The “Focus” I wanted
When I started using Personal Kanban what I was looking for was a system to help me get more things done. I wanted something to focus my time and energy so I could DO MORE THINGS and squeeze more productivity out of every single minute. We’re all only on this planet for a short period of time… I felt like my job was to get as many things done as I possibly could.
When I started, I asked a colleague of mine to act as my coach. What I was looking for was someone I could trust to hold up the mirror when need be and someone who be willing to call me out on stuff when I cheated because I know myself well enough to know that there was a 100% chance that would happen.
The “Focus” I got
Maybe If I had started following other productivity systems with the aid of a coach they would have worked better for me, but maybe not. I can say that having someone act as a coach for me as I got started with Personal Kanban was a big part of why it had such a huge impact on me. In addition to creating a board and working the items on it, the person coaching me asked me to do a few other things. One of the things he asked me to do was to sign up for a happiness tracking tool that would ping me throughout the day to ask me what I was doing and assess how much joy it was bringing me. He also asked me to make notes about how I was working. I started keeping notes about what things I was getting done each day and what I was not getting done each day.
What I found was that the things I felt I needed to “focus” on the most were often not really that important and were being done at the expense of things that were either more important (like things that had a deadline or dependency) and things that didn’t look important but were critical to self-care and maintenance (like playing guitar and meditation).
I think this was maybe the first massive epiphany I got from using PK… learning that it wasn’t really that I wasn’t focused… I’m actually pretty good at being focused. The issue was that I was focused on things that were not the most important things.
The “Focus” I have now
I’ve been working with Personal Kanban for almost 10 years. I tend to think of this as a practice, not a thing I do. In the same way that I have a meditation practice. There is no end goal… just an evolving, learning engagement. The way I practice Personal Kanban has changed a lot over the years and the way I do it now is very different from how I started. At some point along the way, my idea of “focus” changed as well. While I started with a “focus” on getting things done, what I am focused on now is deepening my understanding of how I work, the choices I make, and why I am doing what I do. Instead of “how do I get more done?” I’m curious about why certain things do and don’t get done. Little by little, I am getting better at letting the board teach me ways to be better at working.