Get Everything Done

Deep Focus Journey – Part 2 – Personal Kanban

(continued from http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2265905 )

OK, the inbox is under control. But I still have all these projects and ideas to sort out, prioritize, and act on. I need to figure out which ones to focus on. I need to have a clear and easy method for doing this, otherwise I will waste all my focus time doing nothing (as I learned from personal experience!).

For my own personal working style, I need to see “everything” in front of me, so I can group, organize, prioritize, see connections and patterns, and finally, make decisions. I learned this from doing “commitment audits” with DIT – I’d take a big piece of paper, 17”x22”, and start doing a “mind map”. I’d usually fill the whole sheet. I’d write down tasks, ideas, priorities, goals, commitments. I’d scratch things out and move them around, group them together, draw lines to connect things. After an hour or two, I’d have a much better idea of what to drop, what to postpone, and where to focus right now.

The problem was the “hour or two”. This was intense work, and left me drained. It was very valuable, but too time-consuming for my fast-paced world.

Then I re-discovered “personal kanban”, and realized it does all the same things, but in a much more systematic way, more easily maintainable. And it has all kinds of other side benefits as well.

Kanban (sometimes known here as “the K word”) has a bad rap on these forums, but I think that’s because it hasn’t really been explained really well. The methodology started in manufacturing as a means of using informational cards and other visual cues for managing inventories. It still means that, but has also broadened in meaning and usage. “Personal Kanban” typically means writing out your tasks and projects on cards or stickies, and arranging them in such a way that you can visualize your work more effectively. This can be dynamic and freeform, or it can be rigid and structured, or whatever you want – whatever helps you to visualize your work most effectively, so you can SEE your overall workload, your bottlenecks, your backlogs, work-in-progress, and accomplishments.

There are really only two rules for “personal kanban”:
1. Visualize your work. This means to get it all out where you can see it. The most common method seems to be to write everything down on stickies, and organize them on a wall or board. Stickies are helpful because you can easily re-arrange things. Their uniformity in size, shape, color, etc., also helps.
2. Limit your work-in-progress. In other words, don’t start more than a limited number of tasks – don’t keep more than a certain number of things going at once. This rule leads to all kinds of interesting results, such as a preference for completion over starting; a preference for focus over multitasking; and the ability to more easily visualize the cause of stoppages and backlogs.

For more on personal kanban, see:
http://www.amazon.com/Personal-Kanban-Mapping-Work-Navigating-ebook/dp/B004R1Q642
http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/blog

I generally implement Personal Kanban like this:
1. I keep a sheet of paper, maybe 8.5”x11” or A4, maybe something a lot larger, depending on my current needs. This first sheet is my “collecting” sheet, for collecting tasks and projects.
2. I then write down tasks and projects on sticky notes, and put the sticky notes on the sheet of paper. Small tasks (<15 minutes or so) go into my “Quick Tasks” and are handled with my emails. Everything else goes onto a stickie.
3. I clip this sheet to the wall near my desk, so I can see it.
4. I take another sheet of paper – this one is more structured, and it’s always a large sheet, 17”x22” (close to A2).
5. I fold it in half a couple times, then unfold it – the creases create column boundaries for four columns. I write the headers for the columns as follows: Committed, Today, WIP (Work In Progress), and Done. This second sheet is my “working” sheet, only for COMMITTED work that I have consciously accepted as a commitment, and expect to get it completed.
6. I clip the “working” sheet to the wall next to the “collecting” sheet.
7. I spend most of my discretionary time on the “working” sheet. When I have finished some work and have room for more tasks, I can pull in some more tasks from the “collecting” sheet. It’s really nice because I can *visually see* that I have room for more tasks (or not). It’s not just an assessment of how busy I feel.
8. When I leave work, I unclip the “working” sheet, fold it up, and take it home. I can then clip it next to my desk at home. Or I can take it with me when I am travelling.
9. I leave the “collecting” sheet on the wall at work. If I am going on a business trip, or will be working from home for a couple of days, I make sure I have enough work on my “working” sheet to keep me busy.

That’s how I use personal kanban for my work. I do the same thing for my family/volunteer stuff (I have one set of “working”/“collecting” sheets for my job, and another set for family/personal/volunteer stuff).

This method is flexible, portable, easy to see how much work I currently have. It’s also easy to show to my manager or my wife and talk about priorities, deadlines, etc. But mainly it’s an easy way to get everything out in front of me so I can see it all – and KEEP it there, and give it some order, structure, and flow. I don’t have to sit down for 2 hours to write it all up – I just keep it maintained all the time. It’s easy.

When we first discussed personal kanban in this forum, someone named Erik proposed using a little pocket notebook for his personal kanban. I couldn’t imagine doing it that way – I have AT LEAST ten times as many stickies in play than would fit in a little pocket notebook. By having a large “collecting” sheet for all the new things, and a large “working” sheet for the committed active work, and setting them up so I can easily fold them and take them with me, I get all the benefits of Erik’s system but with a much larger and more flexible format. It really does allow me to visualize my work, to see it all laid out, to see the competing priorities, to see the backlogs and the natural workflow that develops.

Did I say it’s flexible? If I want, I can easily take out a new sheet of paper, and try a new set of columns, let’s say for a special project of some kind. Or if I get a sudden urgent assignment from my manager and need to give it my exclusive focus for the day, I will usually just start making a project list. But if it starts getting complicated and I want to visualize it better, I can start capturing the major tasks on stickies and arrange them on a whiteboard, organizing into groups or columns or swimlanes or whatever works. A whiteboard is nice, because it’s so easy to redraw columns and groupings. If I want to take it with me and don’t have time to move the stickies to a sheet of paper, I can just take a quick photo with my phone and email it to myself.

Also, for some reason, it’s kinda fun to move stickies around on a board. It makes it feel like a game.

BTW, if you count the number of "Mark Forsterisms" (principles advocated by Mark in his many systems or books or elsewhere on this site) embedded in the above methodology, it's probably in the double digits. :-)

Alan, does Simplemind provide a mechanism for limiting WIP? It has a lot of benefits.

Alan, I had in mind the flags and markers that some mind-mapping tools use. I used one tool at work - I think it was MindJet - that allowed you to add a series of priorities to the ovals. You could check them off as "completed" and it would re-order the remaining ones. If you clicked on a new oval it would automatically give it the next priority number. You could also do filters on different kinds of flags, and flags could be integrated with Microsoft Outlook tasks, etc.

I thought maybe SimpleMind, might have some similar tagging mechanism but I couldn't remember from my brief playing around with it on the iPhone.

BTW, Kanban does have a good mechanism for limiting WIP - you simply run out of space! :-) (This is more effective than it might seem!)

vegheadjones - Wow, that's great! Let us know how it goes!

Also, don't get discouraged if it doesn't start to "flow" right away - it takes some trial and error to figure out what columns work for you -- what they actually mean -- and what your team rules should be for moving things from one column to another.

One coworker and I have a board that is basically the same as my personal board (Collect > Committed > Today > WIP > Done) except it replaces "Today" with "This Week", and it adds a "Peer Review" column between WIP and Done. This cadence works better for us as a team, and it ensures that we stay aligned in expectations and outcomes.

The best part of all this is the discussion that arises from standing in front of that board with your team - you can get so many insights into your team's work, its dependencies and relationships, team members strengths and weaknesses, how long things really take to get done, what "done" really means, what work doesn't really need to be done at all, etc.

Here's an article that discusses some of the things that can go wrong with Kanban:
http://mikaellundgren.blogspot.com/2010/03/should-we-ban-kanban.html

For example: Putting tasks with greatly-variable size on a kanban board can be confusing and disruptive. Combining kanban with pomodoro helps address this issue but doesn't automatically make it go away.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from using kanban - it's just good to be aware of some of the gotchas.

I thought it might be relevant for vegheadjones, who said he was going to try implementing a kanban for his team.

Also: team-centric kanban and other disciplines like Agile and Lean are not designed for individuals, you are right. But I've still found many of the principles apply to individual time management.

For example: minimum viable product (an Agile concept) can extend very well to managing my own individual work: identifying the minimum necessary to call something "done" and leaving everything else for later assessment.

Also, there's a book on applying Lean principles to personal productivity, called A Factory of One, by Daniel Markovitz - it looks very promising. http://afactoryofone.com/

Alan, I am very glad you could glean something from all this stuff! Let me know how it works out.

I usually save up the "done" until end of the week, and then remove the Done stickies from the kanban, and write them down in idonethis.com, or into a tracking log for my manager. But otherwise, I do exactly what you say here, just pull things forward as needed, working the board from right to left (from Done to WIP to Today to Committed to Collecting).

Here is a good, informative podcast on whether to use a digital kanban, versus a physical/paper kanban. It's mostly talking about team kanbans, but there are still many good insights here that apply to personal kanban. It's also interesting how a lot of this applies to the age-old discussions we've had on this forum about paper vs digital in general.

http://www.thisagilelife.com/31/

Chris, how do you like Factory of One? I bought the Kindle version and have been browsing and poking around while on a trip this weekend. I am really astonished at how many of the things I've been implementing have been described almost exactly the same in this book, but with much more maturity, detail, and Lean best practice baked into it, in the book, compared to my own poor stumblings.

For example: several weeks ago I took a detour from my Kanban to try using my Calendar to manage all my tasks, which Cal Newport, Ramit Sethi, and others advocate. But I found it too restrictive, too frustrating, not responsive enough to my changing environment and priorities.

I felt like I needed a buffer to collect stuff before feeding it into my calendar. Looking closely at some of these other people's systems, I realized they were sometimes doing the same thing - for example, Cal Newport had a block on his calendar called "urgent tasks", which obviously means he's captured a list of urgent tasks somewhere else -- they are not all simply entered into his calendar.

I pondered over what the ideal buffer might be - and suddenly realized I already had it! That's exactly the purpose of my personal kanban. It allows me to structure my inputs together with my own thoughts and strategies, and cue them up to feed into the calendar in a very orderly and structured way. But it's not so over-structured as to prevent flexibility.

I was astonished to read that Daniel Markovitz recommends exactly the same thing in his book! He first recommends putting everything in your calendar - blocking out time for tasks and projects - but if you find it too restrictive or inflexible, to try using a personal kanban with Pomodoros instead!!