Category Archives: DesignPatterns

Personal Kanban Interview on Agile Scout

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Jim Benson

Agile Scout’s Peter Saddington interviews Jim Benson about Personal Kanban and the release of the book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life. ASL005 – LIVE with Jim Benson Personal Kanban from Agile Scout on Vimeo.

Posted in DesignPatterns, Featured, Product | 1 Comment

How I Cook

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Jim Benson

I frustrate people when I give cooking classes. They want measures. They want me to tell them what to do. Cooking isn’t like that. Cooking is about flavor, it’s about texture, it’s about the experience. It’s not about tablespoons or … Continue reading →

Posted in DesignPatterns, Expert, Primers | 1 Comment

Motivation Through Visualization: Seeing What is Really Important

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Jim Benson

When we wake up in the morning, we have a pretty good idea what we want to get done that day. To make those daily goals explicit, we created the Today (link) column for Personal Kanban. Our Personal Kanban serves … Continue reading →

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Kanban for Short Intense Projects: How We Used Kanban to Visualize Our Hiring Process Workflow and Make Our Lives Easier

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Matthew Moran

This is how we used Kanban techniques to visualize our hiring workflow, empower hiring process participants, and give executives a bird’s eye view on a short term project. For many companies, hiring is something that happens in spurts rather than … Continue reading →

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Would You, Could You on a Plane?

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Jim Benson

As a matter of fact, yes. I boarded the first leg of my flight from Seattle to Hanoi. I had 19 hours of flying ahead of me. I also had a backlog, and no wifi. Agile Zen was not going … Continue reading →

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Complex Lives Pt 2: Visualizing Real Work

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Jim Benson

In part one of Complex Lives, we set a Future in Progress (FIP) limit for Jessica, a busy and active single mom. Her goals were overwhelming her ability to get things done. So we reigned them in by giving her … Continue reading →

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When Good Tasks Go Bad

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Jim Benson

Yesterday we were introduced to Richard, who is juggling the demands of several clients trying to keep each of them happy. His largest project entails working alone on a client’s mission-critical legacy system. So in the last blog post we … Continue reading →

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Guest Post: My Current Personal Kanban System

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Corey_Ladas

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

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Jim Benson

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

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Jim Benson

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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