Visualizing the Flow: Polar-State Based Personal Kanban with Habit Trackers

James Mallison shared a bit of insight and I'm passing it along.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.

Personal Kanban and Habit Tracker

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.

The Task Based Personal Kanban Approach in Detail

Task Based Personal Kanban Approach

Imagine you have a number of tasks that need completing, and you need to visualize the state of each task. Let’s say that each of these tasks is going to involve several days of information exchange with others. Now let’s suppose that each of these tasks needs to be completed by a certain date, and if you did them in serially with a WIP limit you would spend most of your time waiting for responses. You simply don't have time to fully "complete" each goal and tracking individual subtasks like "bug Bob to send paperwork AGAIN" is a waste of your time.In a traditional kanban, you’d have a problem. Tasks started but not completed would be “blocked,” and you’d need to solve that blockage before you could move the card. Until you moved that task, it was considered WIP.But here we have tasks whose very nature require us to wait for others to acheive completion. These tasks are messy.The task-based personal kanban approach changes the tasks into swim lanes, and allows for a large number of simultaneous tasks.  Your actions should still fall into a WIP limit, but the tasks themselves are unbounded.I’ll retell the story from the original post:In the beginning of June, I was suddenly faced with a large number of items that had to be done in a very short period of time. All of them involved interactions with others. So I built I task-based kanban where each swim lane was a specific task and the adjudication of the tasks was “Assembling,” “Assembled,” “Processing,” “Completed,” and “Notes.”  I knew that my WIP was toast; there was simply no way I could limit WIP when the tasks were so dependent on others.  I need to be able to launch things quickly and then let them resolve naturally.Context required me to rethink the nature of WIP.  WIP needed to be my personal action state, not the completion of the whole task.Each project had objects that needed to be assembled. I allowed myself to have a WIP of three for assembling.  So at any given point in time, I’d have three tasks with stars next to them. I would then gather all the background materials I needed for those things.  When I had all the background information, they would be “assembled”.  As items were assembled, I would start the process to complete the task (calling people, emailing them, etc.) – that put a check in the “processing” column.  I would take notes and place text reminders in the “notes” column until the matter was settled.  Then it would get a “Completed” and I could ceremoniously draw a big line through the whole task.This helped me visualize the full project on a task basis without feeling guilty that I had more than a certain number of tasks active at any given point.  The task based approach helped me track and complete about 35 simultaneous responsibilities during a very stressful time.

GTD & Kanban: Series Overview

For a long time I have been a Getting Things Done (GTD) advocate in both my personal and professional life, starting from the basics and working my way up to a full blown implementation in various paper and electronic forms over the years.  GTD has been a huge help, yet I have always felt there is something missing in my implementation that helps me better manage prioritisation and focus around work, which led me to explore the use of Kanban as a form of GTD list.  Over a series of posts I intend to explore a number of aspects of GTD and how I have applied Kanban to limit my work in progress, adopt a pull based system, and overall, increase the flow of completed actions in my key areas of focus in life and work:

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.