For planning, I totally forgot about three very important scheduling things:

- a ScrumMaster certification course on Thursday and Friday which required not just time in class, but also three hours of commuting each day.

- my birthday for which I had planned a very informal party on Saturday (normally a very productive work day) which consumed the whole day from morning to late at night.

- the departure of my brother Alexei and his wife Ma Jin so that Sunday would be my last day of visiting, again, taking up my whole day from morning to late at night.

Suffice it to say, a 3-day work week was not what I was expecting when I did my planning. Sometime on Thursday I gave up.

I decided to delay starting a new iteration until I could recover a bit. Over the course of four days I get nearly 200 emails that I actually need to pay attention to at some level or another. So, today has been a recovery day and at the end of the day I will plan my next iteration. Since I did not have a delivery meeting (since I cancelled the iteration), I can only do an informal review of the accomplishments:

- some progress on development work for my client
- some progress on invoicing my client
- some progress on automation of my course listings (Selenium is great!)
- no progress on providing a statement to my other client

The causes of this massive failure are obvious. It should be noted that by doing the ScrumMaster training, I did actually deliver value to Berteig Consulting... it just wasn't the value that I had planned!