Yearly Archives: 2010

What Are Your Task Types?

Flexibility is an unsung virtue. People want absolutes: “Do this, then do that, don’t deviate and then you’ll achieve success.” But we all know that absolutes are often false, and that context is king – in life, in work, and … Continue reading

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Inventory Makes Work

Lean talks a lot about inventory. A major tenet of Lean is to reduce inventory. Companies that stock up on too much stuff have to maintain that stuff, manage it, and then deal with it when it is no longer … Continue reading

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Personal Kanban Conversations – 3 Podcasts

Three Podcasts this year, more to come. Take a listen. Continue reading

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Guest Post: My Current Personal Kanban System

One of my favorite observations about using kanban-like systems for time management is that I have never drawn the same task board twice. Every system that I have designed has had some unique feature to it. Even if I start … Continue reading

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The Retrospective Column

When we make our work and our process explicit, and we do retrospectives, it makes sense to have a retrospective column in our Personal Kanban. The thought here is fairly simple: at the beginning of each day move tasks from … Continue reading

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Dependencies in Personal Kanban

Dependencies are things that occur in succession. One thing happens, then another thing can happen. Ideally, on a kanban, the value stream will visualize these transitions. For a value stream like this: Analysis -> Creation -> Refinement -> Launch refinement … Continue reading

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The Priority Filter: A Tutorial

Prioritization is often even more difficult and daunting as the tasks that confront you. A priority filter in your Personal Kanban helps you determine what tasks are ready in your queue, and the order of importance they should assume.  Click … Continue reading

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Am I Productive, Efficient, or Effective?

Productivity: having the power to produce Efficiency: the ratio of the output to the input of any system Effectiveness: being able to bring about a desired result Personal Kanban is considered a Productivity tool, because it gives us the power … Continue reading

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Respect Your Backlog and Manage It

Your backlog is bigger than it should be and it needs to be managed. Everyday people tell us how they are overwhelmed by their backlog, and cannot possibly manage it within a Personal Kanban because it could contain hundreds or … Continue reading

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Urgent and Important: Incorporating your existing tools into Personal Kanban

We’ve devised Personal Kanban to adapt to any system you might currently use (unless of course your preferred  system is utter chaos). The only two rules are visualize your work and limit work-in-progress (WIP). PK’s main goal is to get … Continue reading

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