None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. ~ Henry Jenkins via Jabe Bloom

This was one of Jabe’s slides.

It reminds me of a discussion I had while I was living in DC with a recently retired CIA friend. We were discussing how intelligence was gathered in the past, and how current reality was more complex. Before we had a few, easily defined enemies who behaved according to fairly predictable patterns.

The Bad News

Today, we are working against a more amorphous “enemy.” By definition, the amorphous enemy is less defined. Because it is less defined we know less about it. Because we know less about it, it is more scary. Because it is more scary, it is more stressful.

In short, our enemies have become more complex, unknown, and scary.

This means two very important things.

1. We can’t have one standard response to threats

2. We are going to imagine a lot more danger than is actually there

In our own work, we feel these threats all the time. Too many tasks, too many data streams, too much stuff coming from too many directions. We don’t have time to think, let alone collaborate.

The Good News

The good news is that we can use Jabe’s quote from Jenkins to deal with this complexity more effectively. And we approach Jenkin’s counsel through Limiting WIP.

In our personal lives, we have the same problem as the CIA. The CIA has too many avenues of input. Too many distractions. And, oddly enough, too many experts. The only way they can solve their problems is through collaboration. The only way they can truly collaborate is to understand their own work and have the capacity for collaboration.

The CIA used to have a linear problem. One, two, three other countries that were potential threats. Now they have an exponential problem. Potential threats that can form, execute, and disband before anyone knows who they are or why they did it.

The CIA cannot solve their exponential problems with the linear problem solving solutions of the past. They cannot rely on solitary agents or even small groups. The organization as a whole needs to collaborate to remain effective.

When I was growing up, I could choose between 4 TV channels, the telephone and maybe a movie at the theater for incoming streaming media. Outside that, I could read a book, magazine, or newspaper. Or maybe I could listen to music on my stereo or Walkman.

At that time, we thought that was a pretty lengthy list. But it was a linear list. I could filter them out simply by walking away from them.

The other day during a lunch with a friend, my Android Phone buzzed non-stop with tweets, text messages, Facebook updates, Foursquare updates, phone calls, and emails. Finally, I shut it off. I had to apply “aggressive filtering” to my lunch. But that was not enough.

The number of distractions we have grows as the number of avenues for distractions grow. Not only that, but – like the CIA fearing more danger than is really there – even when the phone wasn’t vibrating, I was waiting for it to vibrate. Even when I shut the phone off, I could feel it was off and was vaguely worrying I was missing out on something. However, I was able to focus much more intently on my conversation.

When we limit our WIP, we are filtering our work. We are filtering distraction, filtering data sources, filtering complexity. But that is only a temporary solution. Just like if the CIA only focused on one hot-spot, they could focus, but they would be ignoring everything else. But their collaboration would mean nothing if there weren’t sub-groups actively focusing on specific tasks.

In this case, we want to limit our WIP so that we can focus in the service of becoming very aware of what we are doing, what we are not doing, and why. This lets us know, very well, what we know so we can begin to pool our resources and combine our skills. In our increasingly complex world, our role as individuals is changing. There’s too many things going on at once for any of us to take in, process, and act on.

When we limit our WIP, we are recognizing that we can either pay attention to some things with great effectiveness, or we can pay attention to many things with little effectiveness. If we choose the first path, we are creators, if we choose the second path, we are consumers.

Lastly, when we limit WIP and calm our own complexity, we are better able to find others to collaborate with, to add our unique value, and to create stronger teams. As we collaborate, we learn more about other disciplines and find ways to incorporate that learning our future work.

The word conjures up images of slothfulness, of days spent lazying about in a seaside hammock beneath the fronds of a blowing palm tree.

But relaxation is not necessarily sloth. Just because someone or something appears to not be fully utilized is not an indication of their disutility.

Consider the belts in your car’s engine. In order to operate effectively, they can’t be too tense, they must have some give. Engine optimization relies on belts having the appropriate amount of slack.

It’s the same with our work. We need slack for our own optimization. In our work, we’d like to have a degree of slack to:

1. Make sure we are able to focus on the tasks at hand;
2. Make sure we have the capacity to deal with unforeseen events;
3. Make sure we can stop periodically to allow our brains to perform vital functions in memory, processing, and regeneration; and especially to
4. Make sure we don’t work ourselves into an early grave.

When we have unlimited WIP, we tend to start multiple tasks concurrently, and then run in circles trying to complete them. As we’ve discussed in our previous posts in this series, overwork creates additional work, heightens stress, and results in a poor quality product.

Focus on Tasks at Hand

Slack allows us to focus on the tasks at hand simply by giving us the ability to work in a non-freaked, sans-OMFG state. In the absence of slack, we aren’t only working on our current task, we’re fretting because we know there are countless other tasks we’ve started and that they demand completion. We live with an underlying fear that something, somewhere will break and when it does, it’ll be unlikely we’ll be able to deal with it.

Slack is, in the end, a recognition that our time, our brainpower and our emotional fortitude are all limited. If we tax all these resources, we will not be able to do the work on our plate or deal with unforeseen events.

Unforeseen Events

When we’re overloaded with work, we invite panic. We invite emergencies. When we have zero capacity for new work, additional work exacerbates our overload. The thing is, unforeseen events are inevitable; they happen all the time. We can’t predict the future, we can only give ourselves the slack to deal with whatever may come our way – good or otherwise.

If we have three tasks in process and something unexpected comes along, we – at worst – have four tasks in flight. This is still a substantial number less than most people currently have.  This doesn’t make the unforeseen event a welcome one, but it does make it a manageable one.

Rest, Processing, and Catch-up

Francesco Cirillo’s simple yet profoundly powerful Pomodoro Technique invites us to use a timer set to 25 minutes during which we focus without distraction. The timer’s ring alerts us to rest. The ratio suggested is 25 minutes of work to 5 minutes of rest – and then repeat (taking an even longer break after 4 successive pomodori). This isn’t merely to let us have a “coffee break.” Our brains need recharge points.

The brain is not some easy going organ…it’s a resource hog.

When we’re working intently on something, our brain burns a lot of calories, uses a lot of water, and gets tired. Allowing periodic points of slack allows us to hydrate, grab a snack, and recharge.

Not only this, but the brain also works in three memory modes: short term, mid term, and long term. Having slack and taking breaks allows the brain to pause and write vital information from short to mid term memory. The more we overload ourselves with work, the more we forget.

Stayin’ Alive

As we can see, without incorporating slack into our work day, we end up taking on too much work, too much stress, and with too little down time. These factors decrease happiness and longevity. That’s not a good thing.

We limit our WIP specifically to achieve a comprehensible workload that allows us to complete, understand the costs of our choices, make better decisions, and react elegantly to life’s surprises.

With only two guiding principles – Visualize your work and Limit your WIP – much of Personal Kanban seems fairly straightforward. But it’s not as obvious as it seems, and there’s actually a lot going on under the hood.

Tons, actually. So let’s discuss.

We said in the previous post we want to limit our work-in-progress, our “WIP,” and set it within a reasonable limit. But there’s still some confusion about what WIP really addresses.

Does it mean:

A: At this very moment, what task am I actively doing with my hands?

or

B: At this very moment, what tasks am I am actually doing with my brain?

To be clear, your brain does more than your hands.

This goes back to the role of the visual control in your life. As a visual control, your Personal Kanban keeps you honest about the work being done in your head.  The visual control is not necessary there to track what’s going on in your hands.

So the Personal Kanban doesn’t need to tell you (A).

This comment was left on our latest post How to Set Your WIP Limit:

Interesting. My WIP limit on my personal kanban has always been 1. Perhaps it’s just the way I’ve got it set up. For instance, right now the card I have in work is “read blog posts and comment”.

Now, I have a ‘waiting’ lane for cards where I’m blocked from taking any direct action. So by having a different lane I suppose that’s an additional WIP item since it’s not complete, but I like to split that out if I can’t take any action on it myself at the moment. It re-enters my pull queue when the block has been resolved.

What do you think about that Jim? Can I do better?

-Josh

We’ve encountered numerous people who set their WIP limit to one and believe they are working on only one thing at a time. They will actually move cards in and out of DOING to note whether they are actively working on them. Again, what you are doing with your hands should tell you this.

However, those tasks that were moved back into WAITING are still active. They are still IN PROGRESS. Simply because your fingers aren’t moving them right now, doesn’t mean your brain is not still DOING them.

This is important, as the Zeigarnik Effect tells us two things about how we work:

1: We have a psychological need to complete a task. Incomplete tasks tend to create intrusive thoughts, causing us to dwell on what we’ve left unfinished.

2: We forget things that we’ve completed.

In the book and in our talks, we go into great detail about how this impacts our work. For now, let’s focus on #1.

When we begin a task and leave it unfinished, our brain keeps thinking about it. Psychologically we need closure, which can come from two sources – actual completion or officially deciding not to complete.

If we have a column in our Personal Kanban that is just holding incomplete tasks, there will be an irresistible temptation to put more and more tasks in that column. We will come up with excuses like, “This one is more important” or “I don’t have time for that right now,” or “I’ll get to it later.”

We want the DOING column to exert pressure on us. Our goal with Personal Kanban is to have a realistic WIP limit that is honestly displayed so that we can understand our options, better manage our work, and finish what we begin.

More on this in future posts in the Why Limit WIP Series.

A WIP Limit of 3 Makes Work Easy to Understand and Complete

In Personal Kanban we have only two rules. One of them is to limit your WIP.

That sounds simple enough. But what does limiting your WIP really imply?

This series describes what we mean by “WIP,” why it’s important to limit it, and – with all the competing demands on our time – how we can begin to go about doing just that.

WIP = Work-in-Progress

WIP is an acronym for “work-in-progress.” It’s the proverbial “stuff on your plate,” the “balls you are juggling.” It’s the work you’ve begun and currently have in process.

Now consider those things in your life that can and will at some point constitute your WIP:  deliverables you have at the office, improvement projects piling up at home, monthly bills that need tending to, doctors appointments that need scheduling, phone calls that need returning. Now take into account the things you enjoy doing (but that often get put on the back burner), like taking a photography class or working on your yoga practice. Things you both need and want to accomplish can add up to a huge number of tasks you have to hold in your head simultaneously.

Some of these tasks are fairly low-impact. Others are more challenging and might require additional attention.

We want to limit the number of active tasks we juggle because we have a “capacity” – a maximum amount of work we can process at a given time. We simply cannot do more work than we can handle.

What Happens When We Don’t Limit WIP

When we exceed the amount of work we can handle, it heightens our distraction and decreases our concentration.  Our attention to detail suffers, we leave things unfinished, or compromise the quality of our finished product.  All of these outcomes create more work or us in the future.

Forgetting

When we forget something – whether it entails leaving out important details or missing a deadline – invariably someone else will point out our misstep. When they do,  a conversation (most likely a pointed one) often ensues. Addressing and compensating for missteps takes time and effort, compounding cost, and ultimately frustration.

Leaving Things Unfinished

When we leave things incomplete we have two outcomes: (1) We never finish them or (2) We finish them later.

For case (1) it’s likely we’ve wasted time, effort, and resources.

In case (2) we return to the task at a later date, when the task’s context (its need, impact,  or resources available) might have changed. Oftentimes that requires looking at the task and figuring out exactly where we left off,  why we made the decisions we did, and what – exactly – was our preferred course to completion. This reorienting process of remembering and reorganizing likewise can consume time, and incur additional effort and resources.

Compromising Quality

A job poorly executed is sometimes worse than a job left incomplete. When work is done poorly, it usually contains defects. When defects become work multipliers, there are consequences down the line: defects can slow work down, break something else, or even hurt someone. Or they might just make your work product less helpful than it could have been had proper care been taken initially. If your defect is deemed serious enough to require repair (in essence, doing your work over again), first that defect must be discovered, then appreciated, then discussed, then deemed worthy of repair, then the repair needs to be identified, then acted upon.

And those are the easy ones.

When we compromise the quality of our work, we don’t just “do a bad job,” we leave someone to clean up an expensive and time consuming mess.

What Happens When We Do Limit WIP

We’d like to say that limiting WIP will solve all these problems, but it won’t. Nothing makes these things go away entirely.

However, not limiting WIP means we are pretty much guaranteed to fall victim to these time wasters, and we are guaranteed to do it often.

When we limit our WIP, we have less distractions. We are able to focus on correct decisions, completion, and quality.

When we set a WIP limit, we are telling ourselves and the world around us that we want to get work done quickly, and we want to do a quality job.

Even though prioritizing some tasks over others means some tasks have to wait, those tasks will still be completed sooner than they would have if we started them all right away. Since we are no longer paying the penalties for forgetting, incompletion, or poor quality, the work we finish is done faster and does not cause additional work.

What’s Next

This is just the tip of the iceberg as to why we should limit WIP. Over the upcoming months, we will be releasing more benefits to both Limiting Your WIP and Visualizing Your Work.

Until then, there are other related resources on this site. Simply check out articles tagged “WIP,” or visit the PK 101 page.

In yesterday’s post, you may have noticed that we have a “Slack Card” in our Personal Kanban for the day.

The problem we, like most people, were having was this:

Productivity feels good.

The Zone feels good.

But productivity and the zone can lead to burnout.

Just like Pomodoro includes rests every 25 minutes, we wanted to include a Pomodoro that was nothing but slack.

What we assumed was that we have eight half hour pomodoros in an eight hour work day.

Interruptions, non-focused tasks, and other minutia tend to make pomodoros not start back-to-back.

Of those eight, the slack card is kind of a “get out of jail free” card. It can let you spend a free half hour just resting, it can be spent collaborating on less focused tasks, it can be used to “throw away” if interruptions stop you from being able to do one of your Pomodoro.  Ultimately it’s a visual place holder for an option. You be the judge.

It’s $2.99, or free if you have Amazon Prime.

This is the first in our new MemeMachine Series, which will be little eBooks like this that introduce a topic and begin discussions.

Here’s the writeup for it from Amazon:

Business runs on decisions. Recently, we’ve discovered that people aren’t the great decision makers we thought they were.

Business relies on estimates, plans, and projections – and we all know how accurate they tend to be. Careers are made, careers are broken based on accurate estimation and planning.

But what if the successes and failures of these projects were not based on the prowess of those making the plans? What if success or failure were more often the result of a more complex set of events?
Why Plans Fail directly addresses our ability of to plan, to forecast, and to make decisions.

Written by Jim Benson, an urban planner, software developer, and business owner who has planned and built everything from small software projects, to houses, to urban freeway systems – Why Plans Fail is told by someone with much skin in the estimation and planning game.

This short work is the first in the Modus Cooperandi Mememachine series – which looks specifically at underlying issues that directly impact the success of teams, companies, and individuals. The Mememachine series is meant to start conversations and advance discussion.

So far today, Tonianne and I have run our entire workday using Pomodoro Daisuki. Yes, it has the usual Pomodoro functionality, but some extra benefits.

As you can see here, it comes with the fastest set up, easiest use cardwall tool I think I’ve ever seen. It enforces no WIP limits, but it does give you cards with colored “tape” to quickly set up and distinguish a variety of tasks.

Today, Tonianne and I are editing our next book about using Personal Kanban for Meetings. So we’ve already done a few Pomodoros in the book.

The nice thing here is that when you are in focused productivity mode, you don’t want to move around from application to application. With this, you can easily move the current work to done and then pull in the next task.

Pomodoros work as you would expect them. You hit the “Start” button and you get a 25 minute timer. A nice touch is that when you have break time, you can choose between a five and a fifteen minute respite.

The “Show Stats” button is compelling, but in the end it merely shows a count of the Pomodoros you’ve done so far. One can hope that it will have more features in the future.

The only drawback is that once you start a Pomodoro or a break … you can’t stop! There is no “oops” button. So it treats the Pomodoro timebox a little too religiously. But, because these types of things tend to be fixed over time – I invite you to check the comments below to see if they do, indeed fix this.

Visualize Your Work

and

Limit Your Work in Progress

Since there are only two, it stands to reason that they are both important, vital even. When people see the value stream and the stickies, they feel they’ve received clear direction in setting up a Personal Kanban’s visualization. But how to come up with a number for your WIP limit?

This is much easier to describe, but much harder to get the point across.

Start With 3

Why do we start with 3? 3 seems to be a good rule-of-thumb number. Three stickies are easy to see, easy to grasp. Three tasks will always be visible on a computer screen. They are easy to remember.

Three is also a good balance number. Three is large enough to involve multiple stakeholders, but is small enough to manage. Three is a large enough number for other people to respect. One tasks becomes a zero-sum game where people can argue for hours about how you are using your time, three spreads out your work footprint to involve enough different things to diffuse such arguments.

But three is not the only number. It’s just a handy, arbitrary one.

What We Want To Do

Goal: The goal in setting a WIP limit in Personal Kanban is to ensure that we do not take on more work than we can handle.

Fact: People obsess over the WIP limit number because it is a number, which they take to be a rule. “If my WIP Limit is 3, I can never ever do more than 3 things.”

That’s dangerous.

Emergencies are Emergencies

If you’re in the middle of a report, some accounting, and waiting for a team member to reply to an email – and your WIP limit is three – you have met your WIP Limit.

If all that stuff is happening and you have a heart attack – you should deal with the heart attack even if it breaks your WIP. Don’t type faster to finish your report so you can pull the heart attack sticky!

What we want for that WIP Limit to do is keep reminding us at all times that we are much more effective if we limit our work-in-progress. Emergencies will remain emergencies, they are real, we must attend to them.

Variation in our Capacity

Let’s look at Karl on three consecutive Mondays:

Monday 1: Karl wakes up after a relaxing weekend. He eats a good breakfast. He is ready to attack the day. He arrives at work and finds his partner June equally ready. Together they feed off mutual creative energy and the day is off to an excited start.

Monday 2: Karl wakes up after a stressful weekend. He slept little last night and is now hitting snooze over and over again. He misses breakfast and stumbles into the office late. He’s searching for enthusiasm.

Monday 3: Karl wakes up, the weekend was fine, but he’s distracted – something doesn’t feel right. He gets to the office and he and June discuss this feeling he’s having. They spend the morning sipping coffee and talking until they finally figure out what is bothering Karl. It is an oversight they’ve had with their new product line. Luckily, it is something that they can work out. He and June spend the rest of the day coming up with solutions to the problem.

In all these instances, Karl – the very same Karl – has a different capacity for new tasks each day. One Monday 1 it might be 3, on Monday 2 it might be2 and on Monday 3 it is probably just 1.

Our WIP limits therefore can vary with our moods and our context.

Don’t feel that your WIP limit is an advised speed at which you must travel at all times. If you are tired or need to focus, by all means, drop to a lower number of tasks.

Diet and WIP Limit

Diet is Good for the Soul

Studies have shown that throughout the day our glucose levels also fluctuate throughout the day. In the mid-morning and mid-afternoon, we are susceptible to dangerous drops in glucose that make our brains fuzzy, our decision-making questionable, and our productivity low.

This is why smart businesses have fridges stocked with juices and bananas. (At Modus, Tonianne and I have apple breaks). This is also why energy drinks go flying off the shelves after lunch.

Human beings are amazing machines, but we still need to be tended to. Our brains use a tremendous amount of our body’s energy – 20% of our total energy usage or more. The brain, after all, is running on electrical charges and the more you think the more you produce.

If you let yourself get run down, your WIP will drop accordingly.

The same is true for sleep and rest.

Conclusion: You Gotta Use Your Brain

You, whether you like it or not, are the one who has the information necessary to set a personal WIP limit. You are a system that is self-regulating. You choose when to rest, when to eat, when to drink water. You know what external pressures are resting upon you.

Starting with 3 is always safe.

But know your variation.

Photo by Tonianne

Parkinson’s law is:

“Work expands to as to fill the time available for its completion.”

And people misconstrue it all the time.

Logic plays funny tricks on our brains sometime. People somehow believe that Parkinson’s Law warns us that work will expand (or contract) to fill the time to the deadline.  So if I give you a project that will take you two weeks to do, and give you an eight week deadline, you will not complete it for eight weeks.

That might be true. But it is also true that if I give you eight weeks’ work and a two-week deadline, you will complete it in two weeks.

You’ll just do a really crappy job.

The eight week deadline, on the other hand, gives me the option of prioritizing other work first until I need to get to your project.

So, the problem here is not the gaseous nature of work – it’s that deadlines themselves are a major element for prioritization.

In other words, work is a game and a major goal of the game is to get work done on-time.

Sounds good.

But … what if there was a different kind of game of work? What if the game of work was to continuously improve the quality and rate of delivery of your work. The game becomes ways to discover how you can work most effectively, most innovatively. The game stops being how close to an arbitrary deadline can you complete something.

Then some interesting things happen.

First, work becomes more predictable. You learn the rate at which you truly complete tasks. You can schedule better, promise better. You can complete better.

Second, the creation of value becomes more realistically defined. Before, we considered the elements of work to be whatever was included in the contract we were satisfying. When we focus on quality, we find that tasks like making our workspace comfortable, our tools up-to-date, and our minds rested and ready-to-think are of equal weight. We find that rushing toward deadlines decreases quality and taking a few 5 minute breaks throughout the day increases quality. We find that while we can rush work out, that work tends to come back. We start to question if meeting a deadline and having revision requests come back was ever meeting the deadline to begin with.

Third, you learn the real goal of estimating is to promise completion you can deliver with quality. Sometimes that takes longer, sometimes it does not. But the goal is quality, not speed.

Fourth, communication with others increases. We quickly learn that working alone is working in peril. Our projects benefit from regular communication with our partners and clients. The more constant the collaboration, the more likely there will be success.

Deadlines will always be a reality. We will never escape them. The goal here is not deny the existence or advocate for the abolishment of deadlines. What we want is to remove the stress and focus on the date and transfer that to the work itself. So if something is due on the 31st of December and we get it on the 1st of November, it’s finished when it is finished (November 15th) and does not wait until the deadline.

So what Parkinson’s Law is really saying is that when you give people a deadline, that’s what they focus on. The game becomes the deadline. S

Before We Begin

There are some quick tips about a value stream.

1. It should match reality as closely as possible.
2. It should be only as detailed as necessary to see and understand your work flow.
3. As your understanding and contexts change, your value stream will also change.

These three tips are telling. Words like stream, flow, and value are all difficult to pin down. They change, they evolve. In tip number one, we want to match reality as closely as possible. We will never draw a map that perfectly matches our workflow forever.

The Beginning: Start with the Ends in Mind

What is it you are doing?

In a meeting you may be:

• fully discussing a topic
• coming up with action items
• planning a future set of tasks

At home you might be:

• delegating chores
• planning a vacation
• building a deck

During the workday you might be:

• creating documents
• managing staff
• building a section of an airplane

All nine of these might have very different end-states.

So, if we are writing a report, the end state might be “publish.”

The other end … your backlog … is usually called “Backlog” or “Ready”. That is where your value stream starts. So, for our publishing value stream, our backlog looks like this:

Next Step: Fill in the Blanks

Between start and finish is creation. What steps do you take to create something? Working backwards from publish, we might have collation, before that is final, before that is second draft, and before that might be the first draft.

This now starts to build a stream into which the specific sections of the report can flow. The report team can now track each section or chapter as it moves toward completion.

Important Bits to Remember

1. Your value stream is your best educated guess as to how your work is actually occurring.

For some teams, the value stream above will work nicely. They would likely have a report that is from a template and being updated or customized, because the value stream suggests a very orderly process with no surprises or constant re-writes. Other teams will have a value stream that visualizes more editing, document re-organization, or people involved.

2. Your value stream will change.

As mentioned above, your value stream will change as you better understand your work. You do not need to sit around for a month figuring out the perfect mapping of your value stream. Just get one up and start working. You can refine as you move along. Different phases of projects may require very different value streams. Do not allow yourself to fall into the trap of rigid process.

3. Your Value Stream is Fault Tolerant

If you move a stickie to the right and something changes to make you move it back to the left – this is not a problem. It is reality. You really did move a chapter from the first draft to the second draft, conditions changed and then it moved back to the first draft stage again.

This is a Personal Kanban 101 Post. See others in the series.