Excuses to Skip Sprint Planning

Sprint planning is two hours long and contains about eleven minutes of information, most of which is already written down in the tickets it is discussing. The rest is a group of adults arguing about whether a task is a three or a five, when the honest answer is that nobody knows and the person who will do it is not in the room, or is in the room and has stopped listening. The reason a planning absence is survivable is that the artefacts do the work. If your tickets are pointed, your estimates are in the descriptions and your capacity is in the sheet, then you have already attended in the only way that leaves a trace. Say that. 'My tickets are pointed and in the sprint, so I'd be an audience member for ninety minutes' is an argument about value, not about mood. The one thing worth doing before you skip is flagging the blocked items, because a sprint that gets planned around a ticket nobody knows is stuck is a sprint that fails politely in week two. Below are ten excuses to skip sprint planning, plus twenty in the generator.