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.

Orange Means Administration

I am famous (perhaps too famous) for hating administrative work. I’ll let it pile up like nobody’s business. So in my personal kanban on Agile Zen, I colored my administrative tasks bright orange. That way if I dynamically deprioritized them because I hated them, I would be confronted daily with them piling up in my backlog.

Being able to visualize them, showed me the weight of their existential overhead until finally I had to give up and just do a bunch of them en masse.

Use a little creativity to call out certain kinds of tasks that may require special attention – either they need to be grouped or you just need a little extra reminder about their importance.