This is the second post of a three-part guest series, Doing GTD Kanban Style by Pascal Venier. You can read the third post here.In the first post, I have described how David Allen’s Getting Things Done allowed people to gain control of their workflows and at the same time get perspective on their work. This method has proved incredibly valuable to me over the last eight years. It nevertheless remains that making it all work is not always so easy. No matter how well GTD has been working for me, I have always had at the back of my mind that there was something missing in my implementation. For a time, I went through a phase of trying to find a technological solution to this problem. This involved trying more GTD software than I care to count, in search of the proverbial magic bullet. With time, I came to realize that this was pointless and went back to the fundamentals and came to the conclusion that there were two key issues I was struggling with in my implementation of GTD.The first problem I have been confronted is the sheer number of projects and Next Actions that ended up on my lists. This made me very aware that I was confronted with an overload of half-finished projects which were languishing and of tasks which were fighting for my attention. This was at times leaving me to feel overwhelmed and at times even slightly demoralized. The more I was becoming productive, the more I seemed to be faced with endless projects and tasks. GTD is meant to be the synonymous with “stress free productivity”, but it seemed that if I was not very careful, the stress could can creep back through the the back door. Indeed David Allen does make a distinction between "active projects" and passive ones for which the someday-maybe list provides a "parking lot", but in practice in a busy life, it is difficult to juggle all the obligations one has to face. The switch between what should be active and passive projects is in my view one of the most crucial issues to an effective GTD implementation, but also perhaps one of the hardest to nail down.The whole method is designed with one end in mind: getting things DONE. Yet, it is no little paradox that when there are two crucial frameworks which help getting control and getting perspective, there isn't anything as simple and powerful about the DOING part of GTD. The absence of a straight forward process to help you focus and actually take actions is often felt by GTD-ers. Paul Eastabrook has very aptly identified this issue, in one of his posts on this blog. As he puts it, "GTD can lead to thrashing, when the total number of options for doing is enormous." Of course we must acknowledge that Next actions are not simply traditional tasks on a task list, but precisely this: the next action to be taken in a given project. Nevertheless, in my experience, a delicate issue remains how to choose which next action will be performed at a given moment. The only guidance provided by the GTD method in this respect is that there are three ways to choose the actions at a given moment. Firstly the context, and what can be done in a given environment. Second, the time available which greatly limits the next actions which can be executed. Finally, the energy available at a given moment must also be taken into account: there is no point in attempting to undertake demanding tasks when one is very tired. I have often felt that the absence of better way of prioritizing and limiting what could be done at a given time was a problem. A natural tendency seems to be that the smallest and easiest Next actions were undertaken, following the line of easier passage.Such are the two crucial issues I feel I have been confronted with in trying to take my GTD implementation to the next level. Discovering serendipitously Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry’s Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life has however given me an opportunity to find an elegant solution to address these issues, by simply adding to the equation this lean pattern which simply involves 2 principles : visualizing and limiting one's Work in Progress (WIP), as I will explain in my next post.
Doing GTD Kanban Style #1
This is the first post in a three-part guest series, Doing GTD Kanban Style by Pascal Venier. You can read the second post in the series here.When Jim Benson encouraged me a while back to write something about how I am combining Personal Kanban & Getting Things Done, I thought this was an excellent idea. This was the more so as it was extremely timely for me to pose and reflect on my experience, 8 years after starting to implement GTD, and about a year after discovering Personal Kanban. I started drafting a blog post on how in my experience they play extremely well together. However, what was initially intended to be written in the form of a single post has irresistibly grown into a series of posts. In this first post, I would like to start by describing Getting Things Done and what it involves.
Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free productivity is the title of a book published at the very beginning of the last decade by David Allen, a personal productivity consultant and speaker based in Ojay, California. It has quickly become a best-seller and has rapidly drawn a huge following. It is now one of the classics of the personal productivity literature. The purpose of the GTD method is to help people becoming more productive by gaining control of their workflows. This is achieved by implementing a simple 5 stages process - “a phenomenal piece of mental artistry” in the late Marc Orchant’s words - which involves collecting, processing, organizing, review and doing. As an image is worth 1,000 words, the processing system has been elegantly synthesized in the now famous GTD Workflow diagram and more recently as a cool infographics, the GTD workflow map.A first basic principle is to be quite systematically collecting not only all the “stuff” coming into your life (letters, documents, emails, etc.) but also emptying your head and writing down everything that has your attention.It is then a matter of quite systematically processing all the inputs coming in your system. This triage process uses simple yet effective filters by asking three questions: “what is it?”, “is it actionable?” and if it is actionable, “what is the next action?” ; determining what is the next action is quite central to the whole system. A particularity of GTD is that anything involving more than one action is a project.Organizing involves using a very clear structure and “clear buckets”. Items which are not actionable are disposed of (trash), set aside to incubate (someday-maybe folder) or stored for future retrieval (reference materials). A simple system of lists and folders is used to keep track of actionable items (next actions, time sensitive items and events, “waiting for” items which have been delegated, as well as projects and projects support materials).Systematically reviewing the system on a regular basis is essential to the implementation of GTD. This involves reviewing constantly what Next Actions need to be executed, but also conducting ritual weekly reviews in order to process the in-box, take stock of all the open loops, Next Actions, projects, and keeping them aligned with one’s areas of responsibility and focus and your longer terms goals and vision.Finally, it is a matter of doing, for in the end this is all about Getting things DONE. A key here is that a lot of what will be involved will consist in predefined work, whilst keeping enough flexibility for being able to be responsive to what may come up and need immediate attention.If Getting Things Done is about becoming more productive, it is in no way a matter of simply keeping your nose to the proverbial grindstone, far from it. It also involves another dimension, alas for too often neglected or misunderstood, which helps taking things to the next level, by going beyond productivity and striving towards effectiveness. Gaining perspective is quite crucial to this end and the Getting Things Done method also involves a second framework, the six-levels of the horizons of focus. This is a matter of looking at your work bottom-up, starting from the ground up, from the runway, i.e. the Next Actions you need to accomplish, and rising progressively in order to get an eagle-eye view of what you are doing and would like to do in the future, right up to you life values at 50,000 feet. The six horizons of focus include:
50,000 feet : Life purpose
40,000 feet : vision of long-term success (3-5 years)
30,000 feet : one-to-two-years goals
20,000 feet : current areas of responsibilities
10,000 feet : current projects
Runway : current next actions
These six-levels allow you to map what you are currently doing to make sure that they are aligned with your goals and vision for the future, but also all importantly atoned with what you see as your Life purpose.Over the last eight years, practicing the GTD method has proven incredibly valuable to me. I would like in my next post to reflect on my experience of trying to make it all work and identify some of the recurrent challenges I have been confronted with, before looking at how Personal Kanban has helped me take my GTD implementation to the next level.
HOW TO: Limit WIP #7: Understand Your Customers
In this series, we’ve been discussing the psychology of your work, the sized of tasks, how we complete certain types of tasks, and who / what might interrupt us.Perhaps it’s time to understand the consumers of our tasks: our customers. When we do something, even if it is simply relaxing, there is a potential beneficiary of that task.We do things. Those things we loosely call “work”. “Work” has a “work product”. “Work products” should have some value for somebody. That somebody is the customer.Customers can include:
those paying money for the work (the traditional customer)
our bosses (corporate hierarchy)
colleagues, coworkers, partners (corporate culture)
regulators or agents of an authority (bureaucracy)
family (family)
friends and neighbors (society)
ourselves (ourselves)
And there are likely other customers and subdivisions of these customers.If you are doing things that have no value to anyone … why are you doing them?To limit our WIP, we need to make sure we are doing the right thing.But even if we know it's the right task, are we doing the thing right? To learn this, we must ask ourselves:
What does our customer want?
What is the highest value they can get from my work?
Do I have time to give them that value?
How much value can I get done in the time I have?
Will that level of value be sufficient?
We often find ourselves saying “no” to that last question, but continuing to do the work anyway.When we know our work is going to be of insufficient quality, we tend to become aggravated. We feel annoyance at the task, at those who asked us to do the task, an ourselves for getting stuck in a situation like this. This annoyance increases the chance that our work product will be of low quality – making the work even more insufficient.If we didn’t want to do a good job, this would not be a problem.Since we do, there are five quick actions we should take when we understand we have a customer:
Be clear about what they want – Yes, this sounds obvious, but how many times have you had to rework something because of a simple initial lack of understanding?
Be clear about what is on your plate – No, sorry Miss Customer, you are not the only thing I am doing right now. I wish you were, but life doesn’t work like that. Here’s what I can realistically do.
Get their feedback early and often – How soon can you show them an interim product? How quickly can you compare expected and actual progress? Earlier feedback = earlier delivery.
Understand minimum and optimal deliverables – Minimum and optimum deliverables give you a range of success to shoot for. If you are always aiming for the high point, you will usually underdeliver.
Work is a relationship – All work is a relationship between the person doing the work and the person receiving it. Communication (again as early as possible) helps both cement the relationship and ensure an appreciated delivery.
It's simple, if we don't know who it is for, we don't know what we are doing. If we don't know what we are doing, how can we limit our work-in-progress?
HOW TO: Limit WIP #6: Count The Bosses–Show the Work
It’s hard to limit your work-in-progress when your boss count exceeds your WIP limit.If you have a WIP Limit of 3 and 12 bosses, you may as well have one card permanently in your Personal Kanban that says, “Negotiate with Bosses”.That sounds funny, but it is true. Your bosses will always require explanations about why you are working on tasks that are unrelated to their work.Tonianne and I play a game with people regularly called “Count The Bosses.” The rules are simple…. you count your bosses.If you need more than a few fingers to count them, you know that part of your job is not only satisfying their demands, but also choosing which one to be attentive to at any given point-in-time.Your bosses are people who directly give you work. In a few days, we’ll have a post #7 which deals with understanding your customers. For today, however, we simply want a number … how many people are giving you work?Then ask these questions:
Do these people consult with each other before giving me work?
Do I feel guilty when I’m working for one when another has needs?
Am I punished for doing work for one boss over another?
Am I in the middle of their disputes?
Will they let me complete tasks before giving me another?
Do they allow me to complete my work in a way that works for me, rather than working in ways they think I should?
What we would like is have answers that give them the right to give us work, but give us the ability to complete that work in the best way we see fit.If your answers are not in this direction, it is useful to show on a Personal Kanban what is really happening. Then discuss this with them around the board. Do not just go talk to them, because neither of you will have anything physical to talk about. The goal here is to use the board as a mediator. We want the board to reveal how there is too much work-in-progress and that the work load itself is hampering your ability to complete things on time.Have your bosses watch this strangely silent YouTube Video. Let them know you, too, have an optimal WIP limit.
Limit Your WIP
HOW TO: Limit WIP #5–Throughput Analysis
When we think about limiting Work-in-process, we have to confront that there are many types of work. Simply limiting work is not enough, we have to know what we are limiting. We have to see what we are really completing.A very real danger for us as people is that we limit our WIP and then say, “What’s the most important task to pull next” without understanding the weights of types of tasks.We have tasks that might:
make us money
satisfy someone else’s needs
teach us something
provide us pleasure / opportunity to relax
gain us political favor / help avoid political disfavor
satisfy bureaucratic requirements
etc.
Depending on the situation, we will pick one of these over another. However, very often Tonianne and I see people favoring office demands over personal growth, emergencies over kaizen, and politics over family. This behavior creates new personal emergencies. If you ignore your spouse and your kids long enough, that has repercussions – the best of which would be that they feel ignored, the worst can be much worse.Back at the office, the emergency we are tending to right now is at the cost of other work on other project that, after it languishes for a while will also become an emergency. And the cycle continues.The sad truth is that quite often we create our own emergencies and, therefore, our own spiral into an emergency-centered life. When we reach this point, we say, “How can I possibly limit my WIP? Everything is an emergency!”
Emergencies Create Throughput Issues Create More Emergencies
In this video, we see the impacts of a workplace emergency. New emergencies are spawned at home and at work. The point here is not to say, “Don’t have emergencies,” but to understand how they can create an emergency cascade. If the person in the video would have hired a handyman at home and found even one person at the office to help him, his dilemma could have been avoided.The key here is balance. The tickets at the end of the week were all focused on the Desper Project, rather than on all of his goals. The more balanced the tasks are at the end of the week, the more balanced goal attainment will be. The visual cue of only red tasks let us know that new emergencies were brewing.When you are setting up your Personal Kanban, ask yourself what your goals are and make sure the stickies are designed to give you feedback on what you are and what you are not completing.