Agile & scrum friends, what’s your preferred frequency for Rest Weeks/Catch-up Sprints in a project? I like every 4 sprints; I’m interested in what you do.

If your response is “Rest weeks??”, please know that your process is damaging your team members’ health. Rest/catch-up sprints are not about vacation and time away, but rather time to sit inside the project without the relentless pressure of pushing forward. Reorganize some user stories, clean up a hacked bit of code, adjust an internal process. Rest.

Here's a true story about my dad. When I was little, we were on a beach in Oregon and he found a message in a bottle.

The note contained an address, with a plea in a young boy's handwriting to send a postcard and let him know how far the bottle had traveled. It had very clearly been thrown in the ocean from the nearby crab docks. It probably traveled a whopping 1/2 mile before washing up in the sand.

He decided to wait until we got back to California to send the postcard, so it would seem like the bottle floated all the way south.

My dad died last night. I'm really sad.

Here are some things you should know about him: He only agreed to sign the permission slip to my 6th grade dance if he was allowed to make modifications. He handed it back and there were two new bullet points:
* NO TATTOOS
* NO ENGAGEMENTS