Keep Track of Tasks that Hurt

Kanban is meant to be epiphany heavy, but process light. These approaches are meant to provide simple means to visualize how your work actually flows. Some tasks are going to be horrible. They are going to take longer than you expect, be harder to complete than anticipated, or even just really annoy you.

In life, you want to do things that make you happy and not do things that don’t. So why not start noticing what you don’t like to do or what takes you away from doing the things you like?

The MAN THAT WAS AWFUL approach is simple. When you finish a task and it was in anyway unpleasant – set it aside. Then, later, take a look at the tasks that were unpleasant and look for patterns. Were the people involved the same? Was it a resource issue? Do you just hate doing those kinds of things?

After you see the patterns you can make choices like:

• when to delegate
• when to refuse work
• what processes you might want to recreate
• if you want a new career
• to cry

Again, the point here is to make what you are doing explicit. Hopefully bad things will initially fall into some patterns that you can consider and reshape. Awful tasks should become less and less common as you can spot them coming and learn ways to deflect them.

Photo by _Boris

Mission Based Kanban for Small Teams

Some days you get together with a colleague and you need to run through a project quickly.  The project is of short duration, and requires the creation of a set of “things.” Pictured here is a Mission Kanban I created in about 3 minutes on the 19th of July when my collaborator and I needed to quickly populate the web site for my book with fairly uniform content.

The green list down the side represents specific blog posts that needed to be written.  In blue and red across the top are the actions that needed to happen for each post.  The blue tasks were mine, the red tasks were hers.

As we worked through each task, we would draw a box to show the one we were currently working on. A line through the box meant the task was completed and could be “pulled” into the next item in the value stream.  (The value stream here is Draft -> Edit -> Accept -> Publish).  Due to the directed nature of this project and the uniformity of tasks, we had a WIP of one. Each of us worked on one task until it was done, and then we’d move on to the next.

In a very simple pattern, this method establishes a value stream, limits WIP, assigns tasks, and provides a visual control for the project.

Writing is a Process

I can say with confidence that I am intimately familiar with the complexities of writing a full-length book. Having a life while working on a manuscript is a challenge, ask any author. So much of your self goes into those pages and, as an author, you tend to obsess over every chapter, section, paragraph, and word. There’s a tremendous amount of energy expended on a labor of love such as this.

Many authors I’ve spoken with have shared that during the writing process, there have been times where they’ve actually hated their book. One explanation for this is that a book is literally millions of individual tasks that are undifferentiated.  As I’ve said before, undifferentiated tasks cause stress. For authors, stress detracts from the creative process. I would hazard to guess that thousands of amazing books were never published because they crumbled under their existential overhead.

While writing Instant Karma, Tonianne and I have truly benefitted from having a kanban. The first one (pictured below) was on a white board in my office in Seattle. Note that our workflow is clearly defined on the kanban and what we are moving across are chapters. Each chapter of the book goes through the same overall process.

Final Kanban for Instant Karma

The items in the work flow are the way Tonianne and I work, not necessarily the way you should work. You can develop your own system. The key is to figure out what that system is, and make it explicit, then to figure out the best logical breakdown of work to visualize and move it through your system.

For us, the best way to visualize value was in the chapters. We have the the following steps:

1. Pre-Writing – Jim writes initial text for a chapter. Jim writes very fast.  He has three chapters going at any given time.  Why?  Because he writes so fast that he would overwhelm Tonianne because she is very detail oriented and focused. So we have step two.
2. Scrutiny – Tonianne takes one chapter at a time and runs it through the ringer. Editing and re-editing sections. Research and re-researching vignettes Jim has added to the book. Making sure that Jim’s sources are accurate and the best ones possible. And giving Jim directed re-writing assignments as finely grained as a “pick a new word here” or “re-write this sentence.”
3. Internal Review – The chapter is then sent to another editor who gives it a once over.  The scrutiny phase is intense and both Tonianne and I get to close to the material. The initial review generally doesn’t take the reviewer all that long, but returns some incredibly high value feedback.
4. Crowdsource Prep – Jim and Tonianne take the reviewed chapter and address any comments, accept or reject changes from the internal review and release it to crowdsouring.
5. Crowdsourcing – All of the chapters go to a very large group of commenters who provide yet another round of feedback. Assuming the feedback doesn’t kill the chapter, we then go into final production.
6. Through 10. A final edit of the chapter makes it ready for inclusion into the book, when the book is assembled it goes to pre-press. If everything looks nice, it’s ready to sell.

As always, your kanban should evolve over the course of your writing project.  To prove the point, here’s the initial kanban for Instant Karma:

First Kanban for The Book Instant Karma

A major point of doing a kanban is seeing how you conceptualize your workflow and reconciling that with what actually happens in real life.  There’s almost always a disconnect between what we think is happening and what is actually happening. So first we see our workflow better.  Then, once we understand it, we can articulate what is actually happening.

Then, we can make things happen even better.

For smaller writing projects, such as what might happen within a specific chapter, see Mission Based Kanban.