I’m Agile-Scrum certified and actually kind of hate it. It’s probably more about the environments I’ve tried to work in Agile, but it always has amounted to more paperwork and less productivity than I like.

However, Agile does have some principles that are crucial to success in creating digital products, apps, and websites. At my company, we use what I call “Agile Lite,” where we take the 3 best principles of Agile and eschew the rest.

Those are:

• Planning by breaking concepts into smaller tasks
• One in one out
• Retrospectives with Lite burn down reports

As I was pulling the latest burn down report for a website we launched, I had an epiphany that I don’t just use these 3 principles at work, but I repeatedly use them in life as well. I also realized that these principles have been crucial to my career success while still having some 4-hour work days.

Here’s how I use those 3 Agile principles to live a productive and progressive life.

Planning by breaking concepts into smaller tasks

In software development, it’s impossible to think about all of the lines of code or pixels of design that will encompass the product at once. It’s the epitome of the term “breaking your brain.”

Instead, most sensible humans break larger problems down into specific tasks for development or design. In Agile, there’s an overly complicated process where you assign “story points” to each task and estimate how many tasks you can fit within a given sprint. At its core, though, it’s about breaking down ideas into manageable chunks. You’d have to ask the Medium team, but I would bet that they designed and built the formatting tools on a completely different timeline than the tagging functionality.

In life, breaking larger concepts into tasks is an easy way to reach your goals and not burn out. For example:

Life feels really overwhelming when you only focus on the big picture or the large changes you need to make. You can achieve more by giving yourself attainable tasks more often.

One in one out

This principle is honestly my favorite to come out of Agile. Since Agile requires sprints to be time-boxed, you can only fit so many tasks within your sprint. Therefore, if a stakeholder or colleague tries to fit a new task within that sprint mid-stream, you rally the troops and pick something to push into the next sprint to the overall estimation of hours stays the same. Aka as one goes in, one has to go out.

With a Project Management background, facing scope-creep (where the goalposts of “success” continue to move) at one point is pretty much inevitable. One in one out gives you a great way to manage this while not burning out your resources and still keeping your client happy.

We as humans can only handle so much on our plate at one time. You can use this methodology to reach your goals and avoid burnout in your personal life, too! For example:

• When making plans, I know I only have social energy for a certain number of coffee or dinner dates per week. If something suddenly comes up, I’ll move a personal hangout to the following week
• When shopping, I will only buy something new if I can donate or sell something I already own. Removing physical clutter helps me remove mental clutter
• When I have personal drama to deal with, I’ll politely decline to provide advice to friends or family until I’ve sorted out my own issues

You know when your cup runneth over and when you have room to take on more. Don’t let others’ needs dictate what you can handle and keep a manageable headspace.

Retrospectives with Lite burn down reports

If we don’t reflect on where we came from, we can’t tweak for efficiency and progression in the future. Agile ensures this happens with retrospectives and burn down reports. A retrospective is a meeting where the team reflects on what went well, what could be improved, and what they learned in a given sprint. A burn down report is an analysis of the hours and tasks completed vs. what’s projected.

The burn down report is what burned me out when I was participating fully in Agile. I’d be in meetings all day just to spend 2 hours every night compiling a burn down report. I’d need my engineers and designers to tell me how many hours they worked on every minute piece of functionality. Then at another job, retrospectives could take 2 hours some times. I‘m exhausted just thinking about this time in my life.

At my current job, we use what I call a “Lite” version of each of these principles. For retrospectives, we use this Miro template and have folks drop their feedback in before the meeting. That way we use the meeting to just review the high level themes and takeaways. For burn down reports, I look at our Resource Management by Smartsheet every other week to see if any of the budgets are totally out of whack. Then I pull one year-end report.

While the methodology could maybe be improved, the concept is rock solid. Take time to review how you did so you can do even better in the future. For example:

• When reaching yearly goals, I review my progress against monthly goals at the end of every month, and adjust for the upcoming month accordingly. Maybe I’m over a goal and want to bring a new one in (read: One in one out principle), or maybe I need to kick it up a notch
• When keeping a handle on my finances, I review my Mint.com transactions once a week (on Wednesdays with a glass of wine, to be specific) and make adjustments to my spending habits based on how I’m tracking against my budget
• When reading books, I track what I thought in Goodreads and adjust my “want to read” list depending on how I enjoyed my previous book

Agile is popular for a reason. Its principles have allowed some of the world’s best products and tools to be built. But like everything in life, moderation is key — and you can get many of the benefits of Agile without fully engrossing yourself in its concepts and terms.

If you take away anything from Agile, I’d recommend applying these 3 principles to your life:

• Planning by breaking concepts into smaller tasks
• One in one out
• Retrospectives with Lite burn down reports

You don’t have to Product Manage your life, but you can increase your productivity and growth by stealing some Agile principles for life.