my quarterly targets.

Am I on track to hit my personal goals this year? Photo by Lukas on Pexels.com

It may seem like overkill, but I’m hoping that this mechanism will help me stay on track for some of the big goals I’ve set myself this year.

What do you think? Is this overly complex for personal goals? Do you have a similar mechanism and how did it work for you? Let me know in the comments below!

Introducing Donuts and Dragons

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

After all the positive feedback I recieved writing Code Black last year I’ve been working on something else.

For those who don’t know Code Black is a business parable novel for DevOps techniques. In other words it’s a story, about a team at a failing IT company who embrace modern software development techniques to produce higher quality software in a much more efficient way.

Writing a book is not easy, it’s never turned into a best seller (although who knows, this post may go viral!) but I enjoyed the process and I learned a lot putting it together.

Deciding to push myself once again I’m dusting off my keyboard and writing Donuts and Dragons.

Once again Donuts and Dragons is a story, this time about Megan who joins a team who are working to develop the next best selling game. Instead of DevOps I’m focusing on agile techniques.

I’m publishing the story on LeanPub, the site (in a very agile manner) encourages you to publish early and often. The word count is going up, slowly and steadily as a first draft. As the story is very much in the early stages I’m not charging for anyone who wants to read it and provide feedback.

As I mentioned in my recent goals post, I’m hoping to finish the book in 2021. To do this I’m hoping to have the first draft completed by June and then I’ll have plenty of time to proof read and listen to your feedback. Why not have a look at what I’ve got so far? I’d love to hear your feedback!