Work 100% on one thing at a time and decrease your cycle time (length of sprint) to allow for rapid shifts. If you have to go to a 3-day cycle time -- as long

Work 100% on one thing at a time and decrease your cycle time (length of sprint) to allow for rapid shifts. If you have to go to a 3-day cycle time -- as long as you are 100% dedicated -- do that. This, of course, assumes you've understood the agile/scrum concepts enough that you can scale them down to a few minutes each. If you're still having 30-minute standups and 4-hour sprint planning sessions, my advice is not going to work. Here's the thing: no matter how stressed out and context-switching the work environment is, you can only work on one thing. So can you predict what you are going to deliver and then deliver it? If you can't -- if you can't even predict day-to-day what you are going to do -- then you're well and truly hosed. Scrum or agile isn't going to fix that. (BTW, there's another answer if you are truly in an environment without any structure at all. In that case, I'd look seriously at some lightweight kanban)