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.

Capacity: It's a Matter of Content...and Context

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Envision This:You're heading to a cabin in the mountains for a week-long getaway with your family. Your car is in the shop so you schedule a rental to be delivered.In addition to six bags of groceries, a box of pots/pans/utensils, and a cooler full of water, your four children each pack a suitcase; your wife packs three, your mom and dad who are visiting pack two. They then proceed to set their luggage along the curb.Your two daughters ask if they could each take their best friend, bringing your passenger count to ten, and luggage count to eleven.The weather forecast for the next few days predicts lots of sun. So you tell the kids to grab their bikes, and stand them next to the luggage. You then head into the garage to pull out the bike rack.Conditions on the lake are likewise supposed to be ideal and so you ready up your single axle trailer with your 28 foot sailboat.You’re kneeling on the sidewalk next to the curb, tightening a bolt in the boat hitch when a clap of thunder followed by a flash of lightening pierces the unexpectedly darkening sky. Just then the rental car pulls up. Still eye-level to the wheels, and through the initial drops of a soon to be teeming rain, the first thing you notice is that the air pressure on the back two tires is low.It isn’t until you stand up that you notice the second thing: the car they delivered...is a Miata.To recap:6 bags of groceries1 box of cooking paraphernalia1 cooler of water10 people11 suitcases6 bikes1 boat1 2-seat RoadsterWithout having visualized your capacity first, how could you possibly have known how much would fit in the car?Keep in mind the overload here isn’t simply attributed to people, provisions, and luggage. A host of other factors would further diminish the car’s capacity including the wind resistance created by the bike rack, the added weight of the boat trailer, decreased visibility and traction during the four hour ascent up the mountain during a storm, and lower fuel efficiency due to the decreased tire pressure.

Capacity - it’s not only impacted by content, but by context.

It’s the same with information. Despite the persistent, insidious, and scientifically proven to be counterproductive practice of expecting knowledge workers to multitask, people - like automobiles - are not unconstrained resources. When it comes to processing cognitively complex tasks, our brain has finite processing capacity.Especially when it comes to knowledge work, understanding capacity as well as the potential for variation is paramount. Much in the way the car above would be impacted by external conditions, the brain’s bandwidth is likewise impacted by its context. Physical illness, emotional stress, hunger, and fear of threats real or imagined likewise impact cognitive capacity, compromising performance and quality.Visualizing your work and limiting your work in progress on a Personal Kanban allows you to not only to see, understand, and communicate your capacity to others, but it likewise prevents against taking on more work than you can handle. And when contextual factors are at play, such as mood, health, energy level, task difficulty etc., Personal Kanban helps you respond to that variation, allowing you to adjust your capacity by dropping your WIP limit accordingly.

For more on how Personal Kanban can help you visualize, understand, and improve your capacity while giving you the agility to respond to variation, 

register for our FREE webina

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Clarity > Coffee

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Okay. So I recognize the title of this post might stir up some controversy, especially among my fellow coffee enthusiasts. Not to mention it undoubtedly puts me at risk of getting exiled from my beloved adopted home, Seattle. And yes, perhaps it even seems a tad hypocritical how I'm writing this while enjoying a double shot at my local overpriced third wave roastery.But I digress...First off, I am in no way suggesting you - or we - instead consume thimbles of “energizing” wheatgrass rather than continue our relationship with our BFF, Joe. Let’s be honest, Joe energizes us, he makes us alert. He leaves us happy. Sure, these effects can be fleeting, the result of the temporary dopamine response - “the motivation molecule” - caffeine triggers in our brain. This causes us to build up our tolerance and increase our dependence on Joe’s services more often than we might take notice of. And when we try to fight our need for Joe, his absence leaves us tired, and cranky, impairing our focus, our memory, our ability to plan, our processing speed, and our decision-making capabilities. All that notwithstanding, Joe’s often the first one we call on to boost our mental acuity and usher us through our midday slump.Now I respect the power of confirmation bias enough to know that at this point, I could take this post in one of two directions. There’s a surfeit of scientific research out there that supports the link between coffee and productivity and conversely, enough to suggest it wrecks havoc on our teeth, bones, liver...in addition to our productivity.Neither of those are where I am going with this.My issue is with reliance on coffee as a first responder - for motivation, for making us less anxious, for combatting the brain fog so many of us knowledge workers experience. In those cases where our mental performance needs a boost, the dopamine release we chase through the caffeine in our coffee is little more than a quick fix. The short bursts of energy we experience simply aren’t sustainable, and so we’re forced to reach for yet another double- or triple-shot to maintain its effects. When we do, the resulting adrenaline rush proves counterproductive, leading to more irritability, more stress and ultimately, we crash.That’s the thing about Joe: he’s temporary. Joe has commitment issues. And while he breeds dependency he’s simply not in it for the duration.Clarity? Now clarity is in it for the long haul. You want to tame anxiety, elevate your mood, achieve focus at a sustainable pace while creating good work habits in the process?

Clarity’s your huckleberry.That’s because the brain hates ambiguity. In fact, it LOATHES it. Two of the brain’s primary functions are to reduce risk and optimize rewards. It satisfies the second need with coffee. It satisfies both with, well, care to venture a guess?You got it. With clarity.We fear what we can’t see, what we don’t understand. By their very nature knowledge workers - creating “products” that often have no tangible steps, no physical output - operate in a world of ambiguity. And we know how the brain feels about that. The brain wants assurances. It wants to know upfront what output it can expect from an input and so it wants to be certain it’s equipped with all the (pre-existing) knowledge it needs to address any situation. When it has too little information to go on, when it encounters the unfamiliar and perceives it as a threat (whether real or imagined), its fight or flight mechanism is engaged and anxiety results.Enter clarity.Studies show anxiety diminishes and success rates soar when abstract goals - the very nature of knowledge work - are clarified, when they are transformed into concrete and attainable steps. Such is the case when we visualize work on a Personal Kanban. Especially for knowledge workers, getting all those amorphous tasks out of your head and easily visualized on a board demystifies your priorities, your tradeoffs, and makes work manageable. Evolutionary biology teaches us that having processed images long before it did text or language, the brain deciphers images tens of thousands of times faster than it does text. Not only does externalizing goals by mapping them out on a kanban increase the likelihood of achieving them, visualizing progress big or small results in a rewarding boost of dopamine.As we see with our reaction to coffee, we then chase that dopamine release. We adjust our behavior to trigger a consistent flow of it by perpetuating the very action that makes us happy. Clarity and the completion it fosters gives us the focus, and the motivation to continue this virtuous work cycle.So the next time your brain needs a boost, consider getting your dopamine-fix from your board...not your barista.For more on how visualizing your work (and limiting your WIP!) with Personal Kanban can improve your clarity and ultimately, your effectiveness, register for our FREE webinar.

Five Years of Personal Kanban | Travel, Exploration, and Learning

It's been 5 wonderful years since Tonianne and I released the Personal Kanban book.The people we've met, the problems we've helped solve, the boards we've seen have been amazing. Every problem we've seen has had unique bits and predictable bits. What's been fun is learning what are those really predictable parts, what parts seem predictable, and what is novel.We've learned a lot since we started Modus Cooperandi and since we launched the book. Why we make certain decisions, why we focus on some things and not others, why we are so easily distracted, what systems actually help us create quality work and finish.This year we've launched a new webinar series and an online Personal Kanban class that extends what was in the book.  Why an online class and not another book? Because we've found that human contact and short bursts of information mean a lot when adults are learning.We hope to see you there and thank you for five years of Personal Kanban awesome!

Personal Kanban & Some Goodies About Your Brain

Simple Personal Kanban

Sharing some thoughts around my weekly homework from my neuroscience studies

Knowledge work is all about attention. Unfortunately that is a scarce resource, easily high jacked by any distraction. Multitasking, i.e. using focused attention on two different targets basically does not exist. What you are able to do is to do a lot of things on autopilot (i.e. walking, breathing, looking) while your executive network (incl. working memory) is doing something else (i.e. discussing). When you think you are multitasking you are actually attention switching, with a high cost in performance. For this you will allocate attention toward or away from interference, maintain relevant memory in mind, and reactivate representations if the maintenance of what you are doing is disrupted (Clapp et al, 2010). So when you are working with a need for cognitive logical thinking, minimizing any distractions is a great preventive method.Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while not overloading the team members. The core mechanisms in Kanban is to start where you are at, work in an evolutionary and incremental way to develop the system, limit the work in progress, and finish one thing before starting another. (Wikipedia, Kanban, 29.10.2014).While Kanban is used on a team/organizational level and longer time spans, the same logic applies on personal level and short time spans, too. From a neuroscience perspective, Kanban is too interesting to fit in a 300 words homework.

A couple of Kanban-insights from the neuroscience perspective

• Limiting the number of similar things you work on will lessen the cost of attention switching and thus positively impact performance on the task at hand. (a no brainer) (Clapp et al, 2010).

• Focused attention means you are using your long-term learning mechanisms (Medial temporal areas) to encode the experience. This makes the knowledge accessible by conscious thought later on (vs. using striatal habit learning, creating more unconscious and automatic learning). (Forde et al, 2006)

• A “healthy” backlog is genius from a neuroscience perspective. Attending to an issue (backlog item) then leaving it with the knowledge of that you will return to it, seems to activate your unconscious processing. So while you are consciously focused on your work in progress (WIP), your unconscious works on items, which you know you will attend to later. (Backlog) (Ritter & Dijksterhuis, 2014)

Kanban definitely requires more in-depth analyzing from the neuroscience perspective. My hunch is that Kanban fits many of our biological & neuronal requirements, so I will definitely be dissecting Kanban some more in my studies.Where’s the scalpel?/Riina

References

1. Clapp, W.C, Rubens, M.T., Gazzaley A. ,(2010),  Mechanisms of Working Memory Disruption by External Interference, Cerebral Cortex, April, 20:859-872

2. Foerde, K. , Knowlton, B. J., Poldrack, R.A.(2006), Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction. PNAS, August 1, 2006, vol. 103, 31, p 11778-11783.

3. Ritter, S.M., DIjksterhuis, A., (2014), Creativity – the unconscious foundations of the incubation period, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, April, Vol 8:215, p.1-10.

Picture: Photo credit: o.tacke / Foter / CC BY