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Last month, I had the good fortune to be on Joe Dager's Business 901 Podcast. The topic, of course, was Personal Kanban.Joe edited the conversation into two parts which can be found below:Part 1
Part 2
Announcing the Launch of iKan, the Personal Kanban iPhone App
You asked for it, and we listened. Today we are proud to announce the launch of the first Personal Kanban iPhone app, iKan.When we set out to build it, we decided to focus on a few key things:1. Small Screen Many Tasks - We wanted to make the best use of the screen real estate on the iPhone, so we built the app vertically.2. KISS - We wanted the initial release to be extremely basic. In future updates we will respond to YOUR needs, and additional features will be based on YOUR input. So please keep us posted as to the direction you'd like to see iKan take. We already have a long list of upgrades in our pipeline, but are primarily interested in how you are actually using the app.3. Use Your Data - In the first version, we have had importation from Zen. (Zen, unfortunately, never let you write data back from the API. In one of their updates, the import also ceased to function.).4. Start with Basics then Build to Suit - Each iKan starts with an entry-level Personal Kanban value stream with Ready / Doing / Done sections. You can however, create your own column headings and set your own WIP limits.In the coming weeks, we'll have a series of short tutorial videos for iKan - so stay tuned!Special thanks to Jeremy Lightsmith, Gary Bernhardt and Corey Ladas who were all vital in making iKan a reality.Get your copy of iKan at the iTunes Store.NOTE: If you want to help create an Android app, talk to us!
Work / Life Balance
I've been surprised lately by the number of people asking me about work/life balance. We feel we are undervaluing our family ties, our personal goals, our community involvement, our hobbies and our art. Oftentimes our work makes us feel isolated - we feel alone and seek meaning in our lives. Amusingly, we feel like we've invented this feeling.When people tell me that their generation is somehow unique in this feeling, I ask them to talk to their parents and their grandparents. Soon they discover it is merely a myth that takes just a few minutes to dispel. When your parents laugh at your hubris for an hour or so, it's quite a gut-check.Nonetheless, we can posit that we've managed to give ourselves a lot more controllable distractions than were there before. We just don't control them very well.So for this third post on Task Types, we'll do some work/life balance tasks and, like we did with work tasks, we'll establish some rules around them. Again, let's use colors.Let's say that purple represents family time. Use purple stickies and note real family time - not that trip to Costco but rather, those things that your kids will look back on and remember with a smile.Next, let's have blue represent those things that need to be done for the family. These are tasks like, "Fix the leak in the downstairs bathroom" or "Mow the Lawn."Finally, let's use green for aspirations. These are tasks like "Read the complete works of Vonnegut" or "Learn Personal Kanban" or "Get CPR Certificate."Sound good? Great! So what happens next?These colored tasks can appear on your Personal Kanban as task types. You can then set up your balance - literally. Every day you can pull one purple. Every week you can pull two blue and two green. And in your DONE column, you can see where you are with your goals.Work/life balance now has a shape and a color palette.Having said this, I consider my work and my life as indiscrete parts of a continuum. I love what I'm doing at Modus and the people I'm doing it with. So for me, the balance comes from not becoming so enamored with Modus work that I forsake all other activities. And, yes, I do need to work on this.But, I will venture a guess that if you actively dislike what you do professionally, work/life balance will be unapproachable. You simply cannot dislike that much of your life and expect to achieve a healthy balance.Photo by Robotography
Inventory Makes Work
Lean talks a lot about inventory. A major tenet of Lean is to reduce inventory. Companies that stock up on too much stuff have to maintain that stuff, manage it, and then deal with it when it is no longer useful. This is why companies end up having huge sales at the end of the year - they've amassed warehouses of stock (or their suppliers have) and now that merchandise needs to be sold fast.
Inventory lowers organizational effectiveness because the time and money spent taking care of the inventory could have been spent making the company more successful. Therefore, Lean organizations tend to receive the things they need to operate at the last responsible moment, this is called "Just in Time" (JIT). A JIT organization does not take on inventory until the moment they need it and therefore spends as little as possible maintaining inventory, greatly reducing the risk of having overstock.But inventory isn't just "stuff." Inventory for us as individuals includes anything we have that requires maintenance or on-going attention. We have responsibilities, they aren't going away. We will have a yard, it will need to be mowed. Dishes need to be washed. Children need to be raised.Other inventory comes in the form of stress. Stress, I would argue, is inventory. Your brain is like a factory, you take in information, you create value. Stress slows your factory down.I've written about "Existential Overhead." Stress is a big part of that overhead and it is totally inventory. The question is, how much of our stress do we manufacture ourselves? Certainly there is stress that comes from outside our control. Illness in the family, natural disasters, economic crises - we can't do much to stave these off.There's other overhead we create for ourselves. Lean teaches us to save action until the last responsible minute, but procrastination teaches us to ignore action until someone yells at us. Procrastination is not responsible. The more you procrastinate, the more you know someone is going to yell at you. So, even when you are doing something else, you are fretting about what you aren't doing and that lowers your productivity.Focus for you as an individual comes from an understanding of what you are doing and why. Existential Overhead, inventory, stress all combine to make you question what you are doing and why. That muddies your understanding, you lose focus, and your effectiveness decreases.The biggest problem here: if you stress about things that can be relieved, when big problems come along, your capacity to absorb that extra stress is reduced. And if the new big problem is too big, you lose your cookies. But all we needed to do to keep our cool and rise to the occasion was some work up-front to relieve those previous stressers.I invite you to look at what is going on in your life, identify stressers and other inventory that you
know
routinely keep you awake at night, and start to figure out ways to mitigate them or even remove them from your life. Especially look for stress you are manufacturing yourself.