All Entries Tagged With: "wip"
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 [...]
Complex Lives Pt 1: Jessica’s Future In Progress
Ready –> Doing –> Done Life 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 [...]
Announcing the Launch of iKan, the Personal Kanban iPhone App
You asked for it, and we listened. Today we are proud to announce the launch of the first Personal Kanban iPhone app, iKan. When we set out to build it, we decided to focus on a few key things: 1. Small Screen Many Tasks – We wanted to make the best use of the screen [...]
When Good Tasks Go Bad
Yesterday we were introduced to Richard, who is juggling the demands of several clients trying to keep each of them happy. His largest project entails working alone on a client’s mission-critical legacy system. So in the last blog post we discussed his tasks and task types. As we discovered, outlining those task types proved invaluable [...]
What Are Your Task Types?
Flexibility is an unsung virtue. People want absolutes: “Do this, then do that, don’t deviate and then you’ll achieve success.” But we all know that absolutes are often false, and that context is king – in life, in work, and in all human endeavor. So limiting our WIP needs to take context into account, even [...]
Respect Your Backlog and Manage It
Your backlog is bigger than it should be and it needs to be managed. Everyday people tell us how they are overwhelmed by their backlog, and cannot possibly manage it within a Personal Kanban because it could contain hundreds or thousands of tasks. Let’s examine this. On Stephen Smith’s blog, he describes using Personal Kanban [...]
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 [...]
Undertow and Churn: Workflow isn’t Always Linear
In Personal Kanban, our primary step is to define our workflow. Workflows tend to be linear, and often look like this: Waiting –>Doing–>Done or Outline –> Pre-writing –> Draft –> Edit –> Final Draft or Backlog –> Coding –> Testing –> Integration –> Release Unfortunately, life isn’t always that straightforward. A few weeks ago on Twitter, [...]
WIP and Priorization: Recommended Portions
You’ve been hiking all morning and the mercury is nearing 100. You’re parched. You need water – lots of it. But even in your thirst, you want that water to be manageable. Which holds more water – a lake or a drinking glass? Which will satisfy your thirst – a fire hose or a drinking [...]
Building Your First Personal Kanban
Four simple steps to starting your first personal kanban.
