You can tame what seems difficult

Your backlog is bigger than it should be and it needs to be managed. Everyday people tell us how they are overwhelmed by their backlog, and cannot possibly manage it within a Personal Kanban because it could contain hundreds or thousands of tasks.

Let’s examine this.

On Stephen Smith’s blog, he describes using Personal Kanban to visualize his workflow with his file-card system. Leslie Dewar left this comment:

I have tried this system of cards in the past and found it extremely distracting and demotivating. I was working with a very intensely personal client base of about 280 people and there were dozens of small jobs that probably really needed to be in a tickler file. If I put them all on a “Task” list, it was quite overwhelming, even though some of the work only needed ten or fifteen minutes.

I also suffer from the “out of sight – out of mind” disability. I have gone through many office an office blitz; prioritised; put in folders; sequenced in desktop folders and ……. forgot about it. By the time I do all that organizing, I somehow felt as though I must have also done the job!

Leslie’s issues are not unique. I’m seeing two in particular here. The first is tracking tasks over time (tasks that aren’t relevant for a while clutter up your Personal Kanban and make it hard to read), and the second is Personal Portfolio Management.

Tracking Tasks Over Time

There are things we do every day that are repeating or scheduled out into the future. We need to remember these things and add them to the Personal Kanban when necessary. Products like Outlook or Google Calendar can help here. Simply place automated reminders (what GTD calls “ticklers”) in your calendar at the earliest date you’ll need to be reminded of them. The due date isn’t going to help you – calls to action will. One of the biggest mistakes people make with calendars is that they record the date something will happen rather than recording the earliest date action will be necessary.

Then forget about that thing until the tickler comes up.

Personal Portfolio Management

I have the feeling this is going to become a major theme for Personal Kanban. Everyone has multiple projects. Those projects have features and those actions have specific tasks. Defined:

• Project – a large thing of value that needs to be done – Build Deck
• Features – units of value that, when combined, create the project – Railings
• Tasks – discrete actions that create features – cut 16 posts to 3’5”

We can use Personal Kanban to manage our work at all three levels. Depending on how many projects we have, a project can simply be denoted by the color of the sticky note. Features can be tracked on the Personal Kanban until we start in on the feature – then we can decide how best to break it down.

If the Project is “Make Breakfast,” that probably stands on its own. You won’t need the features (like Toast) or the Tasks (slice bread, place bread in toaster, depress toaster button, double check toast setting to make sure it’s on golden brown, stare at toaster for what seems like an eternity…).

Part of what makes life challenging is that personal work does come in Projects like “Build House” and “Make Coffee.”  Combined, these projects comprise our Personal Portfolio.

Since one of the goals of Personal Kanban is to simplify your life – creating a huge, mandatory system of nested Personal Kanban or secondary tools doesn’t make sense (for everyone).

So What Do I Do With This Wisdom?

Understand that your body of work is a Portfolio. Your Personal Kanban goal is to manage that portfolio in the way that works best for you. If your Personal Kanban is overloaded with tasks, find ways to group them into Features or Projects until it comes time to actually do the work. If you have too many things in the future, remind yourself with an automated calendar.

If you are like Leslie and have 208 clients, manage them in a Customer Relationship Management system. And, if you get to the point where you can’t manage your work at all – you are taking on too much. That’s the point where you go to Odesk and get an outsourced Personal Assistant.  (And manage them with an on-line Personal Kanban!)

Photo by Sea Turtle

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

Throw out the schedule

In my previous post, “GTD & Kanban: Similarities, Differences & Synergies Between The Two“ in this series, I talked about using Kanban for managing the flow of work, rather than having any number of projects and someday/maybe items in separate lists which are reviewed every week to a month.  In this post I will describe how using flow to manage GTD projects and someday/maybe lists can be beneficial.  In a future post I’ll describe how this also translates into flowing actions in a context, such as the work place, and limiting the work in progress (WIP) of these actions.

Again, for the basics of GTD I recommend the material linked from Wikipedia.  The basics of Personal Kanban can be found on this very site.

What are “Someday/Maybe” lists and Projects?

Getting things Done (GTD) has a number of horizons above any given action: Projects, Goals, Focus, Vision & Purpose.  These are aimed at providing yourself goals to aim for and to test your choice of actions against, so that you aren’t just “doing”, but are actually moving toward a goal, and these goals join up to achieving larger objectives in life.

In GTD, anything you wish to achieve that has more than one specific  action is considered a project.  For example, even arranging a meal out at a restraunt could be considered a project as you will have to go through actions similar to: who to invite, confirm who is available, when to go, where to go, book a table, confirm booking with invitees and go.  The reason why this definition works is, actions could be in any number of places in your personal productivity system, be it a calendar or a list, and when they are done there needs to be a reminder in your system that acts as a touchstone so that you can ensure a next action is available to move forward towards an envisaged successful outcome.

Any objective that requires action, yet does not make sense to undertake as-at-now, yet you feel this is something you would like to do in the future is considered a candidate for the “someday/maybe” list.  Someday/maybe is reviewed at regular intervals to see if an item needs pulling into the current project list, or, if only one action is required, a contextual action list or placed on a calendar.  Why have a someday/maybe list?  Someday/maybe lists assist in clearing your head by placing all these wishes and thoughts into a trusted and regularly reviewed system.

Managing Someday/Maybe & Projects by using a Personal Kanban

Rather than have multiple flat lists, one for projects and one for someday/maybe with no interaction between them other than once a week if not longer, lets use a Kanban to represent both!  The example bellow includes prioritisation, a step for the initial brainstorm of what success looks like and what actions may be required, the doing part (working), and the done part.  All with WIP limits for focus.

Lets do a quick illustration:

1. You get a new project at work called “Project A” that is going to require several actions, so you place it on the backlog as you have plenty to do already.  The backlog acts as your someday/maybe list.
2. A space becomes available on your “Should” lane, which prompts you to look at your backlog for possible projects to start prioritising, you assess the items against your current Goals at work, and select Project A.
3. Over time, Project A moves from “Should” to “Ready”, and before undertaking the work, to the elaboration lane for envisaging a successful outcome and working back to the next steps from where you are.
4. Once Project A moves to the “Working” lane, you place the next action discovered as part of elaborating into the appropriate context list or date on the calendar.
5. Actions get performed overtime, and eventually the successful outcome is achieved and Project A is placed in the “Project Goal Achieved!” lane.

Clearly, due to the variance in size of knowledge work or personal projects it’s difficult to set a limit on “working”, so I suggest you experiment with this number, and try to keep it as low as possible for focus.

Going back to the purpose of someday/maybe, it is possible you have single discreet actions on your backlog now, so it is worth moving those items to an appropriate context list or calendar entry when the time comes that you wish to do something about them.  Personally, most of my Someday/Maybe items were and are projects, so I don’t mind the backlog being closely associated to projects.

Pomodoro and Personal Kanban

Focus is essential to giving a task your all.  Our increasingly hectic lifestyles are however, rarely conducive to focus. How many people do you know who go to work early, stay late, and even pop by the office on weekends, just so they can “actually get some work done.”

But then people tend to go too far in the other direction. They focus for a very, very long time … they drill down … they go deep. They overfocus.

Q: Ever wonder why you get great ideas in the shower?

A: Because you aren’t doing anything.

So, Pomodoro says, focus and work for 25 minutes, then rest for a bit, then work for another 25 minutes.  During those bursts, you are working on one focused thing.  Thinking hard, working hard. Then, you kick back and let your brain say “ahhhhhh”.

It’s just like a workout – you don’t walk into the gym and spend an hour doing 100 pound curls. You do short bursts of directed and focused activity. Then stretch.

Mickey Loves Ya

And just like a workout, during your Pomodoro breaks it’s a very good idea to hydrate.

Personal Kanban dovetails nicely with Pomodoro. Your work-in-progress is handled in the 25 minute bursts of activity. Your Personal Kanban is always filtering and prioritizing what fits into those bursts.  The Personal Kanban takes on the role of your trainer – watching what you do, recommending the next set, helping you understand your exercises and optimize for the next ones.

Since Personal Kanban’s “got your back,” you understand that you’ve organized your tasks, chosen the best one at the time, and will get to the others in due course. Without this peace-of-mind, you can’t really focus.

True focus requires clarity, concentration, and commitment.  Personal Kanban gives you the organization to focus, while Pomodoro can give you the structured time.

Let's Work Together

In this article in the “GTD & Personal Kanban Series” we will explore the why? behind bringing GTD & Personal Kanban together.

What is Getting Things Done (GTD)?

GTD emerged as a highly effective and popular personal productivity approach in the early two thousands.  The approach consists of a five stage process, a workflow to guide that process and a couple of techniques for handling choice around what to do at any given moment, what should be progressed as soon as possible or someday/maybe, and also, how to handle life and work’s various horizons – from now at this moment, all the way through to what is important to you in life as a whole.  This article isn’t a ’101′ on GTD, for that there are plenty of resources available, which are linked to here.

On a personal note, I find that GTD frees my mind enabling me to focus totally on the tasks at hand, and also represents a concrete approach to help achieve Stephen Covey’s first three habits of his famous: The Seven Habits of highly Effective People.

What is Kanban?

This whole site is about Kanban in the context of solving personal and group problems around the home and workplace,  for a great 101 head over to here.

Kanban has allowed me to increase the throughput of things getting done.

Similarities

Though targeted at different problems, there are similarities between Kanban & GTD.

• The breaking down of “stuff” into discrete items to be processed – With GTD this happens as part of taking each item from the physical and/or electronic inboxes and asking if it is actionable, and if so, what is the next physical action.  With Kanban, we create stories which form the Kanbans themselves, to then be placed on a backlog.
• Inboxes & Backlogs - These are both areas where potential work is collected, and represents the start of either a GTD process with inboxes, or a Kanban process with backlogs.  The similarity here will differ based on context, and it’s fair to say that with a backlog, some initial processing of the material onto the backlog may have taken place.  With GTD, raw material is added to the physical or electronic inboxes.
• Lists, lists & more lists – Both GTD & Kanban utilise lists.  In GTD’s case it can take any form as the process is not prescriptive in it’s concrete implementation.  In Kanban’s case, there are lists, though they are split into dimensions, such as stage/state/work station the story is at, and there is additional process related information, like WIP limits and checklists.
• Contexts – Kanban & GTD are very flexible in their applications.  Both can be shaped to fit various situations.  For example, manufacturing cars, or managing your reading list in the case of Kanban.  GTD can have a “context list” for pretty much anything you can imagine, from a specific location to a situation you find yourself in, where certain work makes sense.
• With both GTD & Kanban granularity is important – For GTD, it’s not about writing lists of goals: “buy milk”, “fill in tax return”, but rather, GTD is concerned with determining the next action required and given the right context or time, just performing that action without having to constantly figure out the next step each time.  In Kanban’s case, it favours work items that are discrete, unambiguous and ideally of a similar “size” to reduce variance.
• Support for levels of granularity – Kanban can achieve this with a kind of nesting of Kanbans and horizontal swim-lanes.  Or, multiple Kanbans, one representing a higher level of granularity than the other, whereby the items in the “Kanban in the large” are related to those being processed in the “Kanban in the small”.  I use an approach like this with my current projects and their related current actions being processed.  GTD achieves multiple levels of granularity with lists.  There is: purpose, vision, goals, focus, projects and plenty of contexts, for example “At work” & “At home”.
• Addressing Waste - Kanban addresses waste explicitly as does GTD.  Kanban using WIP limiting and “stop the line” techniques with a general attitude of continuous improvement.  GTD insists that any piece of “stuff” that enters your world should be processed once and once only, by using techniques like a ‘Zero Inbox’ policy and the ‘Two-Minute Rule’.
• Pull – At the most abstract level, both approaches exist to process work to fulfill a demand.  Both approaches pull work through a process to achieve the goal of getting valuable stuff done.

This is encouraging, it would appear that we have a lot to work with in terms of bringing these ideas together.

Differences

There are obvious differences in the two approaches, given they are aimed at different problems. However, I find little that is polarised or in conflict but rather the differences are complementary in enhancing areas of non-existence or weakness in the other, when applied to personal productivity.

• Reduced backlog size versus a clear head – Kanban comes from the world of Lean Manufacturing, where the Theory of Constraints philosophy is pervasive.  Large backlogs are considered to be wasteful as the cost of maintaining them and the friction they cause impacts the value that will be generated. A backlog that is sized so that it is processed rapidly and renewed with new stories regularly is considered ideal.  GTD is different to this, there are no caps, implied or artificial.  GTD encourages a clear head, to reduce stress and allow complete focus on the task at hand.  Obviously, there is a conflict there on face value.  In the past I had GTD action lists with hundreds of action items on them, and project and someday/maybe lists with 10s of items.
• Kanban allows for Work In Progress (WIP) limiting -  GTD doesn’t explicitly try to limit that which is being worked on in any hard manner, rather a softer approach which asks if something is relevant against focus, goals, vision, purpose or just plain want to do it now.  Sadly, GTD can lead to thrashing, when the total number of options for doing is enormous.  Kanban is all about focus, and if used well can seriously reduce the chance, let alone the act of context switching.
• Visual control - Although I’m sure there are ways this could be addressed currently, as a whole, most GTD implementations seem to be light on visualisation of WIP.  Kanban is all about visualisation.
• Process definition – GTD has a definite default process, which is not prescriptive in so far it’s not all or nothing.  Kanban doesn’t define a default, but rather provides tools to be used in a greater or lesser extent to get the right result in a context.
• Prioritisation – In GTD there is no prioritisation as such.  By virtue of the fact something is actionable, it will either appear in a context action list, calendar, waiting for (delegation) or may appear project list.  With Kanban there are  all kinds of ways priorities can be defined.
• Time critical actions – Kanban is about flow, so specific times and dates aren’t catered for.  GTD does use calendars and possibly tickle files to cater for those things that do need attending to at a specific time and date.

I am certain there are more differences here, so please do highlight any to better our understanding.

Synergise

Lots of similarities and lots of differences, generally of a non-conflicting nature. The question is, where can we benefit from bringing these powerful approaches together?  Lets see…

Kanban can help GTD a lot! The problem I have had with GTD is flow, thrashing and WIP limiting at all stages in particular contexts, especially the backlog.  I know there is waste there, given the number of times I have conducted a review and found:

• It takes ages because of the size of the backlog.
• I find out-of-date actions/projects, again due to the size of the backlog.
• Feel like i should be getting some of the value of the review just by doing, instead of waiting for the end of the week review.
• I have also struggled with pulling projects from the someday/maybe into current projects lists.

GTD can help Kanban in a personal productivity context by:

• Providing a way for people to clear their heads to focus on what is at hand.
• Excellent techniques for identifying what should be done or not.
• Doing actions not goals, by forcing the right questions at the beginning of processing “stuff”, instead of constantly asking what do I need to with this?
• Handle work that needs to be on the calendar and most importantly some simple rules to motivate doing!  The Two Minute Rule being a great example.
• Delegation.
• Levels of focus in life and work.  Kanban doesn’t address what it is you are flowing toward.

Over the coming posts in this series I will try to illustrate the above synergies with examples.  Again, please do comment, I’m keen to explore this more myself.

Books are Life

If you are anything like me, you will have a monster reading list.  Do you manage it?  Do you focus on a few books at a time?  If not, maybe you should, to better enjoy that fiction or help manage your reading based learning?

Problem – Too Many Books, Not Enough Time & Bad Habits

I have a lot of books waiting to be read thanks to a nasty ’1-click’ habit with Amazon, I also have a decent amount of quality reading time due to a lengthy commute, yet I just can’t read them all soon enough, and the list keeps growing.  Part of the problem is that until recently I had a bad habit of picking up books, reading a few hundred pages, getting distracted by another book,  and before I know it I have five books on the go, which is plain silly.  The result was a load of books I have finished, and a load I have touched on, yet not fully focused upon and completed.  I asked myself – “If only I could drop this wasteful habit and focus on completing a few books at a time, the NET result would be different, namely, more books read and better understood over any period of time, with less wasteful unfocused reading and rereading”.

Solution – Enter the ‘General Reading Personal Kanban’

Funny name for this pattern right?  Why not just “Reading Personal Kanban”?  Well, I’m going with this one on the basis that I think  there are two types of reading we do, an end-to-end style (General Reading), and for those that use various learning techniques, like a SQ3R, a ‘SQ3R Personal Kanban’ pattern is in the works, so expect a post soon.  In the meantime, ‘General Reading’ can encompass anything factual or fictional, and I personally tend to carry one of each type of book with me.

The root of the problem is one of focus and priority.  If there is one thing I have learnt about Kanban is it can be used, amongst other things, to address these two subjects simply and directly.  Below is an example based on my current reading list, using a great tool called AgileZen:

Manage that reading list with a Kanban

How does this give focus and priority?  Quite simply.  The Kanban describes the process from left to right of first prioritising the reading, reading and then finishing books.  Each step, bar the backlog and the completed step, has a work in progress limit (WIP).  This WIP limiting is the aspects that enables the narrowing of the prioritisation, then tight focus on the act of reading – I like a WIP of two so I can have a factual and a fictional book on the go.  To complete a book, we pull a book off the backlog through the process to add to the flow of books being read over time.  You can read more on Kanban in general and why it works elsewhere on this site under Primers.

My own General Reading Personal Kanban forms part of my overall productivity system, which I am writing about here.

In a recent post he discussed issues very close to what I call visualization and flow. He begins with a little story about Jerry Seinfeld:

A couple of years ago there was a little story doing the rounds about a bit of productivity advice from none other than Seinfeld.  He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day, even when you didn’t feel like it. To help achieve this he had a big calendar on his wall and for each day that he did some writing he put a big red cross over that day. After a few days a chain would be created. As the chain gets bigger you’ll not want to break it, so you’ll do what it takes to keep it going.

What Seinfeld did was build the world’s simplest and most effective kanban. It had two polar states.  Done / Not Done. It had one metric, completeness. Once writing was achieved, task is complete.  Any interruption in flow was immediately visible on his calendar based kanban.

Seinfeld didn’t want to “break the chain.”  He didn’t want to interrupt the flow of work.

James has taken this concept and built flow worksheets … or state based kanban that he calls a habit tracker.

James’ Habit tracker looks like this:

In James’ system you create a repetitive task or a “habit” and you simply do it every day. Once it’s done, you can mark it off. For introspection there’s a note field.

This would be an excellent variation on my Sequestering Approach to personal kanban. I can very much see habit trackers on the wall next to the kanban.

James is looking for comments on the Habit Tracker, so please visit his post and leave feedback.

1. GTD & Kanban: Similarities, Differences & Synergies Between The Two
2. GTD & Kanban: Managing The Relationship Between Someday/Maybe & Active Projects
3. GTD & Kanban: Work In Progress Limiting GTD Next Actions Within A Context
4. GTD & Kanban: Inboxes, Lists, Calendars, Kanbans & Mind Maps Working Together In Harmony
5. GTD & Kanban: An Example Of It All Coming Together

Getting Things Done Workflow

I am getting value from the changes I have made to how I work, yet still experimenting to improve.  Any suggestions or questions, please do comment or email in the interest of moving all of our understanding forward.

The Time Capsule approach is to approach the kanban, notice that there are a multitude of little tasks, pull them all off the board, go to your desk, and start doing them until they’re done or your day is over.  And if you have 8 hours of small tasks, well, that’s a learning event for you.

Move them across the desk through 3 stations. Backlog, In Process, and Done.

This is now a speed tasking exercise. Don’t spend a lot of time prioritizing, you already know your backlog.  Prioritize on-the-fly. You will most likely game the system by doing some or all of the following:

Sweat the small stuff: Very small tasks can be done very quickly.  Doing 20, five minute tasks quickly fills up the “done” column with a satisfying number of post-its.

Launch all missiles: Tasks that require a quick email are easy to get into the “active” column. Today, completion is the goal. Having many active tasks is okay, so long as you know it’s moving toward completion. Remember: You are the only judge of the effectiveness of the time capsule.

Play for Pay: You want to move those tickets to the done side of your desk. Screw convention, screw the Agilistas, screw the WIP monsters – you are only interested in those tickets moving to the right.

Focus after Fast: Tasks that require a bit of your time and focus should be done after the fast things and after the missiles are launched.  While those emails are out-reaping rewards, you can work on the more delicate tasks.

Remember this is a strategy for coping with clutter in your backlog. The mess will happen from time to time because personal tasks are unruly. If you find yourself de-cluttering more than once a month, then it’s likely you have too many commitments, or aren’t prioritizing well.