03 — The Wedding Season and Family¶
Probability: 70% (high — this is India, this is your cohort’s age).
You are 24–25 years old, in India, in a middle-class family. Wedding season is not a hypothetical. Family expectations around your own future are not a hypothetical. This IS the season of your life where personal-hour budgets collapse for reasons that are not negotiable. Plan for it. Do not fight it.
Description¶
October arrives. A cousin is getting married. You travel for four days. Two weeks later, a friend’s engagement. In December, another wedding, this one in another state, five days including travel. Meanwhile at home, family is asking pointed questions about your own timeline — when will you settle down, have you thought about it, so-and-so’s daughter is nice, why are you always at the laptop. In January, a friend’s wedding. In February, an uncle’s function. Deepavali sits somewhere in there and takes another weekend of prep and family.
Your personal-hour budget goes from 12 hours per week to 3 hours per week for a stretch of 4-8 weeks. Not because you’re lazy. Because you have a life. Because these events matter. Because your mother has been waiting for you to show up at your cousin’s wedding for a year, and you are going to show up.
The risk is not the lost hours. The risk is what you do about the lost hours — either grinding into 4 AM on the days you ARE home (bad), or letting the roadmap slip silently for two months and then panicking (worse), or feeling like you’re failing at both work AND family and losing motivation entirely (worst).
Warning signals¶
Three consecutive weeks under 8 personal-C hours.
Sprint retros keep saying “family” as the reason things slipped.
Guilt about being at family functions when you should be studying, AND guilt about studying when you should be at family functions. Two-way guilt is the specific signal.
You are packing your laptop to family weddings “just in case.” You will not use it, and you will resent bringing it.
You are declining family functions to code. This is the alarm. If you decline a wedding for the roadmap, you have already lost something more valuable than a sprint deliverable.
Mitigation¶
Primary: buffer weeks explicitly baked into Q3 and Q4. See 00_command/02_sprint_calendar.md. The buffer sprints S20 and S22 exist FOR this. Do not use them for catchup work; use them for family and lost time.
Secondary: the “brother, be a son first” permission clause. From 99_pre_mortem/08 — you have written permission from a calmer version of yourself to prioritize family. Use it. Do not code at the wedding. Do not check GitHub between the sangeet and the muhurtham. Be there. The compiler will forgive you.
Tertiary: scope down the current sprint, do not skip it. If a wedding takes 4 days out of a 14-day sprint, do not try to compress 14 days of work into 10. Cut the deliverable in half. Cut the outcomes from 3 to 1. Ship the one thing. That is a real sprint, not a failed one.
Quaternary: on the marriage-question front specifically. When your family raises it, don’t argue. Don’t defend the roadmap as the reason you’re not thinking about it. That’s a losing frame. The roadmap and the marriage question are separate conversations, and conflating them makes both worse. Address the marriage question on its own terms with your parents, honestly, whatever your actual position is.
Escalation trigger¶
If a full sprint is lost — zero deliverable, zero meaningful work — do NOT try to catch up in the next sprint. Apply the reset protocol. Formally re-baseline. The instinct will be to compress two sprints into one and “recover.” That instinct is exactly what turns one lost sprint into three lost sprints. Reset instead.
If two consecutive sprints are lost to family season, that is normal for this time of year and this life stage. Do not treat it as a crisis. Extend the timeline by a month formally in 00_command/01_month_by_month.md. Adjust and continue. The 13-month calendar is a plan, not a covenant. Sliding by a month is fine. Silently sliding by 3 months while pretending you’re on schedule is not.
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