Boosting Productivity and Learning with Spikes

71878930_02a27afb1b_m

Is there something you don’t know?Almost everyday it seems we are faced with having to learn something new. Some of those things are trivial and easy to accomplish, while others are important and a more than a little daunting to master.There are some easy steps to make learning less overwhelming.On the Lean Agile Machine blog, there have been two consecutive, thought-provoking posts on Personal Kanban and productivity. One describes how to set up a Personal Kanban for research and writing production. The second describes how to set up short bursts of research and quickly evaluate the results.

SPIKE

n. A short burst of work to create a sample version of something

In agile programming, savvy developers will quickly cobble together a prototype, something merely to demonstrate the idea is feasible. Spikes make sure that assumptions about selected technologies and implementation are sound.In short, a spike is a burst of work that makes sure that further work is warranted.Learning is a great way to do this because there will always be things we do not know. Every field of study has nuances and developments that even ardent devotees can’t keep up with. So, when we suddenly need to bone up on say, deck waterproofing methods, we really don’t want to have to become a master carpenter.So, you do a Spike.You set aside 15 to 25 minutes (perhaps with your Pomodoro timer) and blast through as much research as you can. You Google, you Wikipedia, you save some links, you find some review sites. At the end of your spike, you have one of three outcomes:

1. You have learned as much as you need;

2. You have a good idea where to get information and how much longer it will take; or

3. You have learned that asking an expert is a better idea.

Now learning is easy. The spike gives you a predictable amount of time to spend to get results that tame the learning beast.(Please do read the two posts from Lean Agile Machine.)Photo by Shavar Ross

Rapture – Training Your Mind for Completion

Don’t strain your brain, paint a trainYou’ll be singing' in the rain…- Blondie

466866299_a78acb1584_m

Your brain is a muscle. As we repeat certain actions, our “muscle memory” becomes comfortable with those actions, and programs itself to anticipate them. As it trains itself to anticipate them, it optimizes for them. This is the basis of kaizen, continuous improvement. Your brain gets used to your workflow, it becomes an subconscious process, and so it looks for ways to do things better.Smoother.Faster.You get sensitized to completion. Sensitized to waste.So using Personal Kanban on a regular basis, through its visual and tactile interactions, sensitizes you to the building blocks of success.

Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember.Let me do and I understand.- Confucius

Simply put: your brain responds very well to doing. The active nature of Personal Kanban is what your brain wants. Confucius figured this out 1700 years ago.Managing your workload with static lists, while they can help you organize, doesn’t have the same brain-training impact as having a visual tool like Personal Kanban. Lists don’t involve motor skills or elements of flow.Lists merely “tell you.”Personal Kanban both shows you, and lets you do.Image by Rob Web

Save the Date! Jim Benson Featured Guest on Yi-Tan Call

374641215_6d6d72fde3

Save the date! Monday, January 4th at 10:30 PST/1:30 PM EST for the weekly 40-minute Yi-Tan Tech Community call hosted by Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn.The topic?Personal Kanban, of course!Call, listen, and chat with Jim Benson (@ourfounder on Twitter) as he discusses:

• Why we stress over the tasks we are confronted with;

• What we can learn from the nature of our work; and

• Why visualizing our work with Personal Kanban helps create the clarity necessary to keep control of our lives.

The discussion will assume the format of a conference call, allowing anyone to join the conversation (or just listen) at any point.For an invite, please sign up at  Yi-Tan here, or contact Tonianne for more information.Photo by: David

Tools Talk: Julia Child Understood the Nature of Work

IMG00348-20091227-1904

IMG00345-20091227-1901

IMG00337-20091227-1859

IMG00349-20091227-1912

While expertise, good humor, humanity, and care are words that immediately come to mind when describing Julia Child, the iconic chef personified something else - she understood the nature of her work. She recognized the role it played, the value it brought, the actions involved in creating it, and the opportunity costs in choosing certain methodologies over others.That is why we are canonizing her as our Personal Kanban saint.Yesterday I had the good fortune to spend some time at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History contemplating her kitchen.  Where Martha Stewart’s kitchen is the epitome of OCD tidiness, Julia Child’s kitchen looks as if the instruments of her craft were shaped only slightly differently than if she’d be making furniture or refitting a 1952 Studebaker.That's because Julia Child’s kitchen was her workshop.Julia Child could have had the most cutting-edge kitchen in the world, and most likely she could have had it for free. Surely any appliance company would have paid handsomely to say they custom-fit her kitchen with their latest product line.But instead she chose to used the same range for 40 years.Her arsenal of cutlery was mismatched, "unsexy" by today's standard. Her pans hung from every available surface - from walls, doors, wherever they would fit. Each knife, each pan had its place, fitting perfectly within a designated spot or outline. It wasn't a mess, but it wasn't streamlined, either.Julia Child said things like,“I am a knife freak.”and“Life itself is the proper binge.”and“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”Her demeanor and her actions seamlessly integrated her passion for food with everything else in life. She understood her work and as such, it ceased to be work.It became life.She was organized without being compulsive. She was meticulous but retained her humor. She had little to prove, but everything to share.To the right we see, unsurprisingly, Julia Child’s Wine Kanban. Every bottle, as it ages, is tracked to the point of drinking.We have pots and pans on a visual control, knives on a visual control, wine on a visual control. For Julia, her stuff didn’t just go places, it was a marker for the nature of her work. If a 6 quart sauté pan was missing from its place on the wall, it meant it was in use.Her tools told her story.Her tools represented her creation of value.The take-away here is that visual controls are always graphic markers of how we work. The more seamlessly we can integrate visual controls into how we actually work and live, the less time they take to maintain.  Especially for specific projects, where we are already focused and updating, a literal kanban may take more time than is necessary – creating elegant visual controls that stem from the actual activity can really help give the task an internal coherence and make it easier.Take a page from Julia’s cookbook and examine your work. What might your tools be saying to you?

Towards a Leaner Santa: Holiday "Do" Date-ban

Chalk it up to a decade with the nuns and my time as a Girl Scout (always be prepared!), but I obsess over details. Having my "stuff" in one bag or my proverbial ducks in a row is how I delude myself into thinking I can make sense of my universe. Still, I spend many sleepless nights worrying about that stray comma I didn't catch in time for today's deliverable, or that broken link that needs tending to before tomorrow's presentation.Yeah, I sweat the small stuff. Freud even has a word for me.Yes...that word.I however, prefer to see myself as "uber-organized."So when an aggressive December 29th client deadline threatened to Grinch my Christmas Eve and Day celebrations, I thought I had things covered. After all, my guest list is etched in stone, my menu is planned, and 90% of the gifts on my list were purchased by November.And they were wrapped.Yay, me.Then why - I asked myself - did I feel as if my combined personal and professional workflow was pulling me under?Considering the amount of vowels in my name, missing Christmas is not an option. Somehow the holiday and the client deadline had to peacefully co-exist.A quick glance at my Personal Kanban explained my anxiety. I was drowning in a maelstrom of projects that were not only contributing to my WIP but were competing with each other. With personal deadlines set for the 24th and 25th, and a client deadline set for the 29th, seasonal expectations became pressing obligations.This expectation-based WIP extended beyond normal everyday existential overhead. Emotions and expectations combined to create holiday stress. And despite the days nearing closer and closer to the 25th, those holiday task cards piling up were barely making it out of my backlog.Sure, I had those tasks on my Personal Kanban. But things got messy. How could I limit my WIP with tasks sharing deadlines and very few hours to complete them?With less than a week to go, I needed a dedicated board to track the particular workflow for tasks that "came due" on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I need a way to schedule out this process, visualize my progress at every step, and ensure even the tiniest subtask was not overlooked. Because who wants to have to improvise on Christmas morning with a ___ and a ___ because they forgot to do ___? Not me.On the shortest day of the year, my biggest enemy was time. I had a Christmas mission, and so I needed a (very) special "Do" Date-ban.With just the fridge, magnetic hooks, and some holiday note cards, I am now set for the next 3 days. I grouped tasks by their Type (Snowflake/Shopping, Tree/Preparation, Stocking/Cooking) and their Do/Due Date (the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th respectively). The Do/Due dates became my WIP. That let me easily batch projects such as make up guest bedroom, bake struffoli, and brave the line at the post office.So with each day leading up to Christmas Eve, I've given myself a WIP of 3 things for each day - 3 tasks of immediate "value," with itemized subtasks listed inside. Each morning I take the 3 cards off the fridge which correspond with that date, and that's my WIP.Being able to boil down a seemingly insurmountable number of tasks to 3 cards per day tames an otherwise overwhelming task load, and allows me to enjoy the holiday rather than sweat the small stuff.