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Performance

Rapture – Training Your Mind for Completion

Don’t strain your brain, paint a trainYou’ll be singing' in the rain…- Blondie

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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

Tools Talk: Julia Child Understood the Nature of Work

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Julia's Knives

While expertise, good humor, humanity, and care are words that immediately come to mind when describing Julia Child, the iconic chef personified something else - she understood the nature of her work. She recognized the role it played, the value it brought, the actions involved in creating it, and the opportunity costs in choosing certain methodologies over others.That is why we are canonizing her as our Personal Kanban saint.Yesterday I had the good fortune to spend some time at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History contemplating her kitchen.  Where Martha Stewart’s kitchen is the epitome of OCD tidiness, Julia Child’s kitchen looks as if the instruments of her craft were shaped only slightly differently than if she’d be making furniture or refitting a 1952 Studebaker.That's because Julia Child’s kitchen was her workshop.Julia Child could have had the most cutting-edge kitchen in the world, and most likely she could have had it for free. Surely any appliance company would have paid handsomely to say they custom-fit her kitchen with their latest product line.But instead she chose to used the same range for 40 years.Her arsenal of cutlery was mismatched, "unsexy" by today's standard. Her pans hung from every available surface - from walls, doors, wherever they would fit. Each knife, each pan had its place, fitting perfectly within a designated spot or outline. It wasn't a mess, but it wasn't streamlined, either.Julia Child said things like,“I am a knife freak.”and“Life itself is the proper binge.”and“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”Her demeanor and her actions seamlessly integrated her passion for food with everything else in life. She understood her work and as such, it ceased to be work.It became life.She was organized without being compulsive. She was meticulous but retained her humor. She had little to prove, but everything to share.To the right we see, unsurprisingly, Julia Child’s Wine Kanban. Every bottle, as it ages, is tracked to the point of drinking.We have pots and pans on a visual control, knives on a visual control, wine on a visual control. For Julia, her stuff didn’t just go places, it was a marker for the nature of her work. If a 6 quart sauté pan was missing from its place on the wall, it meant it was in use.Her tools told her story.Her tools represented her creation of value.The take-away here is that visual controls are always graphic markers of how we work. The more seamlessly we can integrate visual controls into how we actually work and live, the less time they take to maintain.  Especially for specific projects, where we are already focused and updating, a literal kanban may take more time than is necessary – creating elegant visual controls that stem from the actual activity can really help give the task an internal coherence and make it easier.Take a page from Julia’s cookbook and examine your work. What might your tools be saying to you?

Retrospectives and Kanban Evolution in Action

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Marc Bless has a great post about his personal scrum board evolving into a personal kanban. His personal retrospectives showed him a need to limit WIP, so he created a special section for WIP, while not losing track of his tasks awaiting the actions of others.Marc Says:

After a while I recognized the repeating problem of too many thing in progress. After a short personal retrospective I decided to improve my focus on the "in progress" lane. It seemed obvious to limit the number of things to work on in parallel. I splitted the "in progress" lane in two parts:a) an "on hold / wait" part for all the things that have been started but need external helpb) a "working on" part with focus on all the things in progress. This part now is a Kanban box with a limit of two tasks.

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