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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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; [...]
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 [...]
