Templates · Essentials

Time: Added, Stolen, Restored

A retrospective on how each person spends their time: what saves it, what wastes it and how to get it back.

What it is

Three questions about time, all addressed to “you”: your plans, your choices, your day. It is a retrospective on one subject, not a review of the sprint.

Goal

Each person leaves with ways to protect their time. The team finds out which leaks its members share: those are the ones that deserve a common rule.

When to use it

• When people say they have no time, and days are cut up by meetings and interruptions.
• After a change in how the team works together: remote work, new meetings, a new on-call rota.
• As an occasional session on one theme, between regular retrospectives.

When to pick another format

The format says nothing about the product or the sprint’s results: for a regular retrospective, take Went well, To improve, Action ideas. If the tiredness goes deeper than the calendar, Energy Levels asks what drains people. To look at speed as a team matter, not a personal one, use Speed Car.

How to run it

1. Which of your plans or choices add time to your day? Ask for the habits and choices that give hours back. Start here: these cards are tips the others can copy.
2. Which personal choices steal time from your day? Ask where time leaks: interruptions, meetings, rework. The question says “personal choices”: have people look at their own part before blaming the calendar.
3. How do or would you reclaim lost time? Ask for concrete ways to win back the hours of the previous column. A good card answers one precise leak.

Group the leaks: those that several people share are a matter for the team. Vote on them, then look in the third column for a remedy to each of the most voted and turn it into a team agreement to try, with an owner and a date. Individual remedies stay with their authors.

Columns

To start a retrospective from this template, see Create a retro.