Inventory Makes Work

Lean talks a lot about inventory. A major tenet of Lean is to reduce inventory. Companies that stock up on too much stuff have to maintain that stuff, manage it, and then deal with it when it is no longer useful. This is why companies end up having huge sales at the end of the year - they've amassed warehouses of stock (or their suppliers have) and now that merchandise needs to be sold fast.

Inventory lowers organizational effectiveness because the time and money spent taking care of the inventory could have been spent making the company more successful. Therefore, Lean organizations tend to receive the things they need to operate at the last responsible moment, this is called "Just in Time" (JIT). A JIT organization does not take on inventory until the moment they need it and therefore spends as little as possible maintaining inventory, greatly reducing the risk of having overstock.But inventory isn't just "stuff." Inventory for us as individuals includes anything we have that requires maintenance or on-going attention. We have responsibilities, they aren't going away. We will have a yard, it will need to be mowed. Dishes need to be washed. Children need to be raised.Other inventory comes in the form of stress. Stress, I would argue, is inventory. Your brain is like a factory, you take in information, you create value. Stress slows your factory down.I've written about "Existential Overhead." Stress is a big part of that overhead and it is totally inventory. The question is, how much of our stress do we manufacture ourselves? Certainly there is stress that comes from outside our control. Illness in the family, natural disasters, economic crises - we can't do much to stave these off.There's other overhead we create for ourselves. Lean teaches us to save action until the last responsible minute, but procrastination teaches us to ignore action until someone yells at us. Procrastination is not responsible. The more you procrastinate, the more you know someone is going to yell at you. So, even when you are doing something else, you are fretting about what you aren't doing and that lowers your productivity.Focus for you as an individual comes from an understanding of what you are doing and why. Existential Overhead, inventory, stress all combine to make you question what you are doing and why. That muddies your understanding, you lose focus, and your effectiveness decreases.The biggest problem here: if you stress about things that can be relieved, when big problems come along, your capacity to absorb that extra stress is reduced. And if the new big problem is too big, you lose your cookies. But all we needed to do to keep our cool and rise to the occasion was some work up-front to relieve those previous stressers.I invite you to look at what is going on in your life, identify stressers and other inventory that you 

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routinely keep you awake at night, and start to figure out ways to mitigate them or even remove them from your life. Especially look for stress you are manufacturing yourself.

WIP and Priorization: Recommended Portions

You've been hiking all morning and the mercury is nearing 100. You're parched. You need water - lots of it.  But even in your thirst, you want that water to be manageable.Which holds more water - a lake or a drinking glass?Which will satisfy your thirst - a fire hose or a drinking fountain?Whether it is water or work, limiting the portion size of something we are consuming actually makes it more useful. We do not lap from the pool or attempt to drink from the firehose's blast.In Lean, we limit work in progress (WIP) not just to slow people down and get them to focus, but to increase throughput. Standard procedure is to drink work from the proverbial firehose. All too often we try to do too much, too fast. And when we can't, and our productivity suffers, we feel we've failed.We have a throughput, our time is a finite resource. We are finite resources.When we limit our WIP, we acknowledge this.Pulling a task from our backlog into our WIP means that we are now using that very finite, very valuable resource. We want to make sure that the task we’ve chosen is of the highest importance.Of course “highest importance” is contextual. Some days it’s work for a given client, other days it’s specific tasks, and still others it’s work that fits in the small time slots you have to work.This isn’t just simple prioritizing of one thing over another. Your brain quickly picks up not only on your limited time but of the trade-offs that limited time generates.  You begin to conduct detailed risk assessments – naturally. I could do this large task for this client, or I could get these 10 little things off my plate – making me more able to focus tomorrow.  Or vice versa.Personal Kanban helps uncover what is really causing the most stress. Those little unfinished tasks, or that big glaring responsibility.  We’re all wired slightly but appreciably differently. Our flow charts similarly have their quirks.