This award is humbling. Shingo awards are usually focused on manufacturing or applications of specific Lean principles with many direct nods to Toyota.

Personal Kanban is strongly rooted in Lean ideals, but it much more focused (as the name implies) on the individual – on us as people.

Tonianne and I are greatly energized by this award and look forward to seeing Personal Kanban continue to grow and thrive.

Read about it on CBS News and the Lean Systems Society sites.

So, after never paying attention to your work at all, now you want to be a superhuman estimator as well?

Ultimately, for me, I recommend not paying attention to task size at all at first. Wait until you actually see your work flow for a while.

But, at some point, you will start to get a little more sophisticated and start to really wonder about task sizes.

In this video, Stephen Covey plays a game where he coerces this apparent executive to place rocks in a tub. The goal is to put in the big rocks after all the little tasks have been achieved. The little tasks can be seen as interruptions, distractions, or the day-to-day minutia of working.

The end-result is that it is, of course, easier to plan for the big rocks (by putting them in first) and there’s still plenty of capacity for the little rocks to fit into the nooks and crannies.

I really love Stephen Covey and have gained mightily from his insights. However here, we can see a few flaws and they related precisely to our fears about task sizing and estimation.  (Go on, watch the video, then come back to this…)

Planning for the Big Rocks

Our issue here is that we are trying to size elements (little rocks) of larger concepts (big rocks) without fully understanding the larger concepts. How many of us focus on the task we are assigned, but don’t question the overall project?  How many of us get bogged down in a task and then notice the deadline looming and say, “I’ll make up for this delay later?” How many of us take on a two-hour project that we work on for two-days?

In short, we can’t really distinguish big and little rocks.

We end up focusing on the size of tasks and not the flow of tasks. We wonder what the cost of delay is, but we can’t measure it because there is no flow for the delay to impact.

Covey is making the same mistake most people make, he thinks those things are ROCKS. This implies that they have definite shape, weight, and color. Corporate planning is not a solid, it is a gas. It will fill the space you provide. If you give Covey’s rocks no definition, they will swell up and overflow your big plastic tub. (Am I really posting about gaseous rocks?)

This tortured analogy is necessary only because we all simultaneously conceive of projects as definite and without form. We recognize the number of unknowns. We make plans and they scare us. The more scared we are, the more we try to tightly control our projects. This is like bearhugging a water balloon. At some point we control too much (hug too tightly) and it explodes all over us. Then we get frustrated and blame the balloon. (more analogies!)

Better the Bucket

Projects are actually the bucket. Tasks are the rocks. Most tasks, as Covey shows, are pebbles. They flow through our day as easily, and as awkwardly, as they did when she poured them in at the end. Most flew right on in, but every so often she had to stop and shake the bucket.

That made everyone laugh, and it made her and Covey grin conspiratorial little grins.

Why? Because it was awkward.

And so is our work.

In the end, the size of any of those tasks didn’t matter a bit. What did matter is she devised a system that noted that there were observable differences in her task types. She put one task type in first, in a deliberate way, and then allowed the other task type to flow.  In this case it was physical size.

In other cases it could be something else.

Context Has a Size

Tasks all have context that relate to our concept of their size. If I told you, your task was to walk into the next room and get something I just printed out of the printer, you’d estimate the size of that task to be small. If the next room involved crossing a pool filled with crocodiles, you might be surprised when it took you longer.

The politics, emotional weight, and implementation details of the seemingly smallest task can prove to be gigantic. We simply won’t know until we understand the system. When she understood Covey’s system, she changed her approach to work.

Size might matter.

Join us July 30-31 as Modus Cooperandi will be hosting its third annual Kaizen Camp: Seattle on the beautiful grounds of the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture. 

Join Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry as we host our third year of Personal Kanban, continuous improvement, and better work management in Seattle. This event is two days, with wonderful food, conversation, and learning in a beautiful setting.

Early bird pricing is $99 for the two-day event and only 175 people can attend, so register NOW!

Last year we sold out quickly. We look forward to seeing you there.

Kaizen Camp™ is an unconference. It’s two idea-dense days of conversations about learning, creating, and building value through Lean Principles, agile methodologies, systems thinking, problem-solving, the thought leadership of people like Deming, Ackoff, Kahneman, and Argyris, real-world stories, and the impacts of collaboration and respect in the workplace. Kanban, Personal Kanban, GTD, Agile, Six Sigma, 5s, Cynefin are all on the table…but so are the root of all these forms: Continuous Improvement or Kaizen.

Join practitioners, thinkers, and luminaries from across healthcare, education, manufacturing, retail, human resources, publishing, software development, and personal productivity. We had a sold-out crowd last year, and we expect to sell-out again quickly. So be sure to register today.

Kaizen Camp™ is brought to you by Modus Cooperandi and sponsored by:

• Rally Software
• Substantial
• LeanKit
• Agile Logic
• TLCLabs

• While I was working, Tonianne, who was on Skype, wanted to do a microphone test.
• Then I received an e-mail for a meeting request from a client.
• While responding to that, I received a lunch request from a colleague.
• While responding to that, e-mail arrived from another client with documents needed for our meeting. So I accepted those Google docs and scanned them.
• While responding to that, my bladder told me that I should rush off for a bio break.
• After that, I rushed to the board and started writing furiously about things that might interrupt us.
• Then Tonianne wanted to discuss some work that was coming up.
• Then I had my meeting.

And now, 3.5 hours later, I am finally writing this blog post.

My goal is to get this done by my call at 1 pm.

How do we limit our work-in-progress in a world of constant interruptions?

Interruptions are more common in knowledge work than work, it seems. They are little things, one minute, five minutes, ten minutes. Happening here and there.

What is an Interruption?

The Free Dictionary defines Interruption as:

in·ter·rupt (nt-rpt)

v. in·ter·rupt·ed, in·ter·rupt·ing, in·ter·rupts

1. To break the continuity or uniformity of: Rain interrupted our baseball game.

2. To hinder or stop the action or discourse of (someone) by breaking in on: The baby interrupted me while I was on the phone.

3. To break in on an action or discourse.

All three of these are important to us at work. While we are working, we are achieving (hopefully) a state of flow. Both in the psychological and the mechanical sense of the word, we are actively focusing, working, and completing the task at hand.

An interruption is anything that breaks that flow-state. <The phone just rang. On call for 2m13s.>

When we break that flow state, just like that side comment about my own interruption broke up the flow of this post, we have several states we transition through:

1. Initial shock (Oh my god, I’m being Interrupted!)
2. Adjustment (Context switch into new context)
3. Existence (Live in new context)
4. Closure (Close off new context)
5. Return (Return to previous context)

Depending on the detail needed by the interruption, these states can take take minutes, tens of minutes, or more. Luckily for me, my interruption was minor and rather fun, so leaving the blog post and coming back was relatively easy.

Interruptions and You

Since most interruptions are small, routine, and often important, we tend not to notice them. When interruptions are annoying, we do notice them. Then, when we are late in finishing something, we will blame our lateness on the annoying interruption and conveniently forget all the other ones.

The fact is that interruptions are part of knowledge work. We seldom do it alone, which means we have colleagues. Colleagues require information. Information requires communication. Communication requires attention.

We are also social animals. So, if I come into your office and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about the Amalgamated Salamander contract,” you are likely going to say, “Okay,” and we’ll talk. Even if you say “No,” you are unlikely to simply say “No,” and ignore me from then on, because that’s rude. And if you are truly rude, you will not stop at “No,” you’ll tell me exactly why you don’t have time for me which is still an interruption.

We cannot declare interruptions as waste, either. Knowledge work and personal work is fraught with rapid changes in context. Micropriorities that never existed on your project plan crop up every day. Like “Hey, Barb’s out sick, you still want to have that meeting?” Or “I just got this fax from the FDA and they are claiming that epoxy isn’t a food and we have to pull our Gluey-Chooies off the market.” Things like that.

So, we need to understand what our interruptions really are, before we decide that we want to eliminate them.

There are many systems out there to help you isolate yourself from interruptions, but completely closing yourself off from change – in an environment with high degrees of change – doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Understanding Interruptions

In order to know a thing, you must become a thing. So, you must first go out and interrupt as many people as you can.

No … scratch that.

In order to understand interruptions, a good place to start is to (surprise) visualize them. Here are some suggested ways in increasing levels of complexity.

Write Them Down: That’s simple enough. Keep a pad of paper nearby and when you are interrupted by ANYTHING write it down. Even if you are interrupted by daydreaming about how awesome lunch is going to taste.

Add Them to Your Kanban: Get a special shaped sticky notes, like maybe ones shaped like the human cochlea (or something) and add substantial interruptions to your board. This way you can track them and see them mixed with your other work.

Record Severity:  Create a table on a sheet of paper. 8 rows for the hours of the day, and 12 boxes for five minute increments. Then color in the boxes during which you were interrupted from your primary task.

Now that you’ve recorded them. Ask some key questions:

• Are these interruptions necessary?
• Did I provide or receive value while involved in this interruption?
• Does this interruption happen frequently?
• Can I schedule this interruption, making it a planned event?
• Did I have the time and mental capacity to help with this interruption?

Again, the goal is not to eradicate interruptions. The goal is to understand them and work with them. Some will be waste and you can remove them. Some will be part of your job and you must find elegant ways to work with them.

Limiting Work in Progress

After you understand the nature of your interruptions, you can build much more resilient strategies for limiting work-in-progress. We can limit unnecessary interruptions, understand when it is appropriate for us to sequester ourselves in a Pomodoro, and structure our work to allow us to stay as much within our WIP limits as possible.

Photo: “Dorrie Interrupts Sissy Bathing” by Paul Schultz.

Does this look familiar?

This is a problem, because an disorderly and frightening READY column is, in and of itself, a form of work-in-progress. Even if you are limiting your WIP, looking at that huge string of demanding post-its weighs us down just looking at it.

When we limit our personal Work-in-progress, our ultimate goal is to provide a calm, stable, and flowing state of work. We want a system that allows us to focus on the task and hand and complete quality work.

Having a huge, daunting backlog undermines our quality and destroys our focus.

What we need to do is focus this work. We can start by gathering some of those tasks together into groups and taking a look at what they really are.

We can do this by doing a quick exercise called Affinity Mapping.

We take the bulk of the stickies that we have in our read column and we sort them into groups that feel right. These might be easy, medium, and hard. These might be project 1, project 2, project 3. There might be two categories or there might be ten.

In the end, however, you’ll have your pile of pain sorted into easy-to-digest groups.

Then, you can name your groups. In this case they are “Household Projects”, “Office Work”, and “End-of-Year Taxes”.

Now we have a little more clarity over what is in our backlog. The previously undifferentiated jumble is a bit more orderly. We can now pull work knowing a few new things:

1. What projects we are really working on
2. What we are completing (and what we are procrastinating on).
3. What work we need to schedule for and what work can simply flow
4. Which tickets are still scary

Perhaps the most important thing is that the cognitive load of the original backlog was enormous. That added to our work-in-progress. The cognitive load of this new organized backlog (no matter how you feel about doing your taxes or cleaning) is much less. Your brain is spending less time and energy trying to make sense of what’s coming up.

And, since this is the Personal Kanban site after all, we should probably talk about how we, as individuals, can limit our WIP.

For this first post, we’re going to start with the simplest answer. The sports shoe answer – just do it.

The key to just doing anything is not doing everything else. David Allen promotes a “stop doing” list to compliment a “to do” list. In that vein, here we don’t want to prematurely end tasks you are working on an never revisit them, but we do want to postpone some tasks so that other can be completed. In the beginning, a large part of our READY column will be populated with tasks we know we already started, but are setting aside to focus on the few tasks in WIP.

Calm Down

The first thing to do here is to recognize that the work you are setting aside will get done. In fact, by setting it aside and waiting to complete the tasks in Doing, you will likely get it done sooner than if you didn’t defer it in the first place.  So, calm down, your current fears of delayed completion are due to how long its taken you to finish things in the past – in a non-WIP limited world.

Why was it so hard before?

We covered this in the Why Limit WIP Series:

• It’s hard to remember well in a chaotic environment
• Completion is fulfilling
• Multi-tasking Creates Overhead
• Context Switching destroys our ability to think
• There is no social cost for taking on work
• We have no healthy constraints to stop us from overworking
• We are fundamentally unaware of the impacts of our workload

When we limit our WIP, we are able to focus, complete faster (much faster), and likely have an end product of higher quality.

We’ve been told over the years that productivity is a good thing. However, true productivity means completing things of quality – not simply doing lots of things at the same time and completing very little.

It should be common sense that if we focus on one thing, we will complete it faster.

We need to lose our irrational fear of not being productive, and replace that with embracing being effective.

So calm down, take a look at the task at hand, focus on it, and finish.

A Note

This will work most of the time. However, there are some complexities. We want to know:

• What is the right thing to work on?
• What is standing in my way of completion?
• How large of tasks should I be taking on?
• I have so many people counting on me, how do I tell some of them to wait?
• I’m interrupted so many times a day, how can I focus?

We will cover these in upcoming posts.

For this purpose, Tonianne and I use THE PEN. In the board to our right (our actual board), you can see that Toni started working on getting a contract amended and then had to send that off for review and comment. While it’s gone, we don’t want to take her away from her other tasks. So she’s moved it into The Pen where it will reside until the outside party has done their bit.

We are blessed on this day to only have one item in THE PEN. Ordinarily we have five or six. When they stack up, it’s a sign that we’ve let them linger too long and should follow up on the tickets. We will also, if need be, set a deadline or a reminder on tasks in THE PEN. Today, that’s not the case – she’s reasonably sure that she’ll get a reply sometime by the end of the week.  However, if tasks are going to sit in THE PEN for a long time or if there is a deadline we have to meet, we will certainly set a date to check on it.

We want to limit our WIP to lighten our cognitive load and let us focus. However, we will often find ourselves in a position where we have several things waiting action by others. It’s okay to sequester these tasks and move ahead with active work.

If they’re more like the latter, ask yourself why.

Good Things Are Completed In Small Packages

Lean thinking asks us, in industry speak, reduce our batch sizes. This is their way of saying we should find tasks that can be completed quickly, effectively, and without many surprises.

We are more likely, whether at work or at home, to complete small tasks than large ones. Why?

They’re Small – First off, small tasks are simply that. They’re small. We can therefore complete them in less time.

They’re Understandable – Small tasks are easy to grasp. We can easily envision what needs to be done, how much uninterrupted time it should take, and what the end state will look like.

They are Stable – If a small task is something we can get done quickly, it means the chance of interruption is less and the potential number of complications is low. With most of our work, interruptions actually provide the most complication. That complication adds instability to our estimates.

They are not Scary – Large tasks, because we know full well that they are instable, are frightening. They evoke our fear response,  making us procrastinate, making us spend more time planning how to mitigate risk, and distracting us while actually doing the work. Small tasks, because we understand them and they are stable are much less scary.

We are Confident – A small, stable, and understandable task is something we can promise to someone else and feel confident about the promise.

We can Knock Them Out – Think about how good a day feels when you move a lot of tickets off your Personal Kanban. Now, think of days where nothing moving. Sluggish movement on the Personal Kanban makes us feel sluggish as well.

Small Deliveries Make a Big Delivery

When  we start a large project (and there certainly are large projects) we need to look at that project and figure out what the units of value are in it. Is this project something that has to be done all at once? Are there elements of this project that can be delivered quickly to provide value along the way? What do my customers really want from this project? What is the likelihood of interruptions causing me to shelve this project for long periods of time? Can I come back to this project and remember where I was?

If we can divide the project into smaller pieces of deliverable interim value, then we can can start enjoying some of the benefits of the big task – even if is has yet to be fully realized.

Say you have a big project that is: renovate the basement. This involves moving everything out of the basement, ripping out the walls, moving plumbing, putting in new walls, putting in floors, doing new electrical, painting, getting new furniture, and then enjoying the basement.

Many people look at that task and say, “That’s big, I’d like to do that, but I don’t have time.”

There are smaller tasks there, however. The first might be, “Go through basement and donate all unused or unwanted items.” (For some of us, even this is a big task).  After that might come a task of “Get a new sofa” or even “Draw up basement plans”. Each of these provides immediate value and may well change the outcome for the larger project. Say you get rid of the clutter in the basement and find, lo and behold, there’s a lot more room down there now.

Now, instead of gutting the basement, you can do a few coats of paint, a few simple repairs, and you have a much more livable space.

Throughput of the Small

In my own life, I had a huge office with people working in it every day for 10 years. I also had a home studio where I had been both working and writing for 10 years. When I closed the office, I was left with 10 years of combined office and home paperwork and other junk.

I set aside a plan where each day I needed to take out one wastebasket worth of recycling. Over the course of a few months (I travel a lot), I was able to work my way through the mountain of combined personal, Modus, and Gray Hill history. If I had sat down and done that large task all in one sitting, it would have left me unable to write or work for clients. It would have been boring and, likely, I would have lost interest mid-way through and started just picking up huge piles of paper and shredding it without looking at it.

Using a small task throughput model like this, where I do a little a time, I could keep focus, work my way to completion, and not have to worry about the huge daunting task.

I use the Pomodoro Daisuki plugin for Chrome for this. Pomodoro Daisuki is a hybrid Personal Kanban / Pomodoro app that lets you build quick and disposable Personal Kanbans to quickly get stuff done.

But … it doesn’t stop there.

We use LeanKit to manage work for Modus and Personal Kanban. That Personal Kanban looks like this:

But I, like some people (not others, I know) tend to relax while cleaning things. So, I noticed that during my Pomodoro breaks I was usually cleaning bits of the house.

So, in Pomodoro Daisuki, I built this second “attack the house” Personal Kanban. Nothing here is pressing. There is no “need” to get these done. I’d just like a cleaner house and this lets me see what could be focused on during the break. For me, I have a few minutes, and at the end of this rather mindless task I get the gift of a slightly cleaner house.

Note that all of these are pretty tiny tasks – maybe 5 minutes long if I really slow down. But I’ve noticed that keeping this up and using it means that I work my way around to tasks I would ordinarily forget about. For example, “Change filter in the fridge” is in that done pile somewhere. That was a three minute task that results in clean water and a healthy fridge.

Another thing I should note is that if I don’t feel like cleaning – I don’t clean. This isn’t a board to force me to clean. It’s a board to help me engage in productive, rewarding, and somewhat enjoyable stuff during my break.

One last point … note that we are using two tools for two different purposes. Examine what your needs are and use the right tool!

Since every journey begins with a single step – we can only begin by simply beginning. But that first step is usually the hardest.

Homes are especially plagued by little tasks that never seem to get done. They mount up and all seem to be equally important or equally unimportant. Prioritization is difficult, and procrastination ensues.

So, I propose the over-all New Year’s Resolution – This year, each month my house will be a little better.

To do this, you can create a Personal Kanban for this specific purpose – or a swimlane on your existing board. They would look something like this:

The steps here:

1. Come up with 12 small, but noticeable projects

2. Start with the smallest one

3. Do one a month.

That really wasn’t too difficult, was it?

You’ll find, as I have, that keeping a board like this compels you (in a good way) to want to do many more than 12 of these small projects.

Two things are important here:

First, start small and stay small. Make incremental improvements that you and others can see. Don’t rebuild the house or put in new floors right away. Again, like in the last post, we are forming habits here. For Gary, the first task he’s taking on is finishing one that has been sitting uncompleted. Before making it a set of tasks – it was part of that daunting sea of blue tickets. Now, that project is alone. It’s manageable. And better yet, the cards are atomic – meaning each car is actionable on its own and in relative short time. If Gary is sitting at his desk in his home office working and wants to take a short break – he can go line up the cans of paint, judge how old they are and what’s needed and move the card. Having moved that one card, he’s now one step closer to getting that bit of existential overhead removed from his life forever.

Second, keep that Personal Kanban visible! If you can’t see the Personal Kanban, it can’t remind you and it can’t reward you. If Gary doesn’t see that list of projects he won’t feel any more compelled to complete them than he did before the board. And if he completes tasks he can see that there is progress and will be more likely to continue that progress.

We humans are very good at procrastinating – use the board to undermine this natural behavior and get the work done. Completed projects mean a prettier home and a better life. (And yes, relaxing can also be a goal on the kanban – it’s not about work, it’s about life.)