All Entries in the "Featured" Category

The Retrospective Column

When we make our work and our process explicit, and we do retrospectives, it makes sense to have a retrospective column in our Personal Kanban. The thought here is fairly simple: at the beginning of each day move tasks from Complete into Retrospective. Then, at the end of the week (or whenever you wish) take [...]

Dependencies in Personal Kanban

Dependencies are things that occur in succession. One thing happens, then another thing can happen. Ideally, on a kanban, the value stream will visualize these transitions. For a value stream like this:
Analysis -> Creation -> Refinement -> Launch
refinement is dependent on both analysis and creation.
That neatly takes care of dependencies, but in our Personal Kanban [...]

The Priority Filter: A Tutorial

Prioritization is often even more difficult and daunting as the tasks that confront you. A priority filter in your Personal Kanban helps you determine what tasks are ready in your queue, and the order of importance they should assume.  Click on the video below for a quick priority filter tutorial.
Note: This video is best viewed [...]

Am I Productive, Efficient, or Effective?

Productivity: having the power to produce
Efficiency: the ratio of the output to the input of any system
Effectiveness: being able to bring about a desired result
Personal Kanban is considered a Productivity tool, because it gives us the power to produce more.  It is likewise said to increase Efficiency by limiting WIP and increasing focus which means we [...]

Respect Your Backlog and Manage It

Your backlog is bigger than it should be and it needs to be managed. Everyday people tell us how they are overwhelmed by their backlog, and cannot possibly manage it within a Personal Kanban because it could contain hundreds or thousands of tasks.
Let’s examine this.
On Stephen Smith’s blog, he describes using Personal Kanban to visualize [...]

Urgent and Important: Incorporating your existing tools into Personal Kanban

We’ve devised Personal Kanban to adapt to any system you might currently use (unless of course your preferred  system is utter chaos). The only two rules are visualize your work and limit work-in-progress (WIP). PK’s main goal is to get you to write things down and begin to watch how and what you complete.
Last week, [...]

Boosting Productivity and Learning with Spikes

Is there something you don’t know?
Almost everyday it seems we are faced with having to learn something new. Some of those things are trivial and easy to accomplish, while others are important and a more than a little daunting to master.
There are some easy steps to make learning less overwhelming.
On the Lean Agile Machine blog, [...]

Rapture – Training Your Mind for Completion

Don’t strain your brain, paint a train
You’ll be singing’ in the rain…
- Blondie
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. [...]

Save the Date! Jim Benson Featured Guest on Yi-Tan Call

Save the date! Monday, January 4th at 10:30 PST/1:30 PM EST for the weekly 40-minute Yi-Tan Tech Community call hosted by Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn.
The topic?
Personal Kanban, of course!
Call, listen, and chat with Jim Benson (@ourfounder on Twitter) as he discusses:

Why we stress over the tasks we are confronted with;
What we can learn from [...]

Tools Talk: Julia Child Understood the Nature of Work

While expertise, good humor, humanity, and care are words that immediately come to mind when describing Julia Child, the iconic chef personified something else – she understood the nature of her work. She recognized the role it played, the value it brought, the actions involved in creating it, and the opportunity costs in choosing certain [...]