Don’t strain your brain, paint a train
You’ll be singing’ in the rain…- Blondie
Action over Words
Your brain is a muscle. As we repeat certain actions, our “muscle memory” becomes comfortable with those actions, and programs itself to anticipate them. As it trains itself to anticipate them, it optimizes for them. This is the basis of kaizen, continuous improvement. Your brain gets used to your workflow, it becomes an subconscious process, and so it looks for ways to do things better.
Smoother.
Faster.
You get sensitized to completion. Sensitized to waste.
So using Personal Kanban on a regular basis, through its visual and tactile interactions, sensitizes you to the building blocks of success.
Tell me and I forget.
Show me and I remember.
Let me do and I understand.- Confucius
Simply put: your brain responds very well to doing. The active nature of Personal Kanban is what your brain wants. Confucius figured this out 1700 years ago.
Managing your workload with static lists, while they can help you organize, doesn’t have the same brain-training impact as having a visual tool like Personal Kanban. Lists don’t involve motor skills or elements of flow.
Lists merely “tell you.”
Personal Kanban both shows you, and lets you do.
Image by Rob Web
This is fascinating and thought-provoking, Jim. Thank you.
Just ran across this site via a Twitter search for #GTD. I’m fascinated, and have to say that the whole Kanban concept definitely feels like a breath of fresh air in my GTD system. However, I’m still very confused on how I can meld the Kanban concept with my very, very established GTD workflow. Do PROJECTS go into the WIP area or do discrete physical actions? If the latter, I’m not sure this could be functional for me, as I’m completing actions on projects constantly, all over the city, without much access to a whiteboard. I guess I’m just stuck on the implementation part of this – the idea is fantastic, but how does it work? I guess I can keep watching and learning, but I’d be interested to get a reply to this query…
Eric,
Thank you for the thoughtful comment.
I’d first direct you to the existing body of work here for PK and GTD
There’s a couple of ways you could carry this around with you.
The first is to use an on-line product like Agile Zen and use it with a netbook (I do).
The next is to use a folder or folio and use the top to track backlog and the bottom to track WIP and completed tasks.
Levenger and others sell folios that have sections cut out to hold note cards. Watch for a future post on these kind of portable systems.
Our InfoPak3 has a lot of design patterns – take a look at the time capsule approach. One of the reasons we set that up on the top of a desk was to show that when it comes to Personal Kanban – you can take it with you.
As for WIP – in Personal Kanban – the discrete tasks go into your WIP. But the level of granularity is ultimately up to you. If a project works better for you – or a portion of a project – then that is great. I mean, sometimes in my Personal Kanban it might say, “Make dinner”. But it does not have individual tickets for “take steak from fridge”, “prep steak”, “pour a sink of water to soak bok choy….” etc.
One thing you’ll find here, we will give you implementation ideas, but we are trying to keep the “rules” as minimal as possible. Personal Kanban should be as free and adaptable as it can.
Thank you again for the comment.
Jim
Jim,
That’s very helpful. After making the comment, I decided just to go for it and see what works. I find, due to the extremely well implemented and ingrained nature of my GTD system, an integrated approach is going to be (for now) the best way to move forward. As I fiddled with it, I found that my projects are really what works best in WIP for now… but my projects tend to be quite small, somewhere between “write the blog post” and “make a PB&J” … more than one step (ala David Allen) but less than, say, 10.
I’ll keep working on it, and definitely look forward to reading more. Thanks!
Eric
Eric,
Please keep us posted on your progress. The only way we can improve Personal Kanban and expand the body of knowledge surrounding it is by learning what works and what doesn’t for others.
Truly appreciate your input,
Tonianne
Tonianne – thanks!
So far, I’ve got two problems with my implementation. First, the number of “someday/maybe” and just generally inactive projects on my various lists are MANY. There’s simply no way I would want to make a virtual or real sticky note/card for every one of those and put them in backlog. Most of them represent ideas for projects that I have no intention of moving on right now, but they were in my system so I can keep track of them. While in the GTD system this is perfectly fine, I realize that for my mind this huge amount of dross was weighing me down.
Working on the Personal Kanban (right now using Agilezen) has forced me to look at every single project and do one of three things with it:
1. Make it a “true” Someday/maybe/bluesky project – kept in my database to be glanced at every couple of weeks during a weekly review.
2. Make it a “backlog” item – something I want to move on pretty soon, but I have not committed to having my focus on RIGHT NOW.
3. Make it WIP (I have a five item limit right now).
That’s fine, but I had one problem. Some of #2 and #3 were single actions (non-projects) and some were projects. To bring the Kanban down to granularity of single actions would be a HUGE amount of effort (pulling already determined actions out of my GTD system into the Kanban). Instead – I’m keeping a Kanban card referencing the project, and keeping the project in my already existing GTD system. So, when I see that card in active, I know it refers to a project plan and I go check on the next action in my system. It seems to be working, but I know it isn’t ideal.
The other problem I’ve run into is fairly minor, and I’m actually not going to detail it here, now. I’ve only just discovered the system, so I’m going to work it this week and see how it goes. I’ll let you know when I have something to report.
Thanks again for all of your hard work.
Eric
Eric,
I would say you are exactly where you want to be right now. You have an existing system (GTD) that manages your backlog.
In software Dev, I tell my clients to use something like VersionOne to manage their backlog and a kanban to visualize it. They, too, need to make decisions of granularity when figuring out their tasks.
At the moment, you are comfortable using GTD as your backlog. Change is good, Bewildering Change is not so good. Keep managing your backlog where it’s working.
Then, experiment with your granularity. What you might find is that you have a Master project-level kanban. But for your daily work you might have mission-based kanban or things like that desk post I mentioned yesterday.
Actually, check out the mission-based kanban and see what you think. It might be another way of visualizing that works better for you.
Jim
Hey Jim,
My system develops every hour, so who knows where I end up!
I’m investigating the mission-based Kanban, but as far as granularity, I do think the desk idea could be a good one to use. Just working with my system today, I realized that while I may have 3-5 “projects” I’m working on during any given period of time (let’s say per week) really I can only work on one at any given moment.
This last statement, is, in fact a revolution for me. Even though I’ve always understood it conceptually, something about the GTD system never allowed me that realization. So thanks for that.
Anyway, I can see a system working out that utilizes the desk example with great granularity of tasks, where those tasks are coming solely from my 5 WIP projects (the master project level kanban)…
A little hard to visualize without doing it a few times, but I’ll use it this week and see how it goes.
Thanks for your great ongoing responses. It’s definitely helping!
Eric
One more quick question – software tools. You talked about Agilezen, and I do find it to be tremendously helpful. However, I’m not quite ready to invest the money to allow for more Kanban, and having only one available means that I cannot experiment (making a project or mission based Kanban alongside my “master” Kanban, for instance). Any ideas of other software tools that can be used? Any in development?
Thanks again,
Eric
New loyal convert
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Eric,
have a look at http://code.qbranch.se/archive/2009/12/Qanban-01-Released
It’s not very functional yet, but may be it will get over time.
Thomas