Visualizing the Flow: Polar-State Based Personal Kanban with Habit Trackers

James Mallison shared a bit of insight and I'm passing it along.In a recent post he discussed issues very close to what I call visualization and flow. He begins with a little story about Jerry Seinfeld:

A couple of years ago there was a little story doing the rounds about a bit of productivity advice from none other than Seinfeld.  He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day, even when you didn’t feel like it. To help achieve this he had a big calendar on his wall and for each day that he did some writing he put a big red cross over that day. After a few days a chain would be created. As the chain gets bigger you’ll not want to break it, so you’ll do what it takes to keep it going.

Personal Kanban and Habit Tracker

What Seinfeld did was build the world’s simplest and most effective kanban. It had two polar states.  Done / Not Done. It had one metric, completeness. Once writing was achieved, task is complete.  Any interruption in flow was immediately visible on his calendar based kanban.Seinfeld didn’t want to “break the chain.”  He didn’t want to interrupt the flow of work.James has taken this concept and built flow worksheets … or state based kanban that he calls a habit tracker.James’ Habit tracker looks like this:In James’ system you create a repetitive task or a “habit” and you simply do it every day. Once it’s done, you can mark it off. For introspection there’s a note field.This would be an excellent variation on my Sequestering Approach to personal kanban. I can very much see habit trackers on the wall next to the kanban.James is looking for comments on the Habit Tracker, so please visit his post and leave feedback.

The Task Based Personal Kanban Approach in Detail

Task Based Personal Kanban Approach

Imagine you have a number of tasks that need completing, and you need to visualize the state of each task. Let’s say that each of these tasks is going to involve several days of information exchange with others. Now let’s suppose that each of these tasks needs to be completed by a certain date, and if you did them in serially with a WIP limit you would spend most of your time waiting for responses. You simply don't have time to fully "complete" each goal and tracking individual subtasks like "bug Bob to send paperwork AGAIN" is a waste of your time.In a traditional kanban, you’d have a problem. Tasks started but not completed would be “blocked,” and you’d need to solve that blockage before you could move the card. Until you moved that task, it was considered WIP.But here we have tasks whose very nature require us to wait for others to acheive completion. These tasks are messy.The task-based personal kanban approach changes the tasks into swim lanes, and allows for a large number of simultaneous tasks.  Your actions should still fall into a WIP limit, but the tasks themselves are unbounded.I’ll retell the story from the original post:In the beginning of June, I was suddenly faced with a large number of items that had to be done in a very short period of time. All of them involved interactions with others. So I built I task-based kanban where each swim lane was a specific task and the adjudication of the tasks was “Assembling,” “Assembled,” “Processing,” “Completed,” and “Notes.”  I knew that my WIP was toast; there was simply no way I could limit WIP when the tasks were so dependent on others.  I need to be able to launch things quickly and then let them resolve naturally.Context required me to rethink the nature of WIP.  WIP needed to be my personal action state, not the completion of the whole task.Each project had objects that needed to be assembled. I allowed myself to have a WIP of three for assembling.  So at any given point in time, I’d have three tasks with stars next to them. I would then gather all the background materials I needed for those things.  When I had all the background information, they would be “assembled”.  As items were assembled, I would start the process to complete the task (calling people, emailing them, etc.) – that put a check in the “processing” column.  I would take notes and place text reminders in the “notes” column until the matter was settled.  Then it would get a “Completed” and I could ceremoniously draw a big line through the whole task.This helped me visualize the full project on a task basis without feeling guilty that I had more than a certain number of tasks active at any given point.  The task based approach helped me track and complete about 35 simultaneous responsibilities during a very stressful time.

GTD & Kanban: Series Overview

For a long time I have been a Getting Things Done (GTD) advocate in both my personal and professional life, starting from the basics and working my way up to a full blown implementation in various paper and electronic forms over the years.  GTD has been a huge help, yet I have always felt there is something missing in my implementation that helps me better manage prioritisation and focus around work, which led me to explore the use of Kanban as a form of GTD list.  Over a series of posts I intend to explore a number of aspects of GTD and how I have applied Kanban to limit my work in progress, adopt a pull based system, and overall, increase the flow of completed actions in my key areas of focus in life and work:

1. GTD & Kanban: Similarities, Differences & Synergies Between The Two

2. GTD & Kanban: Managing The Relationship Between Someday/Maybe & Active Projects

3. GTD & Kanban: Work In Progress Limiting GTD Next Actions Within A Context

4. GTD & Kanban: Inboxes, Lists, Calendars, Kanbans & Mind Maps Working Together In Harmony

5. GTD & Kanban: An Example Of It All Coming Together

Getting Things Done Workflow

I am getting value from the changes I have made to how I work, yet still experimenting to improve.  Any suggestions or questions, please do comment or email in the interest of moving all of our understanding forward.

The Time Capsule Personal Kanban in Detail

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Timecapsule

Individual work is a real PITA. Over time, we invariably amass a lot of small tasks that are necessary but not urgent.  We end up with a number of things that aren’t high priorities but, the longer we put them off the more they will eventually eat up a lot of our time.  Such tasks are waste-in-waiting. They are the five minute nuisances you never got to, that in the end will cost you 10 minutes to apologize for not doing.The Time Capsule approach is to approach the kanban, notice that there are a multitude of little tasks, pull them all off the board, go to your desk, and start doing them until they’re done or your day is over.  And if you have 8 hours of small tasks, well, that’s a learning event for you.Move them across the desk through 3 stations. Backlog, In Process, and Done.This is now a speed tasking exercise. Don’t spend a lot of time prioritizing, you already know your backlog.  Prioritize on-the-fly. You will most likely game the system by doing some or all of the following:Sweat the small stuff: Very small tasks can be done very quickly.  Doing 20, five minute tasks quickly fills up the “done” column with a satisfying number of post-its.Launch all missiles: Tasks that require a quick email are easy to get into the “active” column. Today, completion is the goal. Having many active tasks is okay, so long as you know it’s moving toward completion. Remember: You are the only judge of the effectiveness of the time capsule.Play for Pay: You want to move those tickets to the done side of your desk. Screw convention, screw the Agilistas, screw the WIP monsters – you are only interested in those tickets moving to the right.Focus after Fast: Tasks that require a bit of your time and focus should be done after the fast things and after the missiles are launched.  While those emails are out-reaping rewards, you can work on the more delicate tasks.Rememberthis is a strategy for coping with clutter in your backlog. The mess will happen from time to time because personal tasks are unruly. If you find yourself de-cluttering more than once a month, then it’s likely you have too many commitments, or aren’t prioritizing well.

The Throughput Approach to Personal Kanban in Detail

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In the previous posts we looked at the Time Capsule workaround to having a backlog cluttered with small tasks of varying importance.  This throughput approach might help mitigate the need to use that approach.Kanban tends to have swim lanes – or lanes through which value flows. In your personal kanban, it is possible to have a WIP that takes into account varying sizes of tasks?Let’s say you set a WIP of 5 items: two of these can be large tasks, while three are small.In the throughput approach, the small items are placed daily, and addressed first. The larger items can be handled throughout the day, and will remain on the board as long as it takes to remove them.The goal here is to make sure that at least a minimum amount of small tasks are done regularly, to help avoid the pain of a marathon Time Capsule day.When I’ve done this, I’ve tried to take into account that there will be “flares” – tasks that arise and are completed during the course of a day that don’t make it onto the board. Say your lawyer calls and asks you to track down an email and send it to her. That takes you maybe 15 minutes, but it never makes it onto the board.This is why I don’t move completed tasks off a throughput board until the end of the day.  If you keep moving them and placing new tasks up there, you really haven’t limited your WIP.  You aren’t maximizing for throughput in the number of cards you are moving with the throughput approach, as much as you are maximizing your productivity.With this approach, you will get a number of small tasks done but also devote time to the larger tasks and, hopefully, have the bandwidth to deal with flares.