WIP can be Imposed

I Told You To Paint the Sears Tower!

Please don’t feel bad if you find you’ve lost control of your WIP.

The two rules of Personal Kanban:

1. Visualize Your Work
2. Limit WIP

With a little practice, #1 becomes easy…second nature, even.

Number 2 is, well, pretty much a bitch to master.

It is better stated as a goal.  On a good workday, when things are flowing, we can limit our WIP and feel quite good about that.

What gets in the way of being able to totally master our WIP is the expectations of others. When people expect things from us, even if we’ve conveniently de-prioritized them, they let us know: “Where’s that report?” “I thought you were coming over to visit today.” “When are you going to mail that book to me?”

The telephone, instant messaging, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, fax, and just plain old screaming give people ample ways to contribute to the existential overhead that you would just as soon get to later.

Often these demands for your attention are highly emotional. People you want to spend more time with but can’t. People whom you care about but drive you crazy. People who need legitimate but time-consuming things from you. People who need to work with you but have massively different working styles that will slow you down.

This creates a lot of stress.

There is little in life we can do about the actions or expectations of others. We talk about expectation management, and can do a fair job of it by being clear about what we can do and when, but people are going make demands of us whether we like it or not.

Personal Kanban reacts to this stress by allowing easy re-prioritization of tasks.  You don’t think cleaning the garage is all that important.  You wife has a very different opinion.  Her priorities matter, too.

This sometimes means that we will need to reprioritize tasks and from time to time these will be tasks already in WIP.

Is that good? No.

Is it tolerable? Not really.

But it is necessary. We simply won’t always have the luxury of completion.

Again, Personal Kanban is aimed at getting you to visual and understand work’s flow – total control is an illusion. Do not be afraid to let reality guide your Personal Kanban.

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