Finding Our Own Value - Growing By Understanding

Tracking Learning, Creating, and Health

There are those days where your Personal Kanban is on fire. You are in a state of flow and tickets are just moving right along. The days go by and you look at your DONE column … it’s full. Really really full. The DONE tickets seem to swim. There are so many of them. You’ve been productive, but what might all that work actually mean?A few weeks ago I started a side experiment. By hand, each day, I wanted to see what the actual impact of my work was … on me.What was I getting from the work I was doing? What was I learning? How was I making sure I was becoming healthier? Was I stuck in the productivity trap and not growing ... not being truly effective?Each day I gathered my Inputs, Outputs, and Maintenance, which is an overly technical way of saying:

• What did I learn today?

• What did I create today?

• What did I do to make sure I stayed healthy.

Reading List in Personal Kanban

LEARN: In the first four days we see here, we see both talking to clients and reading made up the bulk of inputs. Almost immediately this section paid off. I noticed that I specifically set aside time to start reading Humble Inquiry, simply so I’d have something to put in the block. Since starting this, my reading radically shot up, due to this one simple adjustment.CREATE: Creation was anything for work or otherwise, so we have writing proposals, recommendation letters and even sous vide ribs. The question wasn’t necessarily what made me money, but what did I create that kept me … well … creative. MAINTENANCE: Since starting this, I was taken down by a nastylittle bit of pneumonia, but we can see here that from the outset I started walking (a peak of 13.2k steps and 81 floors that week), that I’m talking to friends, and that I’m scheduling needed doctors visits (hard to get time to do when you travel a lot).RESULTS: Immediately, visualizing the very loose goals of simply learning, creating, and maintaining created tickets on my Personal Kanban board, changed the way I organized my day (to allow for frequent short walks), and got me to focus each day on a balance of learning, creating, and being a whole human being.  Shortly after putting the books I was reading on our board, Tonianne added the book column on the right to our shared board.Why is that important? Because my starting to do this was due to her putting, out of the blue, reading time into her Personal Kanban.  She had simply put that she was reading Deep Work on the board. That got me to thinking about what I was reading and one thing led to another. She made a little improvement, I ran a little experiment, she made another little improvement.Meta-Lesson: When we visualize for ourselves or others, new information is created. When we expose ourselves or others to new information, improvement opportunities are exposed.

Pattern Matching: Use Your Personal Kanban to See What is Really Happening

I see people setting up their Personal Kanban with one color of post it note and then finding it hard to select their next task or figure out what they've done at the end of the week. The strength of Personal Kanban is that it is a visual system. Visual systems rely on visual cues that let us know what is happening.If our boards are a sea of sameness there will be no patterns.Using color to differentiate task types, projects, people, urgency, cost or whatever you find important will instantly transform your board from a sea of undifferentiated tasks to a clear story of your work. We can then engage in pattern matching, which our brains do specifically to make sense of the world.This video describes how and why we should use color to design our Personal Kanban.Please share this article with someone you know you needs to know this.

Take the RealWIP Test

Write Down Your WIP

If you are already using Personal Kanban or another kanban system, you are likely at least thinking about limiting your work-in-progress (WIP). You are likely finding that challenging.We know that the more work we take on, the more our brains' resources are taxed. That tax limits our ability to focus, to process, and to complete quality work. We want to limit our work-in-progress so that we can finish quickly and with quality.One thing to remember is that if it were easy to limit WIP, we’d all be doing it already. Limiting WIP is challenging in a world filled with demands and distractions. Often we’ll be watching our Personal Kanban and, as long as there’s three things in DOING, we’ll feel pretty good about ourselves.Then, one day, we’ll catch ourselves working on something that isn’t in DOING and we’ll realize … oh no, I have hidden WIP.Hidden WIP is that work you do all the time that you don’t tell your board about.So it’s helpful once a week to sit down and write down your WIP.  Simply write down everything you are really doing right now. Write down everything you are currently working on or is making you think. (You may be starting tasks before you pull them). See what that real load is. If you work with a team or manage them, sit down and do this with the team.You’ll be surprised at how much work you are actually taking on.I can’t stress how important this is even for experienced kanban users. I visit teams and counsel individuals regularly who are overloaded with work and have very nice WIP-limited Personal Kanban boards. Their hidden WIP is killing them.So, sit down, write down your real WIP and do something about it.

PROMISES COLUMN: Make Good on Your Promises

Kanban

When we get overloaded, it is very easy to promise people work and then under-deliver. Promises are tricky, they bring with them social costs as well as costs for time and effort.

When I promise something to you personally, I am putting myself on the line. I am telling you, “because you are important to me, I will do this thing.”  If I don’t deliver, it is telling you, “I guess you really weren’t that important to me.”That was never my intent, but we all know when we’ve been waiting on someone and they don’t deliver, we lose a little faith in them. Worse yet, if it’s early in the relationship we identify them as a “non-deliverer.”Mea Culpa: I, personally, end up overloaded or in danger of being overloaded frequently. Many people place demands or expectations on me and I need to meet them. In many cases, I was making perfectly rational decisions to delay some work and do other work. While that was rational on my end, it was likely infuriating for others.Therefore, I started explicitly tracking promises to other people. This immediately had to impacts on me.1. My short term backlog and WIP shot through the roof. Seeing the promises explicitly laid out was stressful and illuminating.2. I stopped promising so much.3. I began to seriously consider each promise as I made it.

• Was the promise necessary?

• Could the goals of the promise be served with a less costly promise?

• Could the goals of the promise be served with more collaboration?

• Were there options to meeting the goals of the promise?

What I learned was that we tend to rashly promise the first idea that comes into our heads. We’re having a conversation. Something sounds like a good idea, like it’s needed, and like I could provide it. So … I promise it.That promise becomes a tacit social contract … I’ve promised something. You are counting on it, I need to deliver it. So, basically, I just contracted to do work for you without giving it very much thought.That’s a recipe for disappointment.So manage your promises by seeing them. A lot of obligations in the PROMISES column mean a lot of work that is very difficult to re-prioritize. That means you have work in your queue that won’t respond well to change. If you have an emergency arise, those promises don’t go away.This is the third post in the Personal Kanban Tips series. You can read the second post - DONE COLUMN: Daily / Weekly Review here.

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.