The usual productivity tips apply best to those working in a typical office with typical hours. What if you don’t work within a structured schedule? How can you stay productive when work ebbs and flows or occurs outside the typical nine-to-five? Here are three ways to be productive when your schedule is unpredictable.

Building good habits is an important part of an effective Scrum team. Habits are a form of automation: The more basic processes we can automate, the more we can focus our energy on hard things. The Scrum process, with its focus on rituals, helps us by providing a framework for collaboration and making it second nature.

Testing can get complicated when each project is using a completely different toolset, language, and reporting status, with different measurements and formats. Testing is a reaction to context and what we encounter, so how we test cannot be standardized. What we can standardize is the stuff that surrounds the testing.