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.

Last week, Eva Schiffer of Net-Map wrote me and said:

I have just erased my to do list and transformed it in something kanban-like. My own to do list format, that always worked well for me, had 4 categories:

Important and urgent
Important, less urgent
Less important, urgent
Less important, less urgent.

That helps me a lot because I normally love the less important, less urgent tasks, and while they often lead to really interesting creative outcomes, it is important for me to keep procrastination at bay and make sure that I don’t just impress myself with the number of tasks performed, but also do those things that are most urgent and/or important.

This got me thinking about the relationship between productivity and effectiveness. Eva recognized that simply increasing her throughput was not enough, that was mere mindless productivity.

What Eva was searching for was effectiveness.

At Modus, we do dynamic prioritization using a priority filter that looks like this:

For Tonianne and myself, this works wonders. We constantly have a short list of items that need doing, and as they move from 3 to 2 to 1 they become more important. However, prioritization is a contextual exercise that varies from moment to moment. As we can see here, “Eat all the chicken on earth” is Priority 2, but that could suddenly change to Priority 1 if suddenly I were in a place where all the chicken on earth was accessible.

Eva, like many organized people, uses a matrix to ascribe values of urgency and importance, which results in something like this:

Major Tom's Backlog

In the case of Major Tom, he has been sent into space to find out what’s there. He’s a celebrity and everyone is watching him. There are a variety of things he could be doing up there, but he has a a backlog that varies between levels of urgency and importance.

So for example, the papers want to know whose shirts he wears. That’s important both to his individual fame and to the space program in general because after all, it’s being good to the press. But at the moment, he’s in space so he can get to that later.

Major Tom's Workflow

If the press scores an interview while he’s up there, though, it can become relevant and therefore is something to complete.

So we reach Major Tom here in the middle of his work day. He’s already managed to tell his wife he loves her very much, and he’s stepped outside the capsule. He’s put his previously active conversation with ground control on hold because at the moment, he’s working on other things. And he’s now floating in a most peculiar way (and noticing how different the stars look).

Major Tom is still limiting his WIP and he’s still visualizing, even if his backlog is drawn as a matrix rather than columns. The matrix is a familiar organizational tool for him, and it should be preserved. (Although he probably should have checked his instruments.)

So Eva’s concern is very real – we stand a real risk of becoming mindless production units, grinding tasks out at hyper-speed without assessing their value. The key with Personal Kanban is to assess the value of what you are doing – however it is that you define value.

We’re all individuals – quality, value and growth are different for us all.

Not only that but quality, value and growth are also contextual. Today, home repair might be very low on your list. After a tornado, however, it’s probably going to be pretty high. Did you put it there? No. Life did. Context shifted. For that reason, just-in-time dynamic re-prioritization is key for workload management.

So be like Eva. Find the way you define your work – visualize it, and thoughtfully examine how you can best be effective.

The Subproject Approach

Problematic for personal kanban is that its task-based nature undermines lean’s value-tracking goals. Kanban, not even personal kanban, is not a to-do list.  Personal kanban tracks tasks because that’s primarily how individuals measure work and value.

Your personal kanban can have multiple swim lanes, and they in no way need to be coordinate.  A task based swim lane can rest above one or more subproject swim lanes with a full value stream.

This allows you to see your current work simultaneously in both a task view and a project view.

The more you can move large projects into work-flow based subprojects, the more control you will have over them, and the more insight you will have into their flow.

You have some choices with the subproject approach when its combined with the personal kanban.

Roll Up: The subproject approach can be a roll-up task, tracking the progress of the large project while individual tasks still move through your personal kanban. This lets you see how quickly value moves through your subproject when you are working on other things. Here the roll-up task is the purple ticket that refers to the subproject.

Active Engagement: The subproject is actively used as part of your WIP. If the nature of your work is that you are paying even small amounts of attention to the subproject each day, making tags in your subproject part of your overall WIP may be more honest. This conceptually integrates all your subprojects into your daily routine.  This integration could lead to more meaningful introspection.

In this photo, there are 5 tasks in the WIP.  Three are in the top part of the kanban under “doing”, the other two active for me personally would be under “pre-writing” in the project area.

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.