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

There’s a definite cadence to this cycle.

When this cadence is discovered, it can be fine-tuned.  It can be appreciated.  The cadence become reassuring, a reward in and of itself. The cadence represents predictability, efficiency, and a job well done.

This is the dance of business.

Personal work is more frenzied. The cadence is harder to detect. As individuals, we are interrupted more. We are less able to absorb discontinuities.

Working as a team is a sexy tango; working solo is a tap dance.

There is certainly a cadence to working individually, but it is less institutionalized than working in a group.  Over time, you find in tracking your own work more of a repertoire of rhythms to draw from at different times.

After having a personal kanban for about 2 years now, I find that I’m more of a DJ than a time manager. I string together tasks to work on during the day that are part priority, and part rhythm. For me, writing and bookkeeping simply do not go together, they create dissonance. So if I have a bookkeeping day, I balance it out by meeting a colleague for coffee or taking an enjoyable phone call. Bookkeeping, for me, is jarringly anti-rhythmic. I need the syncopation of discourse to smooth it out.

In groups, fine tuning the team’s cadence involves creating one nicely arranged flow though a predictable value stream. For personal kanban, it means being able to create flow from a relatively chaotic value stream.

Photo by Andreas Schepers

Kanban has two main states: a "station,” where value is created, and a “transition,” where the work item is moved from one station to the next. In the kanban below, we see the flow of work for my upcoming book, Instant Karma: 10 Principles of Social Media for Business. In the pre-writing phase, I am creating the initial text for a chapter. When that’s done, and my editor is ready to look at it, she pulls a completed section from my pre-writing section and places it in her “focus” state. There she and I edit and re-edit that chapter until we think it is ready to send off to the crowdsourcers. I was creating value in the pre-writing state, when that value was realized it then went on to the next state of focus, where it remains until that value is realized.

In the kanban above we see that what is moving is not tasks – but the actual chapter. In a work-flow kanban tasks are the mechanics that create value, not the value itself. The value is explicit in the work-flow. Thus, in a kanban, the work-flow is also called a value-stream.

Here we have a task based kanban where I have the task of “Call Bob.”  It’s going to run through my simplistic Backlog | Doing | Done kanban.  But, let’s think about this a bit.  Regardless of my feelings for Bob, does calling Bob ever give me actual value?  No. "Call Bob" is merely a task, a mechanical action that should create value.

Later, if I am going over completed tasks and trying to figure out what makes me successful and what does not, “Call Bob” is a lousy artifact for judgment. There simply isn’t enough information there to let me make a decision.

So why not make the value explicit?

Here my reason for calling Bob is made more explicit.It could be anything you want from “talk about football” to “catch up.” Remember: Kanban isn’t making value judgments of your actions, it’s simply reporting the value of what you accomplished. If you really like Bob, and want to call him just to shoot the breeze, that’s value to you. It’s fine. What you want is to discover tasks that don’t provide value and eliminate them, so you have more time to do what makes your life better.

Images created in Agile Zen, which I am loving.

Geographic maps convey more than merely the physical environment, they show us things like political, historic, organizational characteristics – both real and imagined spatial constraints – which give locations their context. Similarly, the personal kanban is a map of  your work. It captures not just the tasks – but the logic, the flow that gives it an actionable framework

Communication Comes from Shape and Flow

I have intentionally made this personal kanban screenshot illegible because the text does not matter. What matters are the visual cues – the colors, the assignments, and the states.

In this kanban, we have three staging columns: a working column, “The Pen” (to hold tasks in a state of workus interruptus), and “Complete.”

Immediately we see that today our WIP is filled with teal tasks.  Those happen to be for the creation of Gov 2.0 University, one of our projects.  We’re getting ready to launch the web site and conduct some media events, so this particular day was spent focusing on those tasks.

We also see that yellow tasks (biz dev with a specific channel partner) make up most of the work in a waiting state.  So now we understand that on our plates for this day, we have a lot of focus on G2U, but that biz dev might rear its head as an activity from The Pen becomes active.

So while those yellow tasks might interrupt us, the kanban has mentally prepared us for them.

Those yellow tags likewise tell us a story over time. We know their history. Did they appear yesterday or did the come up over time? Are those tasks ones that recur and just never go away?

Do we have a deluge of project tasks (e.g. teal) that need to be batched and processed as a day with a single focus? Perhaps we have a deluge of different projects, but all similar task types (e.g. phone calls) that can be batched.

What personal kanban reminds us is to look beyond the tasks to the patterns that arise on the board. Work now has a shape. You can begin to think of it in other ways.

You can situate it in its context. Work has a geography.

With personal kanban you can now see the entire river – where it emanates from, where it reaches, and how it flows – rather than dismiss it simply as a body of water.

In an upcoming post, the pattern language of work will be explored.