A co-worker turned me on to this little gem. Worth the read. Quite humorous if you haven't seen it before.

A snippet:

Michaels stood up. “Then I will do it, my friend,” he said formally. “I will do it for Prado, who was once great with the bugs. I will do it for the time we filled Prado's office with bouncy balls, and for the time Prado wore his nerf weapons in the marketing hall and slew all of them with no fear and only a great joy at the combat. I will do it for all the pizza we ate and the bottles of Coke we drank.”

In a post from January (I'm just getting to the RSS backlog), Geekpreneur posted some tips for setting your freelance client workload . It's a good post. Not only is it pragmatic advice for an independent, but as I read it I immediately started to think of what we do in sprint planning (capacity planning, story selection, etc...) and task out (breaking down stories into smaller parts, prioritizing, scheduling, etc...). I think you'll see the parallels.

I've noticed that some of the biggest areas people working on sprint teams struggle with are the topics covered in this post. It's interesting to me how that parallels the work that independent's do. It would appear effective time management (in two contexts where you're responsible for your own time), is a must have for those working alone or in agile teams. I'm not so sure how important it is on projects where you have 500 line project plans with three people telling you what to do and when. I'm certain it still matters, but it matters much less.