Don't let yourself for time wasting

A few years ago I really hated when I had to participate in meetings. It wasn't important what topics were discussed on those meetings, it wasn't important who was there, I just found all of them time and strength consuming. For a long time I thought that meetings are useless activity and there are many others things which can be done instead, far more important things. I even could spend my time on such a "cool" activities as cutting a layout or writing a documentation. There also weren't too interesting activities, but at least I found them somehow useful, there was value in it.
And meetings? Useless conversations and almost always without any conclusions. And even if we made decision, it was, sooner or later, changed. Probably on the different meeting.

It was really hard times.

Use your wall

In my current project we're using Jira to track the progress in project, to storing backlog items and so on. And after few years I need to admit that is really great tool, at least is perfect for ours needs.

Ok, it's almost perfect - it's completely unrelated with motivation in our team.
Why I think so? Because we're looking at it only when one of us needs to do something there. Team members moves issues from one column to the other, product owner sorts backlog whenever there is a need, we are adding notes, attachments or we made clarification for the issues and many other things, but all of those are activities related with project life cycle. Not with motivation.

It needs to be interesting

Do everything what we learn should be useful for us?
I believe so. In present days, we got no time for spend it on useless activities. But do we always know what would be useful for us? Do we know it, when we first time hear about something? All those blogs that we are reading, all those books, is there always something useful? Sometimes answer isn't so obvious, sometimes is. Sometimes even happens that we learned something, but life changes and knowledge which was never used before probably never won't be used.
But do we think that was a waste of time? I can answer only for myself, but many times, when everything changed, I didn't regretted what I've learned, even when I knew that knowledge won't be useful for me anymore.

I don't want to work alone anymore

Few months ago we decided to focus more on pair programming. We were doing it from time to time before, but after few conversations with far more experienced people, I spoke with the team and we agreed that it's worth to try doing more pair programming.

If there were so many people, who found pair programming as a one of the greatest technique they have ever experienced, it should be worth to spend some more time to improve it in our Scrum. What bad could happen either way?

After those few months, I can say that was really good idea to invest more time and improve this technique in our team. Right now almost half of our user stories are implemented in pairs and everyone loves it. Why?