Would You, Could You on a Plane?

Planeban - A Quick offline kanban for in-flight work

As a matter of fact, yes.

I boarded the first leg of my flight from Seattle to Hanoi. I had 19 hours of flying ahead of me. I also had a backlog, and no wifi. Agile Zen was not going to be useful for me. So, I opened Open Office Writer and made a quick table.

I had a series of things to do, but with a few constraints. The first was that I was likely to fall asleep at some point, so I wanted to knock out the most important task first. The second was that I had a list of commitments I’d made over the week and needed to make good on them. Fortunately, I have a 17 hour battery and a 4 hour battery as backup, so I had enough juice to cover me.

In no particular order I wrote down my work. I had 14 papers to read for Hanoi, so I began with those.  I knew that not finishing them first would mean I’d read them when I was too tired to retain anything. Then I went to work on the feature sets for the new software projects. Finally I ended with blog posts (of which this is one).

In the end, I had a full accounting of what I’d done – so I could make sure that the files and work completed in-flight made it to the appropriate people and after-action steps were taken.

I want to point out again, you don’t need special hardware or software, you just need to visualize your work, limit your WIP, and prioritize.

Popularity: 5% [?]