The holidays are wonderful times, but also difficult ones.I was interviewing Deb McGee, a client, colleague, and friend about how our time spent working with her team went. At the end, she turned the interview to the fully "personal" side of Personal Kanban. During a holiday season, Deb suffered a profound personal loss, but was determined to give her family a holiday season. She could have done this through denial or burying her feelings. She chose, instead, to meet the holiday's head-on and realistically decide what she could do and what was "too soon".I'll let her tell her own story in the interview. I hope you find it as inspiring as I do.Happy Holidays, everyone.
For Context, Clarity, & Continuous Improvement, Get Rid of That To-Do List
Make list.Become overwhelmed.Cross off low-hanging fruit.Feel good (momentarily).Tackle next easiest task.Repeat.Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But why simply optimize for productivity, when you can shoot for effectiveness?Those seemingly interminable, anxiety-inducing to-do lists - we've all been beholden to them. But if context, clarity, and continuous improvement are what you're looking for, there just might be a better option.For something with such a staggering amount of information, to-do lists fail miserably at providing the context necessary to effectively prioritize our work, understand and communicate our capacity, or surface issues so we can address them in real-time, preventing them from recurring.Rather than create a static, task-focused, prescriptive inventory of your to-dos - inviting little more than an opportunity to react - visualizing your work on a flexible, flow-focused Personal Kanban transforms those to-dos into a narrative of your work that promotes cognitive ease and invites informed action. Tasks are situated in context, options and priorities become obvious, and emergent patterns (like recurring bottlenecks) give us the necessary feedback to invite discussion, collaboration, and/or improvement.
Design: The Status Column
The Problem: Sometimes we are waiting to hear the status of something. That status could come at any time and from any type of communication (email, phone, mention in the hallway, etc.). But we are waiting. If we wait too long, not knowing will cause us problems - but waiting isn't a task. We lose track of time and suddenly we are under the gun.The Solution: Build the Personal Kanban to specifically track status items and let us know when they require action.The Narrative: We've all been there. That day when someone says to us, "How's that thing going?" and we realize "Oh crap! I don't know!" Then we have to scramble to find out.Someone else or some group of "someone elses" are responsible to getting something done, but it directly impacts us. We can't call them every day and say, "Are you done yet?" because that's micromanaging. But we do need to have an idea of where they are at.At Modus, we've found specifically calling out items we are waiting for status on (things outside our group and therefore not on our Personal Kanban) allows us to treat them as potential tasks. If someone reports in on time, it simply moves to DONE and never required us to act. If it sits too long, then it becomes a task.
5 Ways to Focus and Finish
Focusing on our most important work (so that we can get it out the door and create value) is hard. It’s harder still when work suddenly picks up, is unfamiliar, or arrives with immediate deadlines when we are already busy.
The tyranny of the urgent often distracts us from what is truly important. We lose focus on the important and end up doing a lot of “busy-work”. By then end of the day we are frustrated. The real value wasn’t created, but the business was satisfied.
We need to understand what “most important” means. It’s not always easy to just “know” what task out of the hundreds we have on our plate is the best to jump on right now.
When we visualize our work and limit our work in progress, we can see beyond the urgent and find what’s the best use of our time. We can then sit down with our brains and have an honest chat. What do we need to do? What relies on others? What is stopping us from doing that one task that just sits there in our OPTIONS column and doesn’t move? Why do we promise we’ll get those things done today, but at the end of the day it is still just sitting there?
You’ll see that our latest newsletter is on this theme of finding focus in a world of noise. Focus isn’t a “light” topic, we all struggle with it every day. Below are five of our top ranked posts on focus.
If you have a story about how Personal Kanban has helped you find focus, please leave it in the comments and let us (and the community) know.
1) The Overhead of OverworkIn our work, we take on more and more because the task seems small and we don’t understand our actual capacity. We take on more and more because we can’t see we are already overloaded. One day, we burn out, we break down, we snap.Read more.
2) HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #3–Reducing InterruptionsThe fact is that interruptions are part of knowledge work. We seldom do it alone, which means we have colleagues. Colleagues require information. Information requires communication. Communication requires attention.Read more.
3) Finishing Feels GoodIn order to complete, we need some help. We need something to ground us, something to focus us, and something to propel us. Once we have these elements, projects at work become easier, communication becomes smoother, and motivation is easily found.Read more.
4) Time to CompletionWhat if the game of work was to continuously improve the quality and rate of delivery of your work? The game becomes ways to discover how you can work most effectively, most innovatively. The game stops being how close to an arbitrary deadline can you complete something.Read more.
5)On Focus: Conquering the Shiny SquirrelTask-switching begets more task-switching, not completion. This is often attributed to “the Zeigarnik Effect,” a phenomenon in which information and tasks left incomplete don’t leave our mind. Instead, we dwell on those incomplete tasks, and those intrusive thoughts render us vulnerable to distractions. The energy that consumes–the metabolism task-switching requires–drains our cognitive capacity, causing frustration, burnout, impeding focus and inviting error and rework, preventing us from realizing our optimal potential.Read more.
Deep Focus
What does it take to focus? When we teach or work with clients, the need to focus is always the base of any board or system we create. We are all distracted. We’ve directly addressed this in the Personal Kanban online class. Sign up today and join the hundreds of other PK students from around the world. And stay in touch.
How Many Options Do You Have?
The Options Triangle
The other day I was driving down Point Brown Road in Ocean Shores, Washington. Ocean Shores is a small town with almost no economic base. If you live there you are likely a retiree or work in one of the restaurants or hotels that serve the tourists. The Internet in Ocean Shores is anemic, but it does exist. Yet, when I drove by the McDonalds in the center of town, the sign said, “Now hiring, apply on-line.”There is an assumption that everyone, now, in the United States has access to the Internet.With the Internet, we can reach millions of people in an instant. We can research anything in milliseconds. We can find opportunities.We live in a world of options.Options of growth, options to waste our time, options to be informed, options to be misinformed. We can get a degree. We can write a book. We can work at McDonalds.This is good and this can be overwhelming. We can now build a wide-range of things to do simply through the electronic slabs in our homes.Further, we have all the expectations placed on us by co-workers, bosses, clients, family, friends, the government, and ourselves. They want us to do things. We want us to do things. All those things are more options.We all have tons of options.When you are creating your first Personal Kanban, your first goal is to simply understand all you could be doing right now or that is expected of you.Here’s how you might start out.
Write down all the expectations people have of you.
Write down all the things you would like to do (not just work, you want to go to Bali and sit on the beach … write it down.)
In your options column make a triangle like the one below
Use this to organize your current supply of options by placing the options in the portion of the triangle that best described the mix of obligation, desire, and growth.
Ask yourself … what does this mean?
With this quick tool, your work will begin to take shape. Is your work merely obligation? Do you want to do the work on your plate? Is this work building your skills or challenging your intellect? Ideally, we’d like to see tasks working into the middle to middle -right of the triangle. We want to engage in options that allow growth and that we enjoy.This helps us see the context of the options we have amassed. A vacation in Bali will likely be high in desire and even growth. Moving to Bali and sitting on the beach for eternity might be a good escape, but might not be so high on the growth side.One other thing about this triangle. It’s not the magic triangle – there is no magic triangle. There is no magic anything except magic erasers for everything else, you have to work.You can swap out any of the words in the triangle at-will. If you want to collaborate more, swap out “growth” for “collaboration”. Your context is your own. Another triangle might measure risks like “resources” “complexity” and “time”. Make your own, improve on it. Make a better one, but please examine your options carefully and choose wisely.