Prioritization is stressful. We find ourselves prematurely making value decisions about what to pull and when (right now!)In our Gold Call* this week, one of the attendees asked "How can I prioritize my work when there is no clear priority? Everything seems equally important?"This is a deeper issue that simply being indifferent...we are constantly worried (like stressed) about what the best thing is for us to do next. If we make the wrong choice, what might the consequences be?Extreme stress might result when we simply don't know what is most important. At that point, we need to start asking other questions about the work. Is it difficult? Is it going to make me happy? Does it involve other people?This video digs into those issues. In my next post, because choice is not a simple topic, we will go into other ways to select work. (Also, look at the links below this video for more Personal Kanban posts on prioritization.)*Every two weeks out Gold Personal Kanban class members have a one hour chat about what we're working on, how the are working with Personal Kanban, and challenges they are facing. The students, as well as Tonianne and I, work to solve those challenges. They are fun, engaging, and helpful conversations.
Do Meetings Go On my Personal Kanban?
What to do with meetings? They happen all the time, they take up time, they sure seem like work. But putting every meeting on a Personal Kanban would be onerous and annoying. (video about this is below)So the answer is a qualified no. Or a qualified yes.Your Personal Kanban has several roles in your life. The first is to let you know what you need to do. A close second is letting others know.So meetings will appear on your Personal Kanban if:
you need to prepare for them;
they are stressful and you can't stop thinking about them;
they will take up a lot of time (like 3 or 4 hours); or
people on your team need to know.
Regular staff meetings or ad hoc meetings are part of other tasks usually and don't get called out specifically on the board.By the way, I was originally asked this on Stack Exchange. If you have any questions about Personal Kanban, please let us know.
Dealing with Cans of Worms
We are all cursed with "surprises" at work. We come in, sit down, get ready for the day. We select a task to start on and about half way through, it explodes on us. The seemingly simple task now has 30 subtasks all lined up, ready to destroy our day.This is stressful. Since we're likely already overloaded, this new surprise just adds more work to the day and delay to our backlog.However, if we've limited our work-in-progress we look at these "cans of worms" a little differently. They still might be annoying, but they aren't quite so stressful. We understand that, like it or not, the amount of work necessary to get this task done has increased and we can adjust. The slack we've created in our schedule and our work by limiting WIP allows us to adjust gracefully (you can still gripe, it's okay) and plow through the extra work.
Sleep: Your Workflow's Most Important Form of Slack
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It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. ~ John Steinbeck
In Personal Kanban, Jim and I discuss how workflow should be optimized for throughput, not capacity. Work shouldn’t “fit” into your day but rather, it should flow. Much like how a freeway grinds to a halt when its capacity is exceeded, so too do people who are overloaded experience physical and mental gridlock. As with any system - animate, mechanistic, social, or ecological - the importance of incorporating slack to absorb and /or respond to variation, create efficient processing, and maximize performance is not simply good practice, it’s indispensable.Recently, a series of disconcerting conversations caused me to reflect on how much we tend to undervalue our most important form of slack: sleep.
A taxi driver shared how he works 12+ hours per day, with one hour off for lunch, seven days per week because as he explained, “I can sleep when I’m dead”;
A nail technician who works 7 days each week, 10+ hours per day, and only takes off holidays expressed pride in her “work ethic” while dismissing her colleagues who work 5-6 days per week as “lazy”; and
A software developer boasted he could - and in fact, does - exist on a diet of Red Bull, chocolate-covered espresso beans, and as little as 2-3 hours of a caffeine-induced coma...but admitted he greeted each morning in a haze of stupor.
Sure these folks might be “productive,” but how effective are they really in the long-term?
I spend endless days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying. When you are too tired to eat, you really need some sleep. A few days later, things become strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, familiar sounds become unfamiliar, and life reinvents itself as a surrealist dream. ~ Henry Rollins
We wear our busyness like a badge of honor. It has become our default way of existing.Sleep, we rationalize, is for the weak and ironically, for “slackers.” We see it not as a function essential to our existence but as a reward to be earned. And when we do finally deem ourselves “worthy” of a healthy night’s sleep we “cheat” in an attempt to compensate for the hours we’ve been deprived of.From the National Sleep Foundation:
Sleep experts say most adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep each night for optimum performance, health and safety. When we don't get adequate sleep, we accumulate a sleep debt that can be difficult to "pay back" if it becomes too big. The resulting sleep deprivation has been linked to health problems such as obesity and high blood pressure, negative mood and behavior, decreased productivity, and safety issues in the home, on the job, and on the road.
Beyond the obvious self-destructive nature of burning the proverbial candle at both ends, fatigue impedes our brain activity which leads to lack of clarity, which necessitates more effort, increases mistakes, diminishes judgment, and further contributes to our WIP.So long as we view sleep as a luxury we will dismiss it as waste, de-prioritizing it when in actuality, it’s the ONLY thing absolutely vital to our workflow.Does it really need to be stated?Humans cannot live without sleep.So I propose we begin looking at sleep as integral to our workflow. Slack is not simply vital to your Personal Kanban, it’s vital for smooth, efficient flow and maximizing performance.If you frame sleep as part of your work, unfinished sleep becomes WIP. We then struggle with focus, multitasking and task-switching become inevitable, creating a vicious cycle that interferes with the quality of other parts of our life. When we are sleep deprived, our WIP limit should actually be reduced.
I work in the quiet of home 7-8am to sort out things that are stuck or unresolved. Only after I have landed that thinking do I go into the office. ~ Tiffany Overton
A quiet mind, a fresh perspective leads to improved memory, longer attention span, sustainable learning, and improved judgement.Sleep better. Perform better. It really is that simple.
On Working Intentionally: The "Thinking Ticket"
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The quality of art is that it makes people who are otherwise always looking outward, turn inward. ~ the Dalai Lama
There’s a certain irony in the fact that knowledge workers are often afforded little time to do what it is they are enlisted to do: think. In an era defined by constant connectivity, information overload, ceaseless distractions, and the perfidious fetishization of multitasking our days, our processes, our modus operandi is increasingly becoming reactive.Our "fast thinking brain" as Daniel Kahneman refers to it, helps us wend our way through this neural noise with the aid of subconscious shortcuts or, cognitive biases. So we traverse our lives myopically through a sequence of habits, intuition, emotions, one assumption after the next, to the point that our focus turns to frenzy and the output of our work precludes us from taking a serious and vital look at what inputs affect it. Over reliance on this fast, shortcut-driven “system one thinking” can compromise our understanding of what it is we’re actually doing, and why.For innovation, for improvement, for personal fulfillment, this type of workflow is not sustainable.Science estimates the human brain processes on average between 50,000-80,000 conscious and subconscious thoughts per day, and so reliance on heuristics is both an efficient and necessary use of our brainpower.But it’s not always effective.That’s because these shortcuts - the assumptions that drive us - are not always correct.In an age of overload, what happens to the brain when we silence the neural noise and take a moment to simply pause to consider what we are really doing, and why?Unplugging, incorporating ritualized pauses into the workday breaks the cycle of assumption, shifting us from the emotional, to the rational “slow thinking brain.” Disengaging and taking a cognitive time-out engages our "system two thinking," shifting our consciousness from the habitual, the reptilian, to the intentional, helping us solve problems thoughtfully, make decisions more deliberately, and generate new ideas.Looking for more EUREKA! moments? Add a “Thinking” ticket to your Personal Kanban. Unplug. Look out the window. Take a walk. Break the cycle of reaction by tapping into your creative mind.This article was inspired by a conversation with Maggie Churchville. For more on how Personal Kanban can help you be more intentional about your work and by extension your life, register for our FREE webinar, our online class, or our next workshop Personal Kanban for Knowledge Work, Seattle 12-13 April.