The short answer is, every week or so, try to have a short retrospective with your team or alone (if you are working by yourself). When you have the meeting, review what’s happened and archive as you do.

Some of the tasks in your DONE column will spark introspection, some won’t. (Hopefully you don’t have to ponder all your work).

As you discuss the tasks, you can move them into your ARCHIVE where you store completed tasks. Or, if you are so inclined, you can throw them away.

In the video, the ARCHIVE is part of the software. With a physical board you can have your archive be a file folder or a shoebox.

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

Modus Cooperandi is pleased to announce the release of its third Personal Kanban InfoPak. In Personal Kanban Design Patterns: Inspiration to Discover Your Flow we present a series of patterns for individuals as well as for small “teams.” Among the topics discussed: approaches tailored to specific users (i.e. children and authors) and situations (i.e. non-linear work); ways in which productivity tools such as GTD and Pomodoro extend the value of your Personal Kanban; how “coping mechanisms” such as retrospectives shed light on work patterns that have helped or hindered productivity in the past.

For best results and access to links, please download the presentation. As always, please feel free to embed, distribute, and/or comment on this or any of our other InfoPaks.

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