H4M&D is always present in our Personal Kanban

When we wake up in the morning, we have a pretty good idea what we want to get done that day. To make those daily goals explicit, we created the Today (link) column for Personal Kanban.

Our Personal Kanban serves many functions:

• It tracks our current work;
• It shows what we’re excelling at;
• It shows where we may be falling behind;
• It gives us an appreciation for our context;
• It lets us know when we’re overloaded and could use help; and
• It shows the status of our projects.

But our Personal Kanban can also inspire us. For me, there is one major goal I have that drives almost everything else I do. It’s very personal and important to me, so we put it in the Modus Cooperandi Personal Kanban as a reminder. That’s what I’m working for. It’s that yellow task up there, cryptically labeled “H4M&D.”

For me, H4M&D gets a little closer every day. Even though the ticket doesn’t move, if I can close out my day with the understanding that I truly am a little closer to that goal, then the day has been a success. Granted, some days I move only the tiniest bit closer, but closer is still closer.

I would recommend that you be judicious when putting anything like this in your Personal Kanban – make sure it is that important. You don’t want to clutter your board with 20 bits of inspiration that  get in the way of your work.

Use your Personal Kanban to inspire. Make your inspiration visible and begin to work towards it. Like mine, some of your goals can be audacious. Keeping them visual is keeping them relevant. It helps you pull the right tasks, slog through the hard ones, enjoy the easy ones, and see them all in the context of your greater goals.

Clarity Means Completion: The Psychology of Kanban – Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo.

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Personal Kanban: Optimizing the Individual Coder – Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo.

Planeban - A Quick offline kanban for in-flight work

As a matter of fact, yes.

I boarded the first leg of my flight from Seattle to Hanoi. I had 19 hours of flying ahead of me. I also had a backlog, and no wifi. Agile Zen was not going to be useful for me. So, I opened Open Office Writer and made a quick table.

I had a series of things to do, but with a few constraints. The first was that I was likely to fall asleep at some point, so I wanted to knock out the most important task first. The second was that I had a list of commitments I’d made over the week and needed to make good on them. Fortunately, I have a 17 hour battery and a 4 hour battery as backup, so I had enough juice to cover me.

In no particular order I wrote down my work. I had 14 papers to read for Hanoi, so I began with those.  I knew that not finishing them first would mean I’d read them when I was too tired to retain anything. Then I went to work on the feature sets for the new software projects. Finally I ended with blog posts (of which this is one).

In the end, I had a full accounting of what I’d done – so I could make sure that the files and work completed in-flight made it to the appropriate people and after-action steps were taken.

I want to point out again, you don’t need special hardware or software, you just need to visualize your work, limit your WIP, and prioritize.

That was step one.

Step two is visualizing that FIP. Jessica was concerned because her triathlon regimen included both repetitive and non-repetitive tasks. She needed to consume the right amount of calories, be sure to take her meds, and of course work out. This would equate to three repetitive, monotonous tickets per day in Ready –> Doing –> Done.

Many tickets. Too little real information.

Getting the work done for the triathlon was of course, important, but Personal Kanban is built to be an information radiator. What was the real information she needed?  This turned out to be:

1. what workouts did I do
2. when did I do them
3. did my caloric intake match the workouts
4. did I take my meds and, most important
5. am I being consistent or missing anything?

So here we see Jessica’s board. She just had a little white board, so we worked with the walls in her home. Backlog and Done are both off the board (on the walls where the board hung). Her spontaneous tasks still work through a Ready –> Doing –> Done value stream, those tasks were color coded between work, family, studying and other tasks.  But there’s more here than that.

There are two additional “swim lanes” on this board. A swim lane is another value stream or dedicated horizontal lane on our board for special tasks.

The first swim lane is Triathlon Training. We have several metrics here:

Diet: each day net calories, water, and meds are measured. Calories are a number, meds and water are a checkmark for done.

Workout: Type, severity, and subjective well being are noted here. “20” is a 20 minute cardio. On Wednesday you can see “10 mile ride.” E,M,H are easy, medium and hard workouts. Smilies measure how Jessica subjectively felt about the workout.

She can then take these metrics and not only see adherence and progress, but also plan for future workouts.

The second swim lane is Jessica Studying for her Section 65 Certification. She told me that she studies by creating a study plan for herself, studying, and then testing herself on what she just did. So we set up a swim lane with a WIP of one. At any point, she can only be working on one module.

So with this, we took Jessica’s overwhelming combination of things in progress and goals and made them visible and actionable. Take the time to critically look at the different projects you have in flight. In the end, you want to get the work done, but your real aim is to understand what you’re doing. To get those projects done right, Jessica needed some dedicated swim lanes.

I’m willing to bet she’s not alone.

Joe edited the conversation into two parts which can be found below:

Part 1

Part 2

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

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.