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 WIP limiting needs to be flexible. Sometimes tasks just don't behave themselves. Some are extremely urgent, while others become mired down for whatever reason. Both of these scenarios demand respect.I recently had a session with a personal coaching client who has just begun using Personal Kanban. He had set up a few rather detailed value streams, but was having trouble limiting his WIP because different task types were causing conflicts.At Seattle Lean Coffee, the topic of task types has come up at almost every meeting.It's clear we need to talk about task types here.So, let's examine the case of a coder, whom we'll call Richard.A hired gun, with a busy home and work life, Richard is juggling multiple commitments. His primary client is a company that uses an esoteric software system to run their business. Not only is Richard one of only a few (less than 5) individuals on earth familiar with this particular package, the others are not interested in working with it any more.Over the course of each month, Richard receives tasks from his client. These tasks come with some - but not rigorous - prioritization. Every so often though, a bug will surface that impacts the company's operations, and Richard will need to drop what he's doing and focus instead on that bug.Over the years, the system Richard is "lucky" enough to be stewarding has been touched by a succession of coders resulting in a tangled mass of spaghetti code that is undocumented, and often difficult to read.Think of it as the Winchester Mystery House of source code.All too often, problems often arise requiring additional work just to locate the issue, not to mention having to test and find the impacts of any changes he might make.From his experience, Richard has identified five main task types:

• Easy tasks - these are straightforward, can be done quickly, and will require minimal testing;

• Normal tasks - these can be done in a few days without much, if any, outside interaction;

• Hard tasks - these are tasks that will require a lot (or at least an unknown amount) of work and research;

• Escalated tasks - these are tasks that cause the client discomfort and need to move to the front of the queue; and

• Emergency tasks - these are tasks that displace the work already in process and become in-process.

For Richard who is working solo and off-site, parsing his tasks out like this is invaluable. Since his client has had little visibility into his workload, he's begun using an online Personal Kanban tool to create a workflow that he can share with his client. Tasks are colored according to their type, allowing the client transparency into the mix of work he has.Right now, the client has no way of knowing the grades of severity of tasks. Tasks that sound simple to the client can sometimes be difficult in the code. Similarly, tasks sound hard may actually be very straightforward. When the client is waiting for results, it's important for them to know which tasks look easy or hard. This will directly inform the client's risk assessment of setting Richard loose on a particular task. If he identifies one as hard, the client can then re-assess the priority of the task and the investment it might require.With client access to Richard's Personal Kanban, and task types clearly differentiated, clients can work alongside Richard to prioritize and schedule specific tasks. This will increase mutual understanding by giving them something visual and tangible to speak to when they have their regular meetings. Work can always be re-prioritized on-the-fly by mutual agreement. With transparency into Richard's workflow, the client will be less inclined to feel behind schedule because level of difficulty is now understood.Richard can now use all this information to help guide what items to pull when he's moving from one task to the next. Escalated and Emergency tasks are self-evident and should be rare (if they aren't rare, that points to other problems we'll talk about in a later blog post). Beyond those, Richard's risk assessment for pulling specific tasks is based on an amalgam of client priorities and available time.If he looks into his backlog and, if he has only a few hours, he can pull out an Easy task. If he has a few days, he can pull a normal task, etc. His risk profile for pulling tasks is now informed by these task types.And yes, this is all fine until some task goes wrong. Which of course will happen. This we'll cover tomorrow in the post "When Tasks Don't Go Right."Photo by Jeffc5000

Guest Post: My Current Personal Kanban System

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One of my favorite observations about using kanban-like systems for time management is that I have never drawn the same task board twice. Every system that I have designed has had some unique feature to it. Even if I start out with something generic, it will quickly evolve into something that reflects the unique circumstances in which it is applied.A key parameter of the design of a visual control system is the number of participants in the system. The purpose of visual control is to maximize human understanding of the current situation. The contents of that maximum depend on the number and complexity of the parts involved. A system that tracks 100 people will look a lot different than a system that tracks 5 people.A special and interesting category of visual control system is one built for the individual. I have developed and applied a number of different visual task management systems for myself and for other individuals.  I'd like to describe the simple and practical system I am using at present and how I arrived at it.

Some history

My early attempts at using a kanban-like system for managing personal work looked a lot like other contemporary kanban schemes for workflow management. That shouldn't be surprising, since most people learn about the kanban idea from workflow or supply chain management, and so did I. I used a scaled-down version of the kind of ticket-based scheduling board that is sometimes used for office work.

I intended to use the board to track all of the work that I had to do, rather than work of one particular type or for one particular project. This meant that I had to limit any workflow to its least common denominator of ready->busy->done. Coordinating workflow is most of the power and purpose of a conventional kanban system, so reducing workflow to a triviality leads one to wonder what benefits might remain and how best to represent those benefits.While kanban is mostly about workflow, a ticket-based system also encourages you to think of tickets in any planning stages as options, whose value depends upon the time that they are exercised. You can probably think of many more tasks that you might like to do than you can ever hope to complete, and using tickets to represent all the options can help you to realize the set of tasks that best represent your priorities as circumstances evolve. The population of surplus tickets that never get promoted to action can be controlled by giving every ticket a lifespan.Optional tickets fit nicely with the autonomous, self-directed nature of personal work.  Discovery, opportunity, and potential are as much a part of the personal experience as achievement. In a personal kanban system you are the consumer as well as the producer. You are not a slave to your own backlog.Even if we don't care about workflow, adaptive planning is a capability we'd like to preserve.

Necessity is a mother...

I suspect that I will always favor ticket-based systems for teamwork, but I found it to be too contrived and too much overhead for personal work, so I quit using it after a while.  I limped along with old-fashioned calendars and to-do lists for some time, but unsurprisingly, the same problems that led me to try kanban in the first place eventually resurfaced.Without the visual control, my attention slowly divided between too many complex interests to keep track of without resorting to oppressive calendar scheduling. I thought of many valuable goals to pursue, each one realistic on its own, but improbable in the practice of competing for attention with other interests. Frustration eventually led me to reconsider the problem.Like most problems of analysis, it is important to distinguish the universal from the particular.  The universals of work stem from human nature, and everything that does not speak to human nature must be situational.Such universals might include:

• Productivity is a measure of work that you finish, not work that you start.

• The human mind can only focus on one conscious task at any moment.  Humans can only achieve the appearance of multitasking by time slicing, which makes every task take longer to complete, and increases the risk of poor quality or incomplete work.

• Visualizing all of the work to be done makes it much easier to control that work.

Other facts about work are situational:

• scope of work is individual vs group

• finite tasks vs continuing processes

• homogeneous vs heterogeneous task types

• periodic vs reactive tasks

A personal task management system is, by definition, concerned with an individual scope of work, so schemes designed for teamwork may not be ideal for this purpose.  In particular, ticket-based systems like the traditional kanban are excessive for personal work because the function of the kanban ticket is as a signaling device and a medium of exchange between members of a group. You don't need such a contrivance to communicate with yourself.It is the other feature of a kanban system, the limitation of work in process, that we wish to capture for personal work management.

Metaphor and geometry

A person is not a task factory. Most of my time is not directed towards responding to external demands. Much of the time I spend is in the service of some ongoing ambient process that will never be satisfied: eating, sleeping, paying taxes. Other areas of concern are goal-oriented and spawn specific sub-goals and tasks in response to evolving circumstances.As a human, my life is ultimately governed by the limits of biological necessity. Dividing up the 24-hour day is a zero-sum game. Time spent sleeping comes at the expense of something else. The periodicity of time is the fundamental fact about personal time management.On any one day, I may make circumstantial decisions about how I allocate my attention, but over time, these allocations average out to reflect broad priorities. A general-purpose personal system should be oriented towards balancing attention between areas of concern which are open-ended processes.

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The natural visual representation of such a problem is geometric: the partition of a finite area. A limit to work in process is implicit in using a finite area to account for work. The partitions of that area allocate limits to the individual concerns. A whiteboard, once again, becomes an expedient tool to represent such a scheme. Each partition of the board represents an ongoing process or long-term goal.  We only need to track processes that require planning, so we can leave overhead processes like sleep off of the board.  Work may or may not require tracking, depending on the kind of work you do.

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We could use a token to represent which area has our attention at any moment, but there is only one "token of attention". If you're doing chores, that means you can't be sleeping. We should try to define our areas of interest in a way that makes them independent of one another.Dividing up the major areas of interest in your life makes for an illuminating exercise and a step towards gaining control of your time, but that isn't enough to make an effective time management system. The time spent in service of an interest will usually be applied towards specific goals and tasks. Since we have already accounted for the continuity of our interests and the periodicity of the 24-hour day, we can now revert to hierarchical lists to track individual tasks.

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Once again, we can apply geometry to our ends by limiting the physical space available to contain a backlog of tasks. Topic boxes should be proportional to their importance, and not to the number of tasks expected. If you run out of space to add a new task, then you have to delete one or coalesce tasks into a higher goal in order to make room. Always adding tasks to the bottom of the list, in a "ring-buffer" scheme, helps you keep track of which tasks are oldest and stalest. While the ring-buffer scheme might seem like a limitation, it actually fits nicely with our option-thinking view of the world. If a task sits around for long enough to be lapped before being selected, then it can't be that important and deserves to be deleted.The scheme so far helps us decide the relative importance of tasks and whether they are worthy of our attention. It does not, however, give us enough information to decide which task to work on next. We can address that by adding the notion of a "current task token" within each area of interest. The current task token indicates the item we are currently working on, the item that we were working on before we switched areas of concern, or the item that we should start next when our attention returns to an interest. A dot-style magnet serves this purpose perfectly, which is one of the many reasons to use a magnetic whiteboard for time management.

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For the computer-minded, this scheme is starting to look suspiciously like the scheduling of operating system processes. But we only aim to provide a data structure, the algorithm that animates it remains a heuristic in your mind.The current task token indicates the context of the present, but we might also have information about the future. After we complete a current task, when do we decide which task to start next?  We could wait to make that decision until it is necessary, but it is also easy to keep track of our current expectations. We can add new tokens to indicate what we should do next as well as what we are doing now.

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Prioritized tokens come in handy for another reason. Personal tasks are likely to be interrupted and blocked, even while their parent processes are still active. Maintaining a small hierarchy of priority tasks makes it easier to adapt to fits and starts by accounting for thread switching within the current process.

Conclusion

In the end, I came up with a system that was so simple that it almost seems trivial. And that's exactly why I like it. It directly attacks the weaknesses of the unstructured to-do list with a minimum of cognitive overhead. It addresses universal principles of work in a way that is tailored to personal scope. The maintenance of the system is extremely easy. Both active work and planned work are strictly limited. It is constructed from inexpensive common materials. And most importantly, I am finding it much easier to live with than any ticket- or folder-based system.

Dependencies in Personal Kanban

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Dependencies are things that occur in succession. One thing happens, then another thing can happen. Ideally, on a kanban, the value stream will visualize these transitions. For a value stream like this:Analysis -> Creation -> Refinement -> Launchrefinement is dependent on both analysis and creation.That neatly takes care of dependencies, but in our Personal Kanban we really don't want to have to come up with new value streams for every little project we are doing. So we need to come up with ways to visualize dependencies that will let us maintain a simple value stream.So let's look at a few ways we can do that. As always, these are suggestions and we'd love to see how other people work this out.Task NotationWe can simply notate tasks with where they lie in a stream of pre-requisites. Noting what comes before can help us not prematurely pull a task, letting us know what comes next can help us raise that next task in priority ones it's antecedent task is completed.Scheduled EscalationSometimes tasks become relevant on or around a specific date. What we can do is place tasks that need escalation on a certain date on an actual calendar. When that date comes, take the task off the calendar and place it in backlog. If is has a due date, be sure to note that date on the sticky.Sticky StacksTasks that neatly follow one another can simply stack. When a task is pulled, its next task is seen in the backlog. Sticky stacks can also nicely visualize a project without taking up too much space.--So that's it. Some quick ways to deal with dependencies outside the value stream. Of course, do look in Design Patterns to see if you can find ways to deal more elegantly with specific projects.

Am I Productive, Efficient, or Effective?

Productivity: having the power to produceEfficiency: the ratio of the output to the input of any systemEffectiveness: being able to bring about a desired result

Personal Kanban is considered a Productivity tool, because it gives us the power to produce more.  It is likewise said to increase Efficiency by limiting WIP and increasing focus which means we expend less energy to affect results. This in turn boosts our Effectiveness by providing the information necessary to make better decisions and act on them.Often people have bursts of productivity, efficiency, or effectiveness – but because they aren’t paying attention to what they're doing, these events are sometimes dismissed as happy accidents. Personal Kanban makes your work explicit, meaning it constantly shows you what you are doing and what you could be doing. This helps you interpret your options and prioritize you tasks based on current conditions. Personal Kanban also lets us balance productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and turn them into three parts of the same machine.Individually, bursts look like this:

• Bursts of productivity – You get a lot done, but is it the right stuff?

• Bursts of efficiency – Work is easily done, but is it focused for maximum effect?

• Bursts of effectiveness – The right work is done at the right time … this time. Is this process repeatable?

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I call these bursts “hero” events. Over time, things get screwed up and you have to call in a “hero” to fix them quickly. That hero may be you, a temp worker, a consultant, or a friend. But you identify a need so late in the game that you need to work above and beyond to complete the task at hand.What’s funny is that after these hero events, we feel good. And because we feel good, we think, “That was awesome!” and we ascribe the event to something exceptional. Something that just couldn’t possibly happen every day.During a recent project in Washington, D.C., I worked alongside members of the Intelligence Community. More than one of them told me that people in the IC  who allegedly had cushy desk jobs inside the Beltway, routinely volunteered for live fire assignments.These people specifically volunteered to be in harm’s way.Why? Because it was a period of sustained productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. People did not have the "luxury" to relentlessly and constantly prioritize. In the field there is no choice but to constantly re-evaluate conditions and re-prioritize actions. Because picking the most important task was the only way to survive, the only way to complete the mission.There was a mission. There was survival. And those two conjoined drivers created a great deal of focus.Hopefully we don't have to risk our lives simply to focus on our work. Personal Kanban provides the structure to allow us to choose the right work for maximum effect repeatably.For more on how to choose the "right" work, and then how to make sure your processes are repeatable see Prioritization and Retrospectives.Photo by Randy Son of Robert.

Respect Your Backlog and Manage It

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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 to visualize his workflow with his file-card system. Leslie Dewar left this comment:

I have tried this system of cards in the past and found it extremely distracting and demotivating. I was working with a very intensely personal client base of about 280 people and there were dozens of small jobs that probably really needed to be in a tickler file. If I put them all on a “Task” list, it was quite overwhelming, even though some of the work only needed ten or fifteen minutes.I also suffer from the “out of sight – out of mind” disability. I have gone through many office an office blitz; prioritised; put in folders; sequenced in desktop folders and ……. forgot about it. By the time I do all that organizing, I somehow felt as though I must have also done the job!

Leslie’s issues are not unique. I’m seeing two in particular here. The first is tracking tasks over time (tasks that aren’t relevant for a while clutter up your Personal Kanban and make it hard to read), and the second is Personal Portfolio Management.Tracking Tasks Over TimeThere are things we do every day that are repeating or scheduled out into the future. We need to remember these things and add them to the Personal Kanban when necessary. Products like Outlook or Google Calendar can help here. Simply place automated reminders (what GTD calls "ticklers") in your calendar at the earliest date you’ll need to be reminded of them. The due date isn’t going to help you - calls to action will. One of the biggest mistakes people make with calendars is that they record the date something will happen rather than recording the earliest date action will be necessary.Then forget about that thing until the tickler comes up.Personal Portfolio ManagementI have the feeling this is going to become a major theme for Personal Kanban. Everyone has multiple projects. Those projects have features and those actions have specific tasks. Defined:

• Project – a large thing of value that needs to be done – Build Deck

• Features – units of value that, when combined, create the project – Railings

• Tasks – discrete actions that create features – cut 16 posts to 3’5”

We can use Personal Kanban to manage our work at all three levels. Depending on how many projects we have, a project can simply be denoted by the color of the sticky note. Features can be tracked on the Personal Kanban until we start in on the feature – then we can decide how best to break it down.If the Project is "Make Breakfast," that probably stands on its own. You won’t need the features (like Toast) or the Tasks (slice bread, place bread in toaster, depress toaster button, double check toast setting to make sure it’s on golden brown, stare at toaster for what seems like an eternity...).Part of what makes life challenging is that personal work does come in Projects like “Build House” and “Make Coffee.”  Combined, these projects comprise our Personal Portfolio.Since one of the goals of Personal Kanban is to simplify your life – creating a huge, mandatory system of nested Personal Kanban or secondary tools doesn’t make sense (for everyone).So What Do I Do With This Wisdom?Understand that your body of work is a Portfolio. Your Personal Kanban goal is to manage that portfolio in the way that works best for you. If your Personal Kanban is overloaded with tasks, find ways to group them into Features or Projects until it comes time to actually do the work. If you have too many things in the future, remind yourself with an automated calendar.If you are like Leslie and have 208 clients, manage them in a Customer Relationship Management system. And, if you get to the point where you can’t manage your work at all – you are taking on too much. That’s the point where you go to Odesk and get an outsourced Personal Assistant.  (And manage them with an on-line Personal Kanban!)Photo by Sea Turtle