Do The Right Small Thing

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When you look at your Personal Kanban, do you have tasks like “Do the Dishes” or are they more like “Build a House”?

If they’re more like the latter, ask yourself why.

Good Things Are Completed In Small Packages

Lean thinking asks us, in industry speak, reduce our batch sizes. This is their way of saying we should find tasks that can be completed quickly, effectively, and without many surprises.

We are more likely, whether at work or at home, to complete small tasks than large ones. Why?

They’re Small – First off, small tasks are simply that. They’re small. We can therefore complete them in less time.

They’re Understandable – Small tasks are easy to grasp. We can easily envision what needs to be done, how much uninterrupted time it should take, and what the end state will look like.

They are Stable – If a small task is something we can get done quickly, it means the chance of interruption is less and the potential number of complications is low. With most of our work, interruptions actually provide the most complication. That complication adds instability to our estimates.

They are not Scary – Large tasks, because we know full well that they are instable, are frightening. They evoke our fear response,  making us procrastinate, making us spend more time planning how to mitigate risk, and distracting us while actually doing the work. Small tasks, because we understand them and they are stable are much less scary.

We are Confident – A small, stable, and understandable task is something we can promise to someone else and feel confident about the promise.

We can Knock Them Out – Think about how good a day feels when you move a lot of tickets off your Personal Kanban. Now, think of days where nothing moving. Sluggish movement on the Personal Kanban makes us feel sluggish as well.

Small Deliveries Make a Big Delivery

When  we start a large project (and there certainly are large projects) we need to look at that project and figure out what the units of value are in it. Is this project something that has to be done all at once? Are there elements of this project that can be delivered quickly to provide value along the way? What do my customers really want from this project? What is the likelihood of interruptions causing me to shelve this project for long periods of time? Can I come back to this project and remember where I was?

If we can divide the project into smaller pieces of deliverable interim value, then we can can start enjoying some of the benefits of the big task – even if is has yet to be fully realized.

Say you have a big project that is: renovate the basement. This involves moving everything out of the basement, ripping out the walls, moving plumbing, putting in new walls, putting in floors, doing new electrical, painting, getting new furniture, and then enjoying the basement.

Many people look at that task and say, “That’s big, I’d like to do that, but I don’t have time.”

There are smaller tasks there, however. The first might be, “Go through basement and donate all unused or unwanted items.” (For some of us, even this is a big task).  After that might come a task of “Get a new sofa” or even “Draw up basement plans”. Each of these provides immediate value and may well change the outcome for the larger project. Say you get rid of the clutter in the basement and find, lo and behold, there’s a lot more room down there now.

Now, instead of gutting the basement, you can do a few coats of paint, a few simple repairs, and you have a much more livable space.

Throughput of the Small

In my own life, I had a huge office with people working in it every day for 10 years. I also had a home studio where I had been both working and writing for 10 years. When I closed the office, I was left with 10 years of combined office and home paperwork and other junk.

I set aside a plan where each day I needed to take out one wastebasket worth of recycling. Over the course of a few months (I travel a lot), I was able to work my way through the mountain of combined personal, Modus, and Gray Hill history. If I had sat down and done that large task all in one sitting, it would have left me unable to write or work for clients. It would have been boring and, likely, I would have lost interest mid-way through and started just picking up huge piles of paper and shredding it without looking at it.

Using a small task throughput model like this, where I do a little a time, I could keep focus, work my way to completion, and not have to worry about the huge daunting task.

Mapping Your Work with Personal Kanban

To Do Lists are Not a Map

Rewrite Your To Do List

For more on how this works, see the various posts in Personal Kanban 101.To-do lists are something that we’ve turned to time and again to manage our work and we’ve always been disappointed. They become daunting, lengthy, undifferentiated lists of things we have to do. It is hard to get perspective from a list.I’m often asked for the difference between to-do lists and Personal Kanban, and why Personal Kanban differs from to do lists. We cover this in depth in the book, but we can do a short form here.Think of it this way:Here is downtown Seattle. Right away you can tell where the freeways are, the surface streets, the water, and so forth. With maybe a little studying you can quickly find one way streets, ferry lines, and piers.Now, let’s think of this like a to-do list:

• Yesler Way

• James Street

• Cherry Street

• Columbia Street

• Marion Street

• Madison Street….

Personal Kanban is a Map of Your Work

See? I could list everything in downtown Seattle (which would take me quite a while) and in the end you’d have no idea how anything related to anything else.You’d have a list with no context.This is why people who counsel others on to-do lists tell them to rewrite the list daily. To-do lists quickly become stale and irrelevant.If we visualize the work, like we visualize a map, that re-writing is unnecessary.With a Personal Kanban we want to build a map of our work. We want to visualize the trade-offs, the options, the completion rate, even the relative joy in a particular task. We want to be able to see these dimensions to our work – not merely a list of it.Here we see the basic Personal Kanban. While a normal to-do list is only two dimensions (work by length), the Personal Kanban map is multidimensional.Dimensions:Dimension 1 - Topography (the layout of our work)The Value Stream – This is the steps you take to create your work. That can be any steps you really take. This simple example includes four steps: Ready, Doing, The Pen and Done.Ready – This is a graphical representation of the to-do list.Doing – What work is currently in-flight. In a to-do list there are only two states. Not completed and complete. This column clearly shows the completing of your work.The Pen – What work is currently blocked as we wait for others? This work is important to clearly see because it is both something that you cannot act on and yet still something you must keep track of.Done – Work that has really been completed. We don’t draw a line through it. We don’t kill it. We keep it, look at it, remember it.This topography shows us the landscape over which our work travels. We see where we are, where we are going, and where we’ve been. We even see some pitfalls along the way.Dimension 2 – Movement (how we do our work)Movement happens when something in one location ends up in another location. When we see movement, we can see how things actually live. In the Personal Kanban, we are seeing Pull, Constraints, Flow, Bottlenecks.Pull – We “pull” work in a Personal Kanban when we have capacity to actually complete it. This is as opposed to work being “pushed” on us by others and overloading us. When rivers have water pushed into them – that creates a flood with sometimes horrific results. When we have capacity, we can do work thoughtfully and get that work done.Constraints – We limit our work-in-progress to a few things at a time. Note the (3) in the Doing column. We can only have three things in-flight at a time. This constraint is our capacity. When we finish something we can now “pull” a new task. This creates Flow.Flow – As work is pulled and completed, we build a rhythm in our work called cadence. The flow of our work can have three effects.

1. Flow shows us how long it really takes us to complete our work.

2. Flow shows us cadence, letting us set a pattern to our work.

3. Flow actually feels good … when you get in the zone while working, that both calms our fears and excites our creativity.

Bottlenecks – When things don’t flow, they get stuck. (makes sense…) Whether they are stuck in the Pen or in your Doing column, they are visible and impede completion. Since you can see it, you can do something about it.Dimension 3 – Depth (what are we really doing?)Dimension 3 lets us know what our work really means. What options are we selecting? Where is our work coming from? Who are we collaborating with? What do we enjoy?The Work Itself – We see the tickets, each representing a task or other item of value.The type of work – different colored stickies can represent different types of work. Projects, urgency, clients, or areas of our lives (home, work, personal growth).The age of the ticket – some people place dots on tickets for each day they are in doing to keep track of how long they were stuck thereCycle time – some people record date / time started and date / time completed to get an idea of how long tasks actually take to complete.Options – When we pull, we are now moving a task into Doing – which is a limited space. We want to choose carefully what task we start next. This now means that we are carefully exercising an option to do work. The board shows us the options we’ve completed, the options we have, and the options we are doing. This helps us choose better options as we learn more about how we work.

Closing

There are many more elements to the map of our work, but this gives us a taste of how the to-do list’s single dimension view of life is reversed by Personal Kanban.  For more on how this works, see the various posts in Personal Kanban 101.For more on how Lean works, see Lean Muppets.

Would You, Could You on a Plane?

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.

Complex Lives Pt 1: Jessica’s Future In Progress

Ready –> Doing –> DoneLife presents us with opportunities, and so we've no choice but to take on concurrent projects. Unfortunately they don’t always conform to that simple Ready –> Doing –> Done value stream.Last month I was in San Francisco giving lectures on Personal Kanban at Stanford and Keller. My host for the trip was my good friend Jessica. Jessica is a single mom. She  has two jobs on opposite ends of the Bay. She  is studying for her financial advisor certification. She is training for a triathlon.Jessica has a lot to keep track of.As a mathematician and an expert in intangible assets, it was not a big leap for Jessica to recognize: (1) she had so much on her plate that busting her WIP limit was guaranteed, and (2) making money was only one asset out of many she had to devote time to.So on a sunny Sunday morning at a coffee shop, the simple question “Do you want to talk a little about your Personal Kanban” quickly turned into a 2.5 hour conversation. We discussed what she valued, what her goals were.It soon became clear that Jessica is not simply goal-oriented, she's a goal-collector. So we needed to get that under control. Goals are awesome, but when they start generating more tasks than we can handle – they need to be tamed.We agreed she needed more than a WIP Limit – she needed a FIP limit. Future In Progress. She had the triathlon, the certification, a book she wanted to write, and more. It made sense to pick two and (no pun intended) run with them. The triathlon enforced health and working out, so we couldn’t say no to that. The certification was immediately necessary for her job and short-term. So that too was obvious. The others, went into the FIP queue.Jessica now had a FIP limit of two.

Work / Life Balance

I've been surprised lately by the number of people asking me about work/life balance. We feel we are undervaluing our family ties, our personal goals, our community involvement, our hobbies and our art. Oftentimes our work makes us feel isolated - we feel alone and seek meaning in our lives. Amusingly, we feel like we've invented this feeling.When people tell me that their generation is somehow unique in this feeling, I ask them to talk to their parents and their grandparents. Soon they discover it is merely a myth that takes just a few minutes to dispel. When your parents laugh at your hubris for an hour or so, it's quite a gut-check.Nonetheless, we can posit that we've managed to give ourselves a lot more controllable distractions than were there before. We just don't control them very well.So for this third post on Task Types, we'll do some work/life balance tasks and, like we did with work tasks, we'll establish some rules around them. Again, let's use colors.Let's say that purple represents family time. Use purple stickies and note real family time - not that trip to Costco but rather, those things that your kids will look back on and remember with a smile.Next, let's have blue represent those things that need to be done for the family. These are tasks like, "Fix the leak in the downstairs bathroom" or "Mow the Lawn."Finally, let's use green for aspirations. These are tasks like "Read the complete works of Vonnegut" or "Learn Personal Kanban" or "Get CPR Certificate."Sound good? Great! So what happens next?These colored tasks can appear on your Personal Kanban as task types. You can then set up your balance - literally. Every day you can pull one purple. Every week you can pull two blue and two green. And in your DONE column, you can see where you are with your goals.Work/life balance now has a shape and a color palette.Having said this, I consider my work and my life as indiscrete parts of a continuum. I love what I'm doing at Modus and the people I'm doing it with. So for me, the balance comes from not becoming so enamored with Modus work that I forsake all other activities.  And, yes, I do need to work on this.But, I will venture a guess that if you actively dislike what you do professionally, work/life balance will be unapproachable. You simply cannot dislike that much of your life and expect to achieve a healthy balance.Photo by Robotography