Personal Kanban and Micromanagement

micromanagement

At one time or another we've all lost faith in a process and reacted by wanting to keep track of every detail. We want to make sure it gets done right. We want to make sure that we and others don't look bad.That person micromanaging you is no different. They have lost faith in a process they can't see. So ... let them see it. If we all have access to real-time information managers can do what they are supposed to do: facilitate the completion of important work. Without that information, they cannot facilitate. Without being able to facilitate, they will control.This video shows how all this works.

It's About Communication: PK Interview with Trent Hone

Trent Hone uses Personal Kanban to manage teams, to consult, and to help his family get things done. In this interview, Trent talks about how he uses Personal Kanban and what changes its fostered in his family's stress level, his ability to complete work, and his teams' camaraderie.This is the first in a series of weekly interviews of Personal Kanban users, practitioners, and thinkers. Watch for how they build their boards and how it makes them feel.

Capacity: It's a Matter of Content...and Context

Screen Shot 2016-03-12 at 10.15.48 PM

Envision This:You're heading to a cabin in the mountains for a week-long getaway with your family. Your car is in the shop so you schedule a rental to be delivered.In addition to six bags of groceries, a box of pots/pans/utensils, and a cooler full of water, your four children each pack a suitcase; your wife packs three, your mom and dad who are visiting pack two. They then proceed to set their luggage along the curb.Your two daughters ask if they could each take their best friend, bringing your passenger count to ten, and luggage count to eleven.The weather forecast for the next few days predicts lots of sun. So you tell the kids to grab their bikes, and stand them next to the luggage. You then head into the garage to pull out the bike rack.Conditions on the lake are likewise supposed to be ideal and so you ready up your single axle trailer with your 28 foot sailboat.You’re kneeling on the sidewalk next to the curb, tightening a bolt in the boat hitch when a clap of thunder followed by a flash of lightening pierces the unexpectedly darkening sky. Just then the rental car pulls up. Still eye-level to the wheels, and through the initial drops of a soon to be teeming rain, the first thing you notice is that the air pressure on the back two tires is low.It isn’t until you stand up that you notice the second thing: the car they delivered...is a Miata.To recap:6 bags of groceries1 box of cooking paraphernalia1 cooler of water10 people11 suitcases6 bikes1 boat1 2-seat RoadsterWithout having visualized your capacity first, how could you possibly have known how much would fit in the car?Keep in mind the overload here isn’t simply attributed to people, provisions, and luggage. A host of other factors would further diminish the car’s capacity including the wind resistance created by the bike rack, the added weight of the boat trailer, decreased visibility and traction during the four hour ascent up the mountain during a storm, and lower fuel efficiency due to the decreased tire pressure.

Capacity - it’s not only impacted by content, but by context.

It’s the same with information. Despite the persistent, insidious, and scientifically proven to be counterproductive practice of expecting knowledge workers to multitask, people - like automobiles - are not unconstrained resources. When it comes to processing cognitively complex tasks, our brain has finite processing capacity.Especially when it comes to knowledge work, understanding capacity as well as the potential for variation is paramount. Much in the way the car above would be impacted by external conditions, the brain’s bandwidth is likewise impacted by its context. Physical illness, emotional stress, hunger, and fear of threats real or imagined likewise impact cognitive capacity, compromising performance and quality.Visualizing your work and limiting your work in progress on a Personal Kanban allows you to not only to see, understand, and communicate your capacity to others, but it likewise prevents against taking on more work than you can handle. And when contextual factors are at play, such as mood, health, energy level, task difficulty etc., Personal Kanban helps you respond to that variation, allowing you to adjust your capacity by dropping your WIP limit accordingly.

For more on how Personal Kanban can help you visualize, understand, and improve your capacity while giving you the agility to respond to variation, 

register for our FREE webina

r.

Pattern Matching: Use Your Personal Kanban to See What is Really Happening

I see people setting up their Personal Kanban with one color of post it note and then finding it hard to select their next task or figure out what they've done at the end of the week. The strength of Personal Kanban is that it is a visual system. Visual systems rely on visual cues that let us know what is happening.If our boards are a sea of sameness there will be no patterns.Using color to differentiate task types, projects, people, urgency, cost or whatever you find important will instantly transform your board from a sea of undifferentiated tasks to a clear story of your work. We can then engage in pattern matching, which our brains do specifically to make sense of the world.This video describes how and why we should use color to design our Personal Kanban.Please share this article with someone you know you needs to know this.

Getting MicroTasks Done: On Nitpicking

MicroTasks.You know, that one email or refilling the coffee maker or asking Susan if she got ahold of your new client?Those are little interruptions we put upon ourselves. We'll be working along and somewhere in the back of our brain they become louder and louder until we stop what we are doing and get them out of our hair.The nitpicky little tasks do need to be done and you'll never put them on a Personal Kanban, there's too many of them and doing them takes as long to make the sticky and the task does to complete.So why not set aside time for them. Create a "nitpicky" sticky and when you pull it, do all of those things as a block - as a pomodoro or two. They will come with copious context switching, so make sure you take a little time off afterwards to recuperate.