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Urgent and Important: Incorporating your existing tools into Personal Kanban
We’ve devised Personal Kanban to adapt to any system you might currently use (unless of course your preferred system is utter chaos). The only two rules are visualize your work and limit work-in-progress (WIP). PK's main goal is to get you to write things down and begin to watch how and what you complete.Last week, Eva Schiffer of Net-Map wrote me and said:
I have just erased my to do list and transformed it in something kanban-like. My own to do list format, that always worked well for me, had 4 categories:Important and urgentImportant, less urgentLess important, urgentLess important, less urgent.That helps me a lot because I normally love the less important, less urgent tasks, and while they often lead to really interesting creative outcomes, it is important for me to keep procrastination at bay and make sure that I don't just impress myself with the number of tasks performed, but also do those things that are most urgent and/or important.
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Major Tom's Backlog
This got me thinking about the relationship between productivity and effectiveness. Eva recognized that simply increasing her throughput was not enough, that was mere mindless productivity.What Eva was searching for was effectiveness.At Modus, we do dynamic prioritization using a priority filter that looks like this:For Tonianne and myself, this works wonders. We constantly have a short list of items that need doing, and as they move from 3 to 2 to 1 they become more important. However, prioritization is a contextual exercise that varies from moment to moment. As we can see here, “Eat all the chicken on earth” is Priority 2, but that could suddenly change to Priority 1 if suddenly I were in a place where all the chicken on earth was accessible.Eva, like many organized people, uses a matrix to ascribe values of urgency and importance, which results in something like this:In the case of Major Tom, he has been sent into space to find out what’s there. He’s a celebrity and everyone is watching him. There are a variety of things he could be doing up there, but he has a a backlog that varies between levels of urgency and importance.So for example, the papers want to know whose shirts he wears. That’s important both to his individual fame and to the space program in general because after all, it’s being good to the press. But at the moment, he’s in space so he can get to that later.If the press scores an interview while he’s up there, though, it can become relevant and therefore is something to complete.So we reach Major Tom here in the middle of his work day. He’s already managed to tell his wife he loves her very much, and he's stepped outside the capsule. He’s put his previously active conversation with ground control on hold because at the moment, he's working on other things. And he’s now floating in a most peculiar way (and noticing how different the stars look).Major Tom is still limiting his WIP and he’s still visualizing, even if his backlog is drawn as a matrix rather than columns. The matrix is a familiar organizational tool for him, and it should be preserved. (Although he probably should have checked his instruments.)So Eva’s concern is very real - we stand a real risk of becoming mindless production units, grinding tasks out at hyper-speed without assessing their value. The key with Personal Kanban is to assess the value of what you are doing – however it is that you define value.We’re all individuals – quality, value and growth are different for us all.Not only that but quality, value and growth are also contextual. Today, home repair might be very low on your list. After a tornado, however, it's probably going to be pretty high. Did you put it there? No. Life did. Context shifted. For that reason, just-in-time dynamic re-prioritization is key for workload management.So be like Eva. Find the way you define your work - visualize it, and thoughtfully examine how you can best be effective.
