Visualize Your Past

Visualization Retrospective

Happening right now

It’s New Years again and time to take stock of things in our lives. As we know, the two rules of Personal Kanban are to Visualize Your Work and Limit Your Work-In-Progress (WIP).One of the most important factors in limiting or controlling our WIP is understanding our work - this includes appreciating our work, when we’ve completed it, and what we did to complete it.2014 has been a pretty tough year for me personally and when I look back on the last 12 months I tend to view it in my own pessimism bias.But Timehop, an app I have on my Galaxy Tab, keeps thwarting my pessimism and it’s doing it by confronting me with facts. Simply confronting me with what actually happened one, two, three, four, and five years ago. Timehop is an automated long-range Retrospective.Right now it is nearly exactly one year since I stood in my office in Seattle and drew the image above.  See? That’s right now.If you would have asked me, I would have said that was at least two years ago. It’s significant because it means that those drawings led to the Modus Cooperandi Problem Solving System, about a dozen Lunch&Learns where we taught customers the process, and a great partnership with Riot Games to create a complete version of it.When we have sour notes, we tend to allow those notes to overwhelm our interpretation of the entire song. We can have one long very pleasant event and then something happens at the end and we say, “That just ruined the whole thing for me.” I was allowing this last year to be painted with a broad brush because I was focused on a few particularly painful episodes.Timehop, here, served as my visual control, sampling my social media past and showing me what I have actually been doing. What other visual controls are you employing beyond your Personal Kanban to keep track of the good work you’ve done?

DONE COLUMN: Daily / Weekly Review

Done column review

“When do I get tickets out of my DONE column?”People often allow their DONE column to get so full of work that it becomes useless - a huge pile of completed work. There are so many tickets in there, you no longer know what happened.If we’d like to encourage ourselves to empty the board weekly and get some interesting information at the same time, we can create a DONE column that tracks what we do daily. On Fridays or Monday morning, we review and empty our DONE. Now we have set up a system … last week is over and we’d need to clear space for the new week.We can take a look at the week, clearly see what we did, see what days were satisfying and what were not, and get an idea of what days were interrupted.  We can do a “retrospective” on the work and evaluate where we’d like to improve what we’re doing. We can also plan for the upcoming week.We can also see how much work we tend to do.  This is very powerful.  Looking over the board above, we see that we reliably complete about three or four tickets a day. This helps us set our expectations for what we can promise others. We know that a promise, any promise, that we make takes up about a third of our capacity for that day.Understanding that promises have a cost greatly helps us limit our Work-in-Process (WIP). We can see our daily output and limit what we are working on accordingly. It’s hard to say no to work. We tend to like what we do and the people we work with. Understanding how much we actually complete helps us say “No” to too much work.“I’d love to help you, but I’m working on these other tasks right now. Can I help later after I finish a few of them?”Your throughput (the number of tickets you do) may be 6, 8, 12, or more tickets a day - so don’t get hung up on the number in this example. The goal here is to find out what your number is, so you can choose work more effectively and not overload or over-promise.When you over-promise, you under-deliver.So, take a look at what you’re doing each day, review at the end of the week, and set realistic expectations for yourself and others.This is the second post in the Personal Kanban Tips Series. You can read the previous post - DONE COLUMN: How Does Your Work Make You Feel here.

Finishing Feels Good

Yes, finishing feels good. When we complete tasks, we feel better than when we have a pile of incompletes just lying around. Incompletion creeps up on us, overloads us, and crushes us. The more we fail to complete our work or realize our goals, the more susceptible we are to hopelessness, doubt, and fear.

So ... completion would seem to be a pretty clear winner. So, why don’t we complete? Because we have competition for our attention. E-mail, Facebook, conversations with colleagues, and the other 25 tasks we are working on simultaneously are constantly competing for our focus. (Even now, I looked up, my Facebook browser tab says there are 2 replies there. I started to move my cursor up to check on them and said, .... hey, you’re writing a blog post! Get that cursor back down there...)

Neuroscience has found that when we finish tasks, we get a dopamine rush. We actually do feel better. However, interruptions trick the brain. They can be like instant gratification that gives us little dopamine rushes. We find ourselves incurring more and more distractions that, like any indulgence, feel good at the time and leave us feeling empty later on.

The tricky bit here is we no longer have space as individuals to concentrate. Whether we are at the office or at home, our focus is impaired by these constant interruptions. We cannot focus and complete. This costs us, our companies, and our families every second of every day.In 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. The key here is not to have that help seem like the solution. The help here is to find our own ways of working.

We have discovered though, that a few simple tools have helped people and organizations craft their own ways of working.

Tool 1: Visualize Your Work - Creating a Personal Kanban immediately lets you and your colleagues know what you are doing now, what you have done, and what is coming up next. That grounds your work in a tangible system that constantly reminds you of what needs to be completed.

Tool 2: Limiting Work-in-Process - Our distractions create work overloads. We take on too much work and then have to manage all those tasks in-flight. Limiting our active tasks as individuals or as work teams is vital for completion.

Tool 3: An Eye for Improvement - In order to really improve how we work, we need to actually understand what improvement looks like and how to achieve it. In Lean, this is called “Kaizen” (Continuous small positive changes).We don’t want improvement like “Starting tomorrow I will do everything exactly right,” because large unrealistic change is unrealistic. Learning, however, to take on small improvements makes all the difference.

Potent Combination

Our goal here is to understand our work, do just enough to get quality work completed, and always be looking for ways to make work better / more enjoyable / etc.

Learning More ....

Reading: Doing a search on the Personal Kanban site for “Visualize Work”, “Limit WIP”, and “Improvement” will give you some food for thought.Workshops: In March of 2014, I’m going to be teaching a few workshops on exactly this combination with Kaizen expert Mark Graban in Phoenix (Mar 10) and San Antonio (Mar 12).  We did one class in Seattle last year that went so well that this year we’re doing two!Conversation: We’ll be hosting a 2 day conversation on this February 19 / 20in Seattle called Kaizen Camp.