All Entries Tagged With: "visual control"
Complex Lives Pt 2: Visualizing Real Work
In part one of Complex Lives, we set a Future in Progress (FIP) limit for Jessica, a busy and active single mom. Her goals were overwhelming her ability to get things done. So we reigned them in by giving her a FIP limit. That was step one. Step two is visualizing that FIP. Jessica was [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Cards are Conversations
The whole point of having a visual control is to extract information from it quickly. In this respect, the personal kanban is much like a geographic map. Geographic maps convey more than merely the physical environment, they show us things like political, historic, organizational characteristics – both real and imagined spatial constraints – which give [...]
Making Waste Explicit
Noticing waste serves no purpose. Understanding it does. Whether we seek to manage waste or attempt to eliminate it entirely, we need to know how much of it exists and what form it takes – what’s its volume, its shape, its weight. So we monitor it. We watch it. We learn from how it grows, how [...]
