Productivity: having the power to produce

Efficiency: the ratio of the output to the input of any system

Effectiveness: being able to bring about a desired result

Personal Kanban is considered a Productivity tool, because it gives us the power to produce more.  It is likewise said to increase Efficiency by limiting WIP and increasing focus which means we expend less energy to affect results. This in turn boosts our Effectiveness by providing the information necessary to make better decisions and act on them.

Often people have bursts of productivity, efficiency, or effectiveness – but because they aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing, these events are sometimes dismissed as happy accidents. Personal Kanban makes your work explicit, meaning it constantly shows you what you are doing and what you could be doing. This helps you interpret your options and prioritize you tasks based on current conditions. Personal Kanban also lets us balance productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and turn them into three parts of the same machine.

Individually, bursts look like this:

• Bursts of productivity – You get a lot done, but is it the right stuff?
• Bursts of efficiency – Work is easily done, but is it focused for maximum effect?
• Bursts of effectiveness – The right work is done at the right time … this time. Is this process repeatable?

Heroes on Their Way to Work Don't Dress Like You and Me

I call these bursts “hero” events. Over time, things get screwed up and you have to call in a “hero” to fix them quickly. That hero may be you, a temp worker, a consultant, or a friend. But you identify a need so late in the game that you need to work above and beyond to complete the task at hand.

What’s funny is that after these hero events, we feel good. And because we feel good, we think, “That was awesome!” and we ascribe the event to something exceptional. Something that just couldn’t possibly happen every day.

During a recent project in Washington, D.C., I worked alongside members of the Intelligence Community. More than one of them told me that people in the IC  who allegedly had cushy desk jobs inside the Beltway, routinely volunteered for live fire assignments.

These people specifically volunteered to be in harm’s way.

Why? Because it was a period of sustained productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. People did not have the “luxury” to relentlessly and constantly prioritize. In the field there is no choice but to constantly re-evaluate conditions and re-prioritize actions. Because picking the most important task was the only way to survive, the only way to complete the mission.

There was a mission. There was survival. And those two conjoined drivers created a great deal of focus.

Hopefully we don’t have to risk our lives simply to focus on our work. Personal Kanban provides the structure to allow us to choose the right work for maximum effect repeatably.

For more on how to choose the “right” work, and then how to make sure your processes are repeatable see Prioritization and Retrospectives.

Photo by Randy Son of Robert.

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.

Don’t strain your brain, paint a train
You’ll be singing’ in the rain…

- Blondie

Action over Words

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

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?

Julia's Knives

So why call it “personal” if I can use it with my family, in the classroom, or with a team at the office?

In life and in business, we create value.  For Personal Kanban, “personal”  relates to  personal value.  Personal Kanban tracks and visualizes items of personal value – tasks, work, and goals.

Industrial-style kanban – as it was conceptualized by Taiichi Ohno and notably implemented at Toyota – tracks industrial objects of value (tasks) as they travel thru a production stream that is often predictable. These objects have primary value to the organization. This model, while flexible, still tracks relatively well-defined objects through a relatively well-defined value stream. Tracking a crank case over its assembly process is markedly different from tracking the workflow of your upcoming move or your daughter’s wedding.

In contrast, “Personal Kanban” tracks items of personal value as they travel thru a less predictable path. These objects are often smaller and more varied.

In Personal Kanban, even when tracking the tasks of a team, the object of value – and by extension the resultant epiphany about the nature of that work – is still connected primarily to the individual.

Small teams work better when using a group Personal Kanban because such epiphanies are not only shared, but they can likewise be distributed. A realization that something can be improved does not have to be limited to your individual work.

Photo by Tonianne

Thanks to AgileZen, our personal kanban has become indispensable. In its absence, I could hardly remember what we did last week, and certainly not with much accuracy. This got me thinking how the value of personal kanban extends to the dreaded self-assessment / performance evaluation process.

Especially in today’s economy, with an overwhelming number of positions facing elimination and even entire departments threatened by downsizing, the ability to qualitatively and quantitatively justify the existence of your job is crucial. More than ever, it is up to the individual to advocate for that raise, bonus and / or promotion. Rather than “tell” your supervisors that you rock, you have to “show” them exactly why you are a performance superstar.

But how can you do this when you have only a vague recollection of what your actual accomplishments are and nary a memory of the obstacles you faced?

By leveraging personal kanban as a prompt, past responsibilities and deliverables are easily recalled and cited, particularly if you are color-coding tasks / story cards by project or even skill.

Your goal here is to present the clearest picture possible of measurable performance, so try annotating your kanban cards with reminders of:

• the challenges you faced
• the value creation your performance brought to your team or client
• the net value to the organization (lowered costs, reduced inefficiencies, etc.)
• other information you or your organization might value

Likewise, your archived items can also assist in:

• justifying resources needed
• establishing a development plan
• identifying the following year’s goals

In an upcoming post, the value of personal kanban will be explored from the performance evaluator’s standpoint.

Photo by Tonianne.

Some managers have to resort to public humiliation to get employees to submit their time sheets.

“Where is your time sheet?”

“I’ll get it to you.”

“But it was due two hours ago.’”

“Look, I’m really busy, okay, and I just don’t have time to figure out all that I did the past week.”

“Do you want to get paid?”

“Of course I do. Look  - I’ll get it to you … I just have to finish some things.”

Perhaps the single most annoying task for most workers is filling in their time sheet. Having worked for some of the largest consulting firms on earth, I have seen truly monstrous time tracking systems.  Painful, horrible, soul crushing, and pointless.

No one likes time sheets.

A recurring time sheet question goes something like this:

“Hey Jim, what did we do on Wednesday?  I’ve totally forgotten.”

Think about that. We blow through tasks so quickly that all too often what we’ve accomplished becomes a blur. We lose entire days, weeks, months of our lives to “work” we don’t even remember doing. I would call days you can’t remember waste.

How easy it would be to use a personal kanban and write the date of completion on each task when it’s done.  Place it in the “Timesheet” column.  At the end of the week, pick those tasks off the board, and record them.

Using a personal kanban for tracking those tasks:

• increases the accuracy of your time sheet,
• reduces the amount of time you spend completing the timesheet, and
• leaves you with a sense of accomplishment for actually having completed those tasks.

This transforms the time sheet into an opportunity for a quick retrospective. With the key word being quick.

Also consider: some tasks (like time sheets) seem like personal waste when they have no context. Sometimes you can mitigate waste by changing the context of the activity.

Photo cc. Charlee Brown