Get Everything Done

(continued from http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2266501 )

Personal Kanban with Pomodoro

Personal Kanban alone helped me to visualize my overall workload, to identify my real commitments, and to keep them in focus by limiting WIP and thus restrict multitasking.

But when I combined the Kanban with the Pomodoro Technique, it’s like I *LIT A ROCKET* under my productivity and my sense of flow and accomplishment.

The Pomodoro Technique recommends that you work for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break. That 25-minute unit of work is called a Pomodoro. Complete a Pomodoro, take a short break, then do another one. After working four Pomodoros, you take a 15-minute break. There are even Pomodoro clocks, apps, etc.

By itself, this technique can be really effective in breaking down resistance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

And when combined with Personal Kanban, it’s really amazing. Here is how I combine them.

By default, each Sticky on my Kanban represents a single Pomodoro.

Small tasks (generally 15 minutes or less) don’t go on my Kanban – they go in my Quick Task list with my emails. I don't worry too much if a task ends up on the wrong list - it's easy to move it.

Large tasks might be 3 or 4 Pomodoros in all, or maybe a lot more. If they are more than 6 then I try to break them into smaller chunks. I do a quick estimate of how many Pomodoros it would take to complete the task, and write it on the sticky, for reference. For most of these, I work 1 Pomodoro at a time. But if I want to really focus on something, then I’ll block out as many Pomodoros as I can.

Planning my day is now really easy. I look at my calendar and see how much free time I have between meetings. I allocate a couple of 30-minute timeslots for handling email/paper and the tasks they generate. Then I see how many 30-minute blocks are remaining in the workday. For most days, it seems to be about 7, sometimes less, sometimes more. Let’s just say it’s 7.

OK, that means I can do 7 Pomodoros today. So I look at my kanban to figure out how I am going to allocate those 7 Pomodoros. First I check the “WIP” column (Work In Progress). There’s usually 1 or 2 stickies there – large tasks that didn’t get finished in one go. So I allocate 2 of my Pomodoros to finish those two items, or at least push them forward. If they are really big and/or urgent, then maybe I’ll allocate an extra Pomodoro or two to them.

But for now, let’s say I’ve allocated 2 Pomodoros to those WIP items. That means I have 5 Pomodoros remaining. That means I get to put 5 Pomodoros of new work into my Today column. So I look over my Committed column and my Today column to see what’s there. If things are running well, Today should be empty. But sometimes there are some tasks left over from yesterday. It doesn’t really matter. I just need to make sure I re-arrange the stickies so I have 5 Pomodoros in my Today column right now.

I then block off all the time on my calendar so nobody tries to schedule a same-day meeting and ruin my plan. :-) They can always call or IM, and I can tolerate some interruptions (see comments below on "slack").

Then I just bang through the day, following my calendar for the day, attending my meetings, clearing my in-baskets, and moving all my stickies from Today to WIP to Done. The time just flies by; I get a lot done, which I can actually SEE; and I feel like I am focused on the right things.

At work, I generally finish all my Today stuff. At home, it's harder to predict the impact of interruptions and family "emergencies", but I usually still finish most of my Today commitments. (My goal is to ALWAYS finish my Today commitments!)

If I am going through a period where there are lots of interruptions, then I can write “Slack” on a stickie and allocate 1 or 2 Pomodoros to that, and put it in my Today column. That allows me to keep some time set aside for interruptions. I don’t seem to need this anymore, but at first it was helpful.

If I get new work that must be done the same day and will take at least a Pomodoro of work, then I write it on a sticky and put it in a “fast track” row at the bottom of my kanban. It works the same way you draw a line in DIT, and put new same-day tasks below the line. If I already allocated some Pomodoros for Slack, then there’s probably no issue. If I have no Slack, then I may need to leave something in Today undone. I can decide that immediately, and choose which Sticky to move back from Today to Committed.

When my Committed column starts to clear up, I allocate a Pomodoro to review my Collecting sheet, and decide what new things to move to Committed.

If I fall into my usual habits and collect way too much stuff on my Collecting sheet, then I can just start a new one. Maybe allocate a Pomodoro to review and prune.

If I get buried in meetings or business trips, or if I get sick, then I can just leave everything the way it is. It will wait till I get back. Worst case: it all goes stale, and I need to move everything from WIP and Committed back over to Collecting, and review/prune all my Collecting to see where I stand. That might take a couple hours to sort out, if I need to go through all of it. I can take it all with me into a conference room with a white board and organize all the stickies into groups on the white board, and then figure out what to do with it all.

If ALL of it just looks stale or creates resistance, I can take away all the stickies, put them in a file drawer, and start from scratch. I’ve done that once or twice and it works fine. Later I can review the old stickies and see if there’s anything worth keeping, and toss the rest. I can also try changing around the columns, adding new columns, adding sidebar columns like "waiting for" and "fast track" or whatever. Recently I've been trying out a "Tickler" column for things that are "Committed" but don't need to be seen till a certain date.


How does this help me get more focus time?

First of all, it helps me see plainly WHY I can’t focus, if I simply have too much going on, too many commitments, too much piling up in my Collecting sheet. I can visually see the bottlenecks. It’s interesting, I can even take a few steps away from my kanban sheet, and look at it, and figure out where the bottlenecks are, without even seeing the details written on each sticky. Too many commitments? Too much backlog? Always working on too many things at the same time? It's all easy to see. It takes a few seconds to diagnose the issue, so it’s easier to take corrective action sooner, instead of waiting till it just all grinds to a halt.

Second, it gives me a SIMPLE MECHANISM for carving out focus time. I just take a sticky – maybe a BIG sticky, maybe a different color, maybe same size and color but written with a heavy marker, etc. – and write how many Pomodoros I want to commit to that task TODAY. Three or four is a good start, to get some deep focus time. I try to fit that in.

Sometimes, there are just too many other commitments right now, too many deadlines, etc., and I can’t give more than 1 or 2 Pomodoros to my focus project – enough to keep it going, but not enough to really get into deep focus time with it. That’s OK, as long as it’s temporary.

One thing I want to try, but haven’t: put a limit on the number of Stickies in the Committed column, not just the WIP column. Right now, there’s a practical limit of 24 stickies, because the sheet won’t hold more than that. But it’s hard to get any focus time at all, when there are even just 12 or 15 stickies in Committed. The really cool thing is actually being able to IDENTIFY the fact that 12-15 stickies is my real limit, if I want to be able to have focus time for anything. I don’t know how I could have arrived at that information with any other method. Not even DIT could tell me how much was too much, except in a reactive way when I would fall too far behind and trigger an audit of commitments. Kanban makes it easy to establish simple effective limits and SEE them in action.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

Complete Personal Kanban for home, including Collect and Tickler:
http://www.dropbox.com/sc/qjct28pnksywp29/OWTYW7LLbr

The main sheet (Committed, Today, WIP, Done) folds up very nicely:
http://www.dropbox.com/sc/hpklsso6dun6iqz/zCGbqioiZ6

Down to 8.5"x11" - easy to take with me:
http://www.dropbox.com/sc/th5vagh15pfxh4c/BOPlwBJ9Da


Yellow = "overhead" / recurring

Orange = personal and family projects

Red = volunteer stuff

Bernie - remember those discussions we had about a "dashboard", where you could see everything, evaluate where you are just by looking at it, see your main commitments but everything else too, and while the system "guides" you to act in a certain way (e.g., bias toward WIP), you still have freedom to make whatever decision you want without violating any "rules"?

This setup works like that! :-)

Hi Alan,

No, I just use an ordinary sticky.

I think you are asking how it handles projects and the individual tasks that belong to projects? Is that correct?

I know many of us have struggled with how to handle that in AF1 or FV or whatever, but for some reason that hasn't really been a problem here. Sometimes I write the project name at the top of the sticky , then draw a horizontal line, then write one or two tasks that need to be done. Yes, I do that pretty often, come to think of it. I'll usually write " project x - what's next?" if there is no specific task in mind.

I'll give this some more thought. Thanks!

@Kiwi Erik - good questions!

I don't plan out the whole day in advance. I just block out time for "pomodoros". When my calendar says it's time for pomodoro work, I look at my kanban board. I check the WIP column and the Today column, and then decide what to do for this pomodoro. I usually choose something already in the WIP column, because I like to move things from WIP to DONE.

I have a pomodoro app on my iPhone ( https://itunes.apple.com/app/simple-pomodoro-timer/id496191025 ). When I start the pomodoro, I start the timer. It clearly shows how much time is remaining in the current pomodoro. And it gives a little "ding" when it's done. I try to follow Mark Forster's recommendation to STOP IMMEDIATELY, even if in the middle of typing a word, and take the 5 minute break.

If I've allocated more than 1 pomodoro for that task, then I usually go back to that task after the short break, and continue working for another pomodoro. But sometimes I decide to work on a different task.

So you see, the whole day is NOT scheduled. In the past, I did try scheduling every pomodoro, and it just doesn't work for me, it's not flexible enough, and it creates resistance, just like you said. I would feel that I had locked myself into a prison cell for the day.

The kanban-pomodoro technique is much more responsive to my changing moods and energy levels during the day. As long as I choose something in the Today column, and only spend the allocated number of pomodoros on each task, I can be pretty well assured of getting a lot accomplished and feeling pretty good about it. And the day just flies by.

I hope that answers your question... Let me know if not!

Another reason I don't schedule out my whole day, is it just isn't flexible enough. Sometimes there are interruptions, or sometimes I didn't estimate time very well.

Small interruptions don't bother much. But if an interruption takes 20 or 30 minutes, then I may need to move an item from Today back to Committed, or just resign myself to not completing all my Today items. If interruptions are an ongoing problem, then I can adopt the habit of assigning 1 or 2 pomodoros to Slack.

The kanban is also flexible when I grossly underestimate the time required to complete an item that is under a deadline. In that case, I may need to keep pushing forward on that item, even if I exceed the number of pomodoros I assigned to that task at the beginning of the day. It's pretty easy to deal with, since I can just move some other task from Today back to Committed, to make room for the extra pomodoro. Also, this becomes less of a problem over time, as I get better at estimating my work and breaking it down into pomodoros.

When these things happen, I usually don't actually move stickies from Today back to Committed immediately - I just let it sit the way it is, and see how the day progresses. Maybe I can still get everything done, if some of the items actually take less than a full pomodoro to complete. It's easy to re-arrange the stickies inside the Today column to show some kind of priority -- I usually put the top 1-2 items at the "top" of the column, and let the rest sit below somewhere.

As I am blasting through my pomodoros this afternoon, I thought of another reason why this approach doesn't seem to create resistance. As soon as a pomodoro starts, I feel a sense of urgency to jump into it and see how much I can get done. It's only 25 minutes, after all!

Some of the resources out there on the pomodoro technique say you can start with 15 minutes or even less, if it helps you kickstart the process. It's pretty easy to say to oneself, "I hate this task, but I can deal with it for 15 minutes".

Kiwi Erik - I'm glad you are gleaning something useful from all this! :-)

I struggle with having so little discretionary time also, especially for personal/family/volunteer projects. My next post will talk a little about that, and how Pomodoros have helped me with it. The tentative title is "It's OK not to be a morning person". :-)

Hey! Someone else is doing Pomorodos combined with Kanban!
http://kanbanflow.com/pomodoro-technique