Killing Email Interruptions: Personal Kanban using LeanKit, Gmail, and Zapier

Quick intro from Jim Benson:

We've asked Chris Hefley from Leankit to write a series of posts showing how to integrate tools many of us use everyday with our Personal Kanban. These are fairly technical posts, but also very powerful ones.

In this first post, Chris mentions that his aim is to keep his inbox at zero by taking action items and moving them directly to his Personal Kanban. Tonianne and I have also noticed that we also tend to act on emails the moment they arrive. This means that we allow email to interrupt our flow of work - then we get to the end of the day and are disappointed by how we let those interruptions derail our day.

Chris lays out a simple mechanism to move emails into your Leankit Personal Kanban that can both clean out your inbox and give some of those interruptions their proper priority. Also, I've turned Chris' post into a video which is at the bottom.

Take it away, Chris

-----------

I aspire to keep my inbox at zero. About once every couple of weeks, I actually get there. I’ve got several tools that I use to help me with that, including moving emails to my Personal Kanban board in LeanKit.

LeanKit has a connector available for Zapier, a cloud based integration hub. Zapier provides hundreds more connectors with other applications, which makes it very easy to connect LeanKit with Gmail, ZenDesk, BugZilla, BaseCamp, and many more.In this article, I’ll show you how to set up a “Zap” to create a LeanKit card based on an email in Gmail, complete with a link back to the original email, so that you can get that “to do” item onto your Kanban board and out of your inbox.First, you’ll need to go to Zapier.com and create an account. There’s a free account that should work just fine, and if you need more integrations or faster synchronization you can upgrade later.Once you’ve created your account, you’ll be asked to create your first “Zap”, and presented with the screen below:

Integrating Zapier with LeanKit

On the Trigger (left) side, choose Gmail, and choose “New Thread”.

Choosing Gmail and a New Thread

On the Action side (right side) choose LeanKit and “New-Add Card” for the action.So that when a new Thread is created in Gmail that fits the criteria we will add later, it will create a matching card in LeanKit.

Adding LeanKit

Follow the steps in Zapier to set up your Gmail account:

Selecting an Email Account

…and your LeanKit account.

Conecting LeanKit to Zapier

Now, in a separate browser tab, go into your gmail account, open an email, and create a Label called “lk” (or something similar) for that email. (Help for how to create a label in Gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/118708?hl=en)

Back in Zapier, in the filter for your Gmail Trigger, choose the “lk” label you created in the previous step (it could take a few minutes for the label to show up after you’ve created it. If you don’t see it after a few minutes, try saving your “Zap” incomplete, and then coming back to this step.)

Choosing Triggers

In Zapier, Choose the LeanKit board you’d like to add cards to. This will allow you to select from any board in your LeanKit account (that you have access to with your login).

Choosing a LeanKit Board

After selecting the Board, you’ll be able to select the lane you want new cards added to, and the Card Type you want for your new cards.

Selecting the LeanKit Lane

For the Card Title field, add the Gmail fields  “From Name” and “Subject”, and add “Plain Message” to the description field.

You can also add “ThreadURL” to the Description field if you’re using Basic or Team edition to provide a link back to the email. Or follow the instructions further down to add the link to the card header if you’re using Portfolio edition.

Selecting Card Fields

Test it like so:

Test Your Setup

Testing Your Setup 2

If you’re using LeanKit Portfolio Edition, you can use the “External Card ID” field. Add “ThreadID” to this field from the list of available Gmail fields.

Using the External Card ID Field

Open your LeanKit board in a new browser tab, and in the settings for your leankit board, enable Card ID, and set it up as shown below. The field is where the Gmail ThreadID will go.  (Check the gmail message url by opening an email in your browser and confirming the format of the url shown below for the email).

Enabling LeanKit Card ID

Now, the link to the original thread will appear in the header of the card, allowing you to quickly jump back there without opening the card to view the description.

Links on the LeanKit Task Cards

That should do it. You can test the Zap and turn it on in Zapier. Now, all you have to do is label a message in Gmail with “lk” and then archive it to get it out of your inbox. The next time the Zapier sync process runs, it will pick up that email and create a LeanKit card for it.

HOW TO: Limit WIP #7: Understand Your Customers

In this series, we’ve been discussing the psychology of your work, the sized of tasks, how we complete certain types of tasks, and who / what might interrupt us.Perhaps it’s time to understand the consumers of our tasks: our customers. When we do something, even if it is simply relaxing, there is a potential beneficiary of that task.We do things. Those things we loosely call “work”. “Work” has a “work product”. “Work products” should have some value for somebody. That somebody is the customer.Customers can include:

• those paying money for the work (the traditional customer)

• our bosses (corporate hierarchy)

• colleagues, coworkers, partners (corporate culture)

• regulators or agents of an authority (bureaucracy)

• family (family)

• friends and neighbors (society)

• ourselves (ourselves)

And there are likely other customers and subdivisions of these customers.If you are doing things that have no value to anyone … why are you doing them?To limit our WIP, we need to make sure we are doing the right thing.But even if we know it's the right task, are we doing the thing right? To learn this, we must ask ourselves:

• What does our customer want?

• What is the highest value they can get from my work?

• Do I have time to give them that value?

• How much value can I get done in the time I have?

• Will that level of value be sufficient?

We often find ourselves saying “no” to that last question, but continuing to do the work anyway.When we know our work is going to be of insufficient quality, we tend to become aggravated. We feel annoyance at the task, at those who asked us to do the task, an ourselves for getting stuck in a situation like this. This annoyance increases the chance that our work product will be of low quality – making the work even more insufficient.If we didn’t want to do a good job, this would not be a problem.Since we do, there are five quick actions we should take when we understand we have a customer:

• Be clear about what they want – Yes, this sounds obvious, but how many times have you had to rework something because of a simple initial lack of understanding?

• Be clear about what is on your plate – No, sorry Miss Customer, you are not the only thing I am doing right now. I wish you were, but life doesn’t work like that. Here’s what I can realistically do.

• Get their feedback early and often – How soon can you show them an interim product? How quickly can you compare expected and actual progress? Earlier feedback = earlier delivery.

• Understand minimum and optimal deliverables – Minimum and optimum deliverables give you a range of success to shoot for. If you are always aiming for the high point, you will usually underdeliver.

• Work is a relationship – All work is a relationship between the person doing the work and the person receiving it. Communication (again as early as possible) helps both cement the relationship and ensure an appreciated delivery.

It's simple, if we don't know who it is for, we don't know what we are doing. If we don't know what we are doing, how can we limit our work-in-progress?

HOW TO: Limit WIP #6: Count The Bosses–Show the Work

It’s hard to limit your work-in-progress when your boss count exceeds your WIP limit.If you have a WIP Limit of 3 and 12 bosses, you may as well have one card permanently in your Personal Kanban that says, “Negotiate with Bosses”.That sounds funny, but it is true. Your bosses will always require explanations about why you are working on tasks that are unrelated to their work.Tonianne and I play a game with people regularly called “Count The Bosses.” The rules are simple…. you count your bosses.If you need more than a few fingers to count them, you know that part of your job is not only satisfying their demands, but also choosing which one to be attentive to at any given point-in-time.Your bosses are people who directly give you work. In a few days, we’ll have a post #7 which deals with understanding your customers. For today, however, we simply want a number … how many people are giving you work?Then ask these questions:

1. Do these people consult with each other before giving me work?

2. Do I feel guilty when I’m working for one when another has needs?

3. Am I punished for doing work for one boss over another?

4. Am I in the middle of their disputes?

5. Will they let me complete tasks before giving me another?

6. Do they allow me to complete my work in a way that works for me, rather than working in ways they think I should?

What we would like is have answers that give them the right to give us work, but give us the ability to complete that work in the best way we see fit.If your answers are not in this direction, it is useful to show on a Personal Kanban what is really happening. Then discuss this with them around the board. Do not just go talk to them, because neither of you will have anything physical to talk about. The goal here is to use the board as a mediator. We want the board to reveal how there is too much work-in-progress and that the work load itself is hampering your ability to complete things on time.Have your bosses watch this strangely silent YouTube Video. Let them know you, too, have an optimal WIP limit.

Limit Your WIP

HOW TO: Limit WIP #5–Throughput Analysis

When we think about limiting Work-in-process, we have to confront that there are many types of work. Simply limiting work is not enough, we have to know what we are limiting. We have to see what we are really completing.A very real danger for us as people is that we limit our WIP and then say, “What’s the most important task to pull next” without understanding the weights of types of tasks.We have tasks that might:

• make us money

• satisfy someone else’s needs

• teach us something

• provide us pleasure / opportunity to relax

• gain us political favor / help avoid political disfavor

• satisfy bureaucratic requirements

• etc.

Depending on the situation, we will pick one of these over another. However, very often Tonianne and I see people favoring office demands over personal growth, emergencies over kaizen, and politics over family. This behavior creates new personal emergencies. If you ignore your spouse and your kids long enough, that has repercussions – the best of which would be that they feel ignored, the worst can be much worse.Back at the office, the emergency we are tending to right now is at the cost of other work on other project that, after it languishes for a while will also become an emergency. And the cycle continues.The sad truth is that quite often we create our own emergencies and, therefore, our own spiral into an emergency-centered life. When we reach this point, we say, “How can I possibly limit my WIP? Everything is an emergency!”

Emergencies Create Throughput Issues Create More Emergencies

In this video, we see the impacts of a workplace emergency. New emergencies are spawned at home and at work. The point here is not to say, “Don’t have emergencies,” but to understand how they can create an emergency cascade. If the person in the video would have hired a handyman at home and found even one person at the office to help him, his dilemma could have been avoided.The key here is balance. The tickets at the end of the week were all focused on the Desper Project, rather than on all of his goals. The more balanced the tasks are at the end of the week, the more balanced goal attainment will be. The visual cue of only red tasks let us know that new emergencies were brewing.When you are setting up your Personal Kanban, ask yourself what your goals are and make sure the stickies are designed to give you feedback on what you are and what you are not completing.

Managing Sandy’s Aftermath: Emergency Response Personal Kanban

Hurricane Sandy Aftermath

Despite our best efforts, there are simply some instances where we cannot limit our work-in-progress. Forces beyond our control seem to conspire to control us. Natural disasters are unfortunately well-suited for this - they have little or no respect for our carefully controlled WIP.When we’re smack in the middle of an emergency like Hurricane Sandy, it seems all we can do is react to immediate needs: which windows to avoid crashing tree limbs, what doors to insulate against rising and rushing water, where to seek shelter should evacuation become imminent. Once the storm passes, we’re left to contend with a heretofore unimaginable trail of destruction - to our homes, to our businesses, to our mental well-being.It is at the most emotional of moments that we find ourselves forced to make vital decisions. What do I do first? Where do I begin? Will I ever get out from beneath this overwhelming physical and psychological debris?In the Personal Kanban book, we discuss a design pattern which doesn’t quite resemble a “typical” Personal Kanban. In the aftermath of an emergency, the “Emergency Response Approach” helps us:

• Visualize all the work needed to respond to the situation at hand;

• Understand the complexity of the situation;

• Track the states of completion for most important and intricate tasks;

• Compile notes during the completion of those tasks;

• Keep a written record of how we dealt with the emergency;

• Dynamically re-prioritize tasks based on shifts in need or context; and

• Understand our options.

As you can see here, we created this matrix-style kanban with the goal of seeing all our work and ensuring that when we are finished we’ve lost no information in the process. We chose to go extremely low-tech - just flipchart paper and pen - not only because an online kanban would require electricity, but also because with a sticky note-based Personal Kanban the stickies could easily become detached, causing vital information to become lost.In an emergency situation, this kanban becomes your war room.Your “value stream” - the steps it takes to complete a task - might look something like this:

Task → Begun → Assembling → Assembled → Active → Complete → Notes

Begun: If it’s been started (you’ve begun to work on the task).Assembling: If it’s being assembled (you’re gathering paperwork or other requirements).Assembled: If it’s been assembled (requirements are complete).Active: If it’s being processed (by you, or you’re waiting for someone else to act).Complete: If it’s complete.Use the Notes column for points of contact, policy numbers, additional resources etc.One of the major elements of this design pattern is its tolerance for beginning some tasks while allowing others to remain incomplete. Why would we advocate not limiting WIP when that is one of Personal Kanban’s fundamental rules?During an emergency, opportunities to begin tasks are actually valuable.Ordinarily, we want to limit our work-in-progress and complete each task before a new one begins. In this case, there are way too many complicated tasks to undertake, too many coordination points, and too many things to do.This is multitasking by necessity, but it’s controlled multitasking. With a to-do list, we’d have an accounting of the tasks, but we wouldn’t understand their state or be able to limit our WIP. The Emergency Response Approach includes includes a few helpful features that are designed to overcome the limitations of a to-do list.It works like this:

1. In the Task column, write down everything you need to do. For the moment, don’t worry what size the tasks are. Just get them out of your head and onto your kanban.

2. Look at your Taskcolumn and begin working on the highest priority task.

   1. Note that you’ve started by writing a check mark in the Assembling column.

   2. Assemble all the items you need to actually complete the task (insurance numbers, phone numbers, pictures of damage, etc)

   3. When you are done mark with a check mark that you’ve Assembled everything and can begin working on the task in earnest. This task is now Active.

   4. Once a task is Active, take notes directly on the kanban in the Notes field (it’s okay to spill out). Our goal here is after everything is done, your emergency kanban is a one-stop-shop for what happened, when it happened, and how it happened.

   5. When the task is Complete, mark it and move on.

It’s important to note:

• You’ll have many tasks in-flight at once;

• You’ll be interrupted by other tasks constantly;

• You’ll never finish them in priority order;

• There will be many more tasks than you initially expected;

• You’ll need to remember details later that don’t necessarily matter to you right now;

• You are doing heroic things right now. This tool is here to help you keep track of what happened; and

• There are things you will miss, and that’s okay.

Your goal right now is to get your life back to normal. We hope this tool helps you through this difficult time and invite you to feel free to ask questions in the comments.Image from Hurricane Sandy courtesy of Casual Capture  whom we hope is okay.