Complete Meaningful Tasks

The MusingOur work should provide value to someone or something, otherwise why do it?When we build our Personal Kanban, we are building a board that drives us toward completing our work. But is that work worth doing?val·uenoun

1. the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.

2. person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life.

verb

1. estimate the monetary worth of (something).

2. consider (someone or something) to be important or beneficial; have a high opinion of.

Application

Tasks

Visualizing a goal

Visualizing Clear Goals

The words we use to describe value (regard, importance, usefulness, standards, beneficial) indicate that value is not merely based on cash, but also on how it makes us feel, how we respond to it.  So when we say we want to understand the value of our work it means a great deal to us, to our colleagues, to our companies, and to society. You figure out in your own Ayn Rand to Che Guevara scale where your own value equilibrium lies.But … understand it and work towards it.The Practical ApplicationLet’s take a look at a simple case to see what this means practically.Over the Christmas break I quickly assessed how secure my internet holdings were. The answer was rather frightening. I, like most people, was extremely susceptible to hackers getting ahold of emails and passwords and running amok with my accounts.I downloaded Dashlane and began working with it to set strong and constantly changing passwords for all my accounts.My first ticket read “Update Dashlane”. I knew what Dashlane was and why I was updating it, so that seemed to make sense and tell me why I was doing the work.The problem: I had no idea what updating Dashlane meant to me. I knew I wanted to get done by the end of the week, but updating all your passwords and making sure you are letting others impacted by those changes know what’s changed leaves “Update Dashlane” as an open ended task.

I need a Victory Condition.So I created this ticket. “Update five sites in Dashlane.” Okay, great. That had a clear victory condition.The problem: I had no idea what I was working toward or where I was in the process. Or what I was working toward. What was my goal? I wanted to be more secure. Dashlane gives me a metric about security.I wanted to become more secure, not just update sites. Who cares if I update 100 sites and am still dismally unsecure?So, I changed the ticket yet again. This time to give myself a specific goal that was measured by Dashlane. I want to get to 80% by Friday. So 50% today, 60% tomorrow, 70% Thursday and 80% Friday. Four tickets, clear goal, all with demonstrated value.This was today’s card, it’s surrounded by other “Dones” which say what I am doing and the value provided. Note the card next to the 50% card tells me not just to reply to my colleague in Oregon, but also what resolution to get out of that reply.Sage AdviceWhen you create a card, ask yourself what the goal or the value of that work is. That not only gives you the task to complete, but the way to know when you have completed it. Quality and value are hard to determine without a definition. Let yourself know when you’ve achieved victory.And do yourself a favor … if you can’t come up with a goal or a value statement for your work, strongly question why you are doing it in the first place.

READY COLUMN: Breaking Out Projects

Kanban

Lots of tickets in our READY column make a jumbled mess. We’re not sure how close we are to completion or what ticket to pull next, Breaking your work into projects in the READY column lets you see both. You can sequence work (pull the rightmost ticket), see how many tickets are left in the project, and see what projects are ripe for rapid completion.You can also create better strategies. For example: Sunday can be the day to nuke the “CLEAN GARAGE” project.  But maybe Saturday is the day you look over the tickets and figure out what you need to get from the hardware store for both the CLEAN GARAGE and the RENO BASEMENT projects. One trip to the hardware store gets you a power washer, broom, and shelving for the garage and a drill and sledgehammer for the basement.Without having the tickets in orderly swimlanes, we instead would have a disordered jumble which is much harder to manage.This is the final post in the Personal Kanban Tips series.  You can read all the previous posts by clicking on the links below.DONE COLUMN: How Does Your Work Make You Feel?DONE COLUMN: Daily / Weekly ReviewPROMISES COLUMN: Make Good On Your PromisesTHE NEW STUFF COLUMN: What's Just Come In?READY COLUMN: Ticket Aging

READY COLUMN: Ticket Aging

Kanban

In our last post, we discussed a NEW STUFF column. In this post, we are being even more explicit, noting in our Personal Kanban how old tickets on the board are.We have seen, even on our own boards, that tickets can linger on the board for six months, eight months, even a year! That’s simply too much time.What we also see is that if tickets aren’t done within the month they’re put on the Personal Kanban, they probably won’t get done. You’re better off making a second board called “Things I might want to do some day” (What in GTD would be a “someday” task) and getting off the Personal Kanban.An easy way to see this is to make three or four swimlanes in your READY column, each labeled by month. Here you see the months are JUNE, JULY, and AUGUST. This shows us, at any point in time, what tasks are aging or maybe old enough to simply discard.It also lets us see, over time, the types of tickets we tend to put on the board but never get around to. That’s important because people are skilled procrastinators. If one of those old tickets is “schedule physical” or “talk to Uncle Louie” we know the ticket didn’t age out - we’re not prioritizing effectively.Watching tickets age tells us a lot about what we choose to do, what we choose to put off, and what we wish we could do but is never going to happen.Seeing that explicitly can teach each of us what plans we can make that will likely succeed and which will likely falter or never make it out of the gate.This is the fifth post in the Personal Kanban Tips series.  You can read the fourth post - THE NEW STUFF COLUMN: What's Just Come In? here.

THE NEW STUFF COLUMN: What’s Just Come in?

Kanban

Is your READY column filling up with tasks? Is it hard to figure out what’s new, what’s important, and what’s aging?One option to deal with this is a NEW STUFF column. This column holds exactly what it says: New work that has come in over the last few days. As new work comes in, simply place those tickets in the NEW STUFF column.One recommendation would be that at the end of the day or perhaps every Friday you move incomplete tasks into READY - keeping the NEW STUFF as fresh as possible. Once a month, you would look at your READY column and see what tickets have become stale.What we’ve noticed is that many tasks that wind up on our Personal Kanban are never actually completed, but they stay in READY for months on end. It becomes harder and harder to make sense of the work in the READY column because some of it is fresh and some is nearly moldy.My favorite example of this was I visited a team using PK and they showed me their board. They pointed at the blue, yellow, and pink tickets and told me what each meant.I asked, “What does the white tickets mean?”They told me there were no white tickets.I pointed at one.They laughed. It was a yellow ticket that was on the board long enough to be sun bleached!This is important, the goal of the NEW STUFF column isn’t to merely focus on new tasks, it is to help us see what tasks are fresh and when to clean things off the board.This is the fourth post in the Personal Kanban Tips series.  You can read the previous post - PROMISES COLUMN: Make Good on Your Promises here.

DONE COLUMN: How Does Your Work Make You Feel?

Done Column

When we work, we spend our most precious resources: our time, our energy, and our emotion. Each task we complete takes a little bit of us and we’d like to think that time was not only productive, but impactful.But we are so busy, so distracted, so overwhelmed that we finish one task and move right on to the next. The treadmill. The rat race.All too often, we bring this home with us. Home tasks become just more in the endless stream of numbing work.With your Personal Kanban, you can work your way out of this by asking a few simple questions:

• What work makes me happy?

• What work does not?

By simply augmenting your DONE column with three or more simple sections that note what tasks you enjoyed, which were merely okay, and which were upsetting. You can add more gradations (we’ve seen ones with mushroom cloud columns).

Make explicit what you enjoy and what you do not. Then you can create strategies to even your work out. Enhance work that energizes you - that’s the work that gives you the energy (and the hope!) to get through the harder stuff.