Searching for ways to stay more focused on the stories, several of our teams use the following trick: Each morning during standup they set themselves a daily goal.
In some teams these goals are for the whole team, in others each team member sets a goal for themselves (or pairs). Either way works fine for us and achieves several things:
- It creates a mini-deadline that helps those who thrive on deadlines and for whom the end of a 2-week sprint is to far ahead
- Finding the next day that you reached the goal gives a sense of achievement (a bit more than moving stickies)
- If the goal doesn’t change (because it’s not reached) it becomes blatantly obvious that there is an impediment and you can thus address it
So if you’ve got problems focusing or with impediments not being raised, daily goals might do the trick 🙂
PS: In case it wasn’t obvious: The teams set their own goals, not someone else.