DONE COLUMN: How Does Your Work Make You Feel?

Done Column

When we work, we spend our most precious resources: our time, our energy, and our emotion. Each task we complete takes a little bit of us and we’d like to think that time was not only productive, but impactful.But we are so busy, so distracted, so overwhelmed that we finish one task and move right on to the next. The treadmill. The rat race.All too often, we bring this home with us. Home tasks become just more in the endless stream of numbing work.With your Personal Kanban, you can work your way out of this by asking a few simple questions:

• What work makes me happy?

• What work does not?

By simply augmenting your DONE column with three or more simple sections that note what tasks you enjoyed, which were merely okay, and which were upsetting. You can add more gradations (we’ve seen ones with mushroom cloud columns).

Make explicit what you enjoy and what you do not. Then you can create strategies to even your work out. Enhance work that energizes you - that’s the work that gives you the energy (and the hope!) to get through the harder stuff.

Is Your Project in Limbo?

Limbo is completion out of reach

What happens when we start a project and it is honestly overtaken by events?We start a project in good faith and then, because context changes, we have to set it aside. It’s work-in-progress, so what do we do? The project isn’t done, we will likely come back to it, but it could be weeks or even months before we touch it again.These projects Limbo projects - we are unclear when they will start again, we only know that we’ve started them and that they are no longer our priority.  We are moving the project from being active to being just another option that may or may not be exercised in the future.Some people who are, shall we say, really into their Personal Kanban will lose sleep over this. But one word of (hopefully) enlightenment - Personal Kanban is more about understanding our work than it is getting specific things done.So, we now understand that we have a project that is either in Limbo or getting close to Limbo.Ask a few key questions as soon as possible and with as many people involved with the project as possible:

1. Limbo Really? Is the project really in Limbo or are we simply being distracted by something else? (Make hard, but informed choices when interrupting a project).

2. Quick Payoff? Can the Limbo project be focused on and quickly completed? (Even if you greatly reduce the scope of the project, can you quickly realize some benefit from the work done thus far?)

3. Future Knowledge? If you are putting this on hold, what will you need to know in the future when you start up again? Write a note to your future self about the state of the work, why it is that way, and the location of any half-completed work.

4. How Could This Happen to Me? Be very critical of why this project was allowed to start, only to be abandoned. Abandoning a project is very expensive and very wasteful. Figure out why this happened and take steps to avoid it in the future. Limbos cost money.

Again, Limbos are going to happen. They happen to everyone. Since our contexts and priorities change, it would be foolish to expect that every project we start on will be completed. The goal here is to use the Personal Kanban to understand our work, recognize when a project is in Limbo, and to act responsibly.Seattle, WAPretty Awesome Image: http://ichigopaul23.deviantart.com/art/My-Limbo-Wallpaper-364369944

You Are a Role Model

fortune

At some point, maybe at many points, it strikes me that we are all role models. We all influence each other. We are a network of emotions and actions.

When we do something, positive or negative. Kind, indifferent, or cruel. Self-centered or altruistic. Other people notice. Other people react.

This is systems thinking in the social sphere. Social media is a social system. We have seen how they can be built, enjoyed, and exploited. Work, home, friends are also social systems.

I’m not going to go into any false spiritual spiral with this, I’m just going to note that there are systems in which we operate. Personal, political, economic. At home and at work. And how we act, how we present ourselves, how we interact with others - makes a hell of a difference.

In the 90s, before New York City became mysteriously friendlier, I woke up one morning in Tribeca. I went for a walk with my friend Brian. We went into a shop to get some coffee. Brian was animated and talkative, but when the person came to get his order the exchange went like this:

Person (aggressively staring at Brian): What d’you want?

Brian: (looking away, like the other person isn’t there): Coffee.

He gets Brian his coffee.

Person: Here.

Brian: <no response, grabs coffee>

Person to me same thing: What d’you want?

Me: (Looking back at him, smiling) I’d also like a coffee, please.

Person stares at me a second, trying to figure out if I’m for real.

Goes to get coffee.

Comes back and hands it to me.

Me: Thank you.

Person walks away.  Stares at me.

Brings me a muffin.

Person: ... You have a nice day, okay?

Me: Really?

Person: Really. <Person then smiles back>

My friend Brian was one of the nicest people on earth. But in the 90s New York system, he was expected to act a certain way. On my part, I didn’t do anything hokey or over-the-top, I was just not unpleasant.

Brian said, “I’ve never seen that guy be nice to anyone.” I was a role model, just by being human. It doesn’t take much.

When we get overworked, we get stressed. When we get stressed, we get unpleasant. When we’re unpleasant, we behave unpleasantly. We we do that, we spread it around.

So, I’m not saying “be nice all the time.” What I’m saying here is that if we build our systems to avoid overwork (likely one of the largest sources of stress we have), we are improving other systems we engage in because we will be better actors in those systems.

So recognize that you are a role model. You are an active part of many social systems.

Blogged on the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas

Two Goals Quickly Visualized

I realized that I had fallen off the writing wagon. I had become a non-writer.

Two Goals Quickly Visualized

That was really bothering me.I sat down several times to write blog posts and wrote portions of them or huge rambling missives that went nowhere.Soon it became clear that I needed a goal and to visualize it. It was pretty simple really. It looks like this I wanted to make sure that I wrote blog posts and participated on Twitter. So I made a quick (ugly) chart over my done column on the board by my desk. It has the days of this week with two swim lanes - one for blogging and one for entering 3 tweets per day  into Social Flow.I then mark down how I felt about them when I was done. Overall, it was pretty good. No home runs there, but it was okay. (I’d make a big mouthed smiley for one I was really happy with).What I’m doing here is quickly visualizing, rewarding, and evaluating a goal. Since they’re daily tasks, moving the stickies would be redundant and perhaps even annoying. But setting up a rapid feedback system helps immensely. 

Finishing Feels Good

Yes, finishing feels good. When we complete tasks, we feel better than when we have a pile of incompletes just lying around. Incompletion creeps up on us, overloads us, and crushes us. The more we fail to complete our work or realize our goals, the more susceptible we are to hopelessness, doubt, and fear.

So ... completion would seem to be a pretty clear winner. So, why don’t we complete? Because we have competition for our attention. E-mail, Facebook, conversations with colleagues, and the other 25 tasks we are working on simultaneously are constantly competing for our focus. (Even now, I looked up, my Facebook browser tab says there are 2 replies there. I started to move my cursor up to check on them and said, .... hey, you’re writing a blog post! Get that cursor back down there...)

Neuroscience has found that when we finish tasks, we get a dopamine rush. We actually do feel better. However, interruptions trick the brain. They can be like instant gratification that gives us little dopamine rushes. We find ourselves incurring more and more distractions that, like any indulgence, feel good at the time and leave us feeling empty later on.

The tricky bit here is we no longer have space as individuals to concentrate. Whether we are at the office or at home, our focus is impaired by these constant interruptions. We cannot focus and complete. This costs us, our companies, and our families every second of every day.In order to complete, we need some help. We need something to ground us, something to focus us, and something to propel us.

Once we have these elements, projects at work become easier, communication becomes smoother, and motivation is easily found. The key here is not to have that help seem like the solution. The help here is to find our own ways of working.

We have discovered though, that a few simple tools have helped people and organizations craft their own ways of working.

Tool 1: Visualize Your Work - Creating a Personal Kanban immediately lets you and your colleagues know what you are doing now, what you have done, and what is coming up next. That grounds your work in a tangible system that constantly reminds you of what needs to be completed.

Tool 2: Limiting Work-in-Process - Our distractions create work overloads. We take on too much work and then have to manage all those tasks in-flight. Limiting our active tasks as individuals or as work teams is vital for completion.

Tool 3: An Eye for Improvement - In order to really improve how we work, we need to actually understand what improvement looks like and how to achieve it. In Lean, this is called “Kaizen” (Continuous small positive changes).We don’t want improvement like “Starting tomorrow I will do everything exactly right,” because large unrealistic change is unrealistic. Learning, however, to take on small improvements makes all the difference.

Potent Combination

Our goal here is to understand our work, do just enough to get quality work completed, and always be looking for ways to make work better / more enjoyable / etc.

Learning More ....

Reading: Doing a search on the Personal Kanban site for “Visualize Work”, “Limit WIP”, and “Improvement” will give you some food for thought.Workshops: In March of 2014, I’m going to be teaching a few workshops on exactly this combination with Kaizen expert Mark Graban in Phoenix (Mar 10) and San Antonio (Mar 12).  We did one class in Seattle last year that went so well that this year we’re doing two!Conversation: We’ll be hosting a 2 day conversation on this February 19 / 20in Seattle called Kaizen Camp.