Month: October 2018

My Stand-Up Family

Artistic rendition of family stand-up meeting

Every morning at work, I participate in a team stand-up meeting.  During this fifteen minute meeting, the kanban is displayed and each team member briefly answers these three questions:

  • What did I do yesterday (towards sprint goal)?
  • What am I doing today (towards sprint goal)?
  • What is blocking me (from sprint goal)?

It doesn’t take very long for as many as 20 people to report and we are usually done early.  If someone is blocked, a subset of people may remain afterward in order to figure out how to remove the block.  But this post isn’t about stand-ups in the tech world rather how my family is also having a daily stand-up.

For many years my family has had a bedtime routine.  It has evolved over the years as the children have aged, and a few weeks ago we added a stand-up where everyone reports:

  • What did I do today?
  • What am I doing tomorrow?
  • What is blocking me?

It has taken some time to get the scope correct.  For example, breakfast menu typically doesn’t need to be reported and being tired is not a blocking issue.  Now we are more likely to hear about accomplishments such as a song being passed off at a music lesson or blocking issues such as a child needing to be somewhere and lacking transport.

I’ve seen benefits from having the family stand-up every evening:

  • More accurate calendaring–we have a shared family calendar that displays on the BakBoard and is available on our various electronic devices, but sometimes activities and appointments aren’t added to the calendar.  When someone mentions something for the next day that isn’t on the calendar, we get it added.
  • Everyone is better informed–there usually isn’t anything that is new to everyone, but often there is something that is new to someone.  We now have fewer situations where a subset of the family is ill-informed as to what is happening.
  • Offers to help–when someone reports being blocked, other family members often immediately volunteer to help resolve the issue.
  • Positive reinforcement–when someone reports a worthy accomplishment, the family promptly provides proper praise.

Even though both my work and my family stand-up meetings follow the same pattern, the implied context of the questions is different.  While work stand-ups are focused on the sprint goals, family stand-ups deal a lot more with schedule synchronization and individual well-being.  Also, blockages reported in a family scenario are more likely to include details of interpersonal squabbles.  This perhaps suggests that the family stand-ups could benefit from defined goals rather than the implicit “make it through the week somehow.”

I am glad that we started having daily family stand-ups–it has made some things easier.  I expect that over time the family stand-ups will continue to evolve as we see what is most effective for our needs.

10000 Steps!

About 4.5 years ago I started wearing a Fitbit and tracking my steps.  The default goal is 10,000 steps per day and I made that my personal goal.  Some days I do not meet that goal either because of illness, scheduling, weather, or laziness, but most days my Fitbit jiggles and I exclaim “10,000 steps!”  In the 4.5 years I have walked over 17,500,000 steps which averages out to just over 10,000 steps per day and my record for continuous days over 10,000 steps is over 100 days.  But this post is not about steps.

Just over a year ago I underwent some surgery.  Not only did my step count plummet, but I was unable to do any strenuous activity for six weeks–particularly nothing that would use my abdominal muscles.  After that activity hiatus, I wanted to do something to get into better shape without overdoing it.

I couldn’t do a lot, but I could do five pushups and five sit ups without feeling too much strain in the scarred area of the surgery site.  So I did five pushups and five sit ups every day for six days.  Then I did six pushups and six sit ups every day for another six days.  Then seven and then eight.  I kept on doing pushups and sit ups every day and added one more about every six days (the number of days varied slightly so that I would add five every month).

It never got particularly easy and, as the daily count grew, some days I would break up the count into multiple sets.  But every day it was doable.  After several months, I reached the point where I was doing 50 pushups and 50 sit ups every day.  That’s where I stopped adding to my daily count, but still continued with the daily activity.

Approximate number of pushups and sit ups per day

So now it’s been a year since I started and I am still doing 50 pushups and sit ups every day.  It still isn’t easy, but it is always doable.  When I started, five seemed hard, but now I zip past five, ten, 15, 20, and beyond before even noticing the effort.

As I realized it’s been a year, I wondered if I could say “10,000 pushups!” and “10,000 sit ups!” so I decided to do some rough math and see about how many I did.

Total number of pushups (and sit ups) over the course of the year

It took about three months to do the first thousand, but the rate increased and the total grew ending up closer to 12,000.

So if you can do five pushups today, you can do 10,000 in a year.  10,000 pushups!