What I want to do on Friday is kick back a little from the intensity of the Deep Work by finding some cool hack that I think would be of interest to my fellow life- and work- hackers.
I figured we needed some ground rules, so:
- The Hack needs to have come to my attention in the previous week, since the previous Friday. I’m not as au courant as I used to be, but I still see a lot of stuff slosh by. Requiring any hack I tout to be recent seems like a service to all of you.
- I have to be using it, or want to be using it or noodling how to use it. If it’s of academic interest, let’s leave it to the academics.
- Slight prejudice in favor of non-app hacks. In my entrepreneurship courses almost every student idea takes the form of an app even if the app is somewhat negative for the use case.
We may need more ground rules as we go along.
With that framing, my Hack of the Week this week is 5-day sprints.
I read about 5-day sprints in “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” by Jake Knapp, John Zeransky, and Braden Kowitz from Google Ventures
The basic idea is kind of a mashup of Agile and Lean Startup:
- Monday through Thursday, devote all the hours between 10-5 100% for working through a structured process for generating a solution to a pressing problem for the team.
- Friday is then “customer reaction day” (from 9-5). The day is spent finding out what real “customers” (those who would use the solution) think of the solution generated.
- So there’s a looming deadline all week supplying urgency. And there’s a 100% dedication of the team that’s working the problem to… working the problem. So there’s focus.
What gets my juices going is the idea of applying this to my own weekly “sprints”. I’m not a team and I differ in many respects from the examples discussed in the book. But I believe that structure — and specifically some of the structured ideas worked out in the book — are going to make my sprints more productive.
Check out Sprint. Let me know what you think. Have a great weekend.