For those of us who might be sitting in a world of clutter, where a million small tasks have become one daunting one - I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START! - the only way out of that jungle is through.Since every journey begins with a single step - we can only begin by simply beginning. But that first step is usually the hardest.Homes are especially plagued by little tasks that never seem to get done. They mount up and all seem to be equally important or equally unimportant. Prioritization is difficult, and procrastination ensues.So, I propose the over-all New Year’s Resolution - This year, each month my house will be a little better.To do this, you can create a Personal Kanban for this specific purpose - or a swimlane on your existing board. They would look something like this:The steps here:1. Come up with 12 small, but noticeable projects2. Start with the smallest one3. Do one a month.That really wasn’t too difficult, was it?You’ll find, as I have, that keeping a board like this compels you (in a good way) to want to do many more than 12 of these small projects.Two things are important here:First, start small and stay small. Make incremental improvements that you and others can see. Don’t rebuild the house or put in new floors right away. Again, like in the last post, we are forming habits here. For Gary, the first task he’s taking on is finishing one that has been sitting uncompleted. Before making it a set of tasks - it was part of that daunting sea of blue tickets. Now, that project is alone. It’s manageable. And better yet, the cards are atomic - meaning each car is actionable on its own and in relative short time. If Gary is sitting at his desk in his home office working and wants to take a short break - he can go line up the cans of paint, judge how old they are and what’s needed and move the card. Having moved that one card, he’s now one step closer to getting that bit of existential overhead removed from his life forever.Second, keep that Personal Kanban visible! If you can’t see the Personal Kanban, it can’t remind you and it can’t reward you. If Gary doesn’t see that list of projects he won’t feel any more compelled to complete them than he did before the board. And if he completes tasks he can see that there is progress and will be more likely to continue that progress.We humans are very good at procrastinating - use the board to undermine this natural behavior and get the work done. Completed projects mean a prettier home and a better life. (And yes, relaxing can also be a goal on the kanban - it’s not about work, it’s about life.)
The Kaizen Resolution
If you are a typical New Year’s resolver, you’ve just taken on a large, daunting, personal transformation project. You want to lose weight or be nicer or play for the Celtics. Good for you!But if you are also typical you (a) haven’t been too successful at this resolution in the past and have recycled it (b) have good intentions but no plan and (c) are doing this entirely alone.We mentioned my 10,000 steps rule. I have lost track of it after a few years of doing really well, some years of going pretty good, and lately a few years of saying “Oh today I actually did it”. During the years I did really well, I was using an on-line tool called Walker Tracker and, together with my friends like Ed Vielmetti and Prentiss Riddle I walked the equivalent of Seattle to Phoenix by way of San Diego.When we all drifted away from the tool, I lost the community and, therefore, focus.This year, I am resolving the more amorphous “be healthier.” This involves three things: eat better, exercise more, and see friends. These are also amorphous. I cannot treat these like projects, but I can treat them as the focus of my Kaizen events. None of these things require undue coordination, but they do require focus.What is Kaizen? Kaizen, in its essence, is continuous improvement. It is an internal drive to constantly be making things better. I want to do okay this week, a little better next week, a little better the week after that.What I don’t want is to over-commit to something far outside my routine. Business does this all the time. They call it a “re-org” - meaning they are radically reorganizing the processes, structure, and culture of the company. They usually fail.Why? Because they’ve done so much change at once they shocked the system. In 1998, after a decade of being a vegetarian, I decided to start eating meat again. How did I do this? Well, I ate half a chicken. It was delicious. It nearly destroyed me - rather than introducing small amounts of meat into my system, I shocked it with a large amount of change it literally could not digest.Don’t do that.With Kaizen we want to make small incremental changes. In this case, we want to pick up new habits that benefit our New Year’s goals. For this, we can use our Personal Kanban. Let’s say that for these habits, we do two things:1. Remind ourselves of the habits2. Invent small, obtainable projects to get you there.So, we have a habits swim lane. Note that we’ve identified a bunch of habits we’d like to achieve this year in the ready column, but right now we’re just working on a few. While those blue habits are “in progress”, we have blue actions in our working kanban.So we see that we have in our swimlane “exercise more”. (Fitting that it’s in a swim lane). So here’s where life gets interesting. Our first task is to find an exercise buddy - someone with whom we can create some social pressure and some support to actually do this exercising. We find Jill, who's totally ready to exercise - but we find that she’s into hot yoga and not treadmills at the gym.After some discussion, we agree to go with her to hot yoga.If you had pre-decided that the only way for you to lose weight was with treadmills at the gym, you would have bought a lot of new clothes and shoes and a gym membership. Now, you are looking at the best yoga studio. You had patience, and looked for the best options.Remember, your New Year’s Resolution is a goal. It is an end state you would like to achieve. There are many paths to your end-state. If you over-commit to one particular path, you greatly reduce your chances of success. Flexibility - especially in something as fuzzy as a New Year’s Resolution - is vital.Set yourself up for success. Build habits naturally. Don’t force change, but embrace it.
Two Personal Kanban Resolution Ideas
Happy 2013!Most people I know don’t even make New Year’s Resolutions anymore, and when they do - they are perfunctory and amorphous. I will lose weight, I will exercise more, I will grow wings and fly like a bat.But these are all as unlikely as they are amorphous, and they are unlikely because they are amorphous. I, for example, have had a long standing goal to walk 10,000 steps. This can sometimes (or quite often) be a challenge in Seattle when it’s often drizzly and cold. In July, I crush my goal! But I can’t have a yearly goal in one month.When we make resolutions that are difficult to achieve, we do really well at them for a while and then something happens - the weather changes or we get sick or we go on a trip. That breaks the flow of the resolution and we stop doing it. We try to do it from time to time, but that’s not quite the same.I’ve seen people be very successful at small New Year’s Resolutions like “this year I will clean the garage” because these resolutions are easy to grasp, schedule for, and complete.We can only complete our New Year’s goals if they are (a) a small project that we can focus on and complete or (b) a new habit we can intelligently weave into our daily lives. So here at Personal Kanban we have two recommendations we’ll talk about today, one is the Kaizen Resolution, the other is Small New Years Projects.And if you are wondering, I waited until after the first to write this because I figured that about now people would be like ... well, I made the resolution .. now what?
The Pen: Managing Stalled Tasks
This question is from an interview I just did with an internal magazine with ExileSoft, a Sri Lankan company. The question has been haunting me, though, so I’m extending my reply in this post.
Thushara’s question:
“I started to practice Personal Kanban. But I got stuck at some point. I ended up having too many tasks in the “Pen” which never moved. (This interview was a good example. It was there over 9 months). What should I do?”
Answer:
When we first created THE PEN to allow us to sequester tasks delayed by forces beyond our control, we realized that it ran the risk of becoming a sinkhole - a place where work would fall never to be seen again.Here we see a kanban with a THE PEN column. The ticket in there says “Schedule Plumber”. If we didn’t have a column like THE PEN our DOING column would quickly become mired in work that wasn’t complete - but we could not work on.So THE PEN is necessary in Personal Kanban, but, as Thushara has found, it doesn’t stay looking nice and neat like this for long. It fills up with every promise someone has ever made to us and we’re left with the visual record of eternal repeating disappointment.Okay, maybe it’s not that bad.But, for us, half exercised options (which is what a half-done task is) are unacceptable. So, we have a few rules of thumb:MAKE THEM ACTIONABLE: Items in THE PEN should either be obviously waiting on work by others and have born on and revisit dates. When you move something to THE PEN, note when it went in, why it is there, and when you should revisit it.FINISH BEFORE START: Always look at your Pen before your pull a new task. Clean your house before you buy new things.WIP LIMITS: Set limits on the Pen – both for age and for number of tasks. When you reach a limit, you need to place concerted effort in getting rid of those tickets.ASK WHY: If you see tasks backing up ask yourself “Why are these in THE PEN?” Because, you know what? If you didn’t have the Personal Kanban … it would still be stuck. You’d just forget about it over time. So, is it in the pen because it isn’t relevant anymore? Is it there because a project didn’t get finished?ACT:You need to act on those tickets. You can do one of the following:
Nothing – If you are honestly waiting on someone and there is nothing you can do, then leave it in THE PEN.
Refresh – Contact the people on the card(s) and remind them that you are waiting
Escalate – If there is an escalation path (someone to involve of higher rank to increase the urgency of the task for others) bring them in. If there is not, contact the people who are holding up the work and make the ticket’s value for you very clear to them.
Push – You have a pull system but others do not. If a card is stuck simply because others are procrastinating or don’t care – take the card to them and work it off your board.
Recategorize – If this task is not waiting for a person to do something, but for an event to happen (like a trade show or a deliverable deadline) that is forseeable and in the future, declare this task done and make a new ticket for follow up at that later date which can go in your backlog.
Kill it – If the option value for this task has expired or the coordination costs are too high, you can decide that ticket is done and contact the people letting them know you’ve had to kill it.
Managing Sandy’s Aftermath: Emergency Response Personal Kanban
Despite our best efforts, there are simply some instances where we cannot limit our work-in-progress. Forces beyond our control seem to conspire to control us. Natural disasters are unfortunately well-suited for this - they have little or no respect for our carefully controlled WIP.When we’re smack in the middle of an emergency like Hurricane Sandy, it seems all we can do is react to immediate needs: which windows to avoid crashing tree limbs, what doors to insulate against rising and rushing water, where to seek shelter should evacuation become imminent. Once the storm passes, we’re left to contend with a heretofore unimaginable trail of destruction - to our homes, to our businesses, to our mental well-being.It is at the most emotional of moments that we find ourselves forced to make vital decisions. What do I do first? Where do I begin? Will I ever get out from beneath this overwhelming physical and psychological debris?In the Personal Kanban book, we discuss a design pattern which doesn’t quite resemble a “typical” Personal Kanban. In the aftermath of an emergency, the “Emergency Response Approach” helps us:
Visualize all the work needed to respond to the situation at hand;
Understand the complexity of the situation;
Track the states of completion for most important and intricate tasks;
Compile notes during the completion of those tasks;
Keep a written record of how we dealt with the emergency;
Dynamically re-prioritize tasks based on shifts in need or context; and
Understand our options.
As you can see here, we created this matrix-style kanban with the goal of seeing all our work and ensuring that when we are finished we’ve lost no information in the process. We chose to go extremely low-tech - just flipchart paper and pen - not only because an online kanban would require electricity, but also because with a sticky note-based Personal Kanban the stickies could easily become detached, causing vital information to become lost.In an emergency situation, this kanban becomes your war room.Your “value stream” - the steps it takes to complete a task - might look something like this:
Task → Begun → Assembling → Assembled → Active → Complete → Notes
Begun: If it’s been started (you’ve begun to work on the task).Assembling: If it’s being assembled (you’re gathering paperwork or other requirements).Assembled: If it’s been assembled (requirements are complete).Active: If it’s being processed (by you, or you’re waiting for someone else to act).Complete: If it’s complete.Use the Notes column for points of contact, policy numbers, additional resources etc.One of the major elements of this design pattern is its tolerance for beginning some tasks while allowing others to remain incomplete. Why would we advocate not limiting WIP when that is one of Personal Kanban’s fundamental rules?During an emergency, opportunities to begin tasks are actually valuable.Ordinarily, we want to limit our work-in-progress and complete each task before a new one begins. In this case, there are way too many complicated tasks to undertake, too many coordination points, and too many things to do.This is multitasking by necessity, but it’s controlled multitasking. With a to-do list, we’d have an accounting of the tasks, but we wouldn’t understand their state or be able to limit our WIP. The Emergency Response Approach includes includes a few helpful features that are designed to overcome the limitations of a to-do list.It works like this:
In the Task column, write down everything you need to do. For the moment, don’t worry what size the tasks are. Just get them out of your head and onto your kanban.
Look at your Taskcolumn and begin working on the highest priority task.
Note that you’ve started by writing a check mark in the Assembling column.
Assemble all the items you need to actually complete the task (insurance numbers, phone numbers, pictures of damage, etc)
When you are done mark with a check mark that you’ve Assembled everything and can begin working on the task in earnest. This task is now Active.
Once a task is Active, take notes directly on the kanban in the Notes field (it’s okay to spill out). Our goal here is after everything is done, your emergency kanban is a one-stop-shop for what happened, when it happened, and how it happened.
When the task is Complete, mark it and move on.
It’s important to note:
You’ll have many tasks in-flight at once;
You’ll be interrupted by other tasks constantly;
You’ll never finish them in priority order;
There will be many more tasks than you initially expected;
You’ll need to remember details later that don’t necessarily matter to you right now;
You are doing heroic things right now. This tool is here to help you keep track of what happened; and
There are things you will miss, and that’s okay.
Your goal right now is to get your life back to normal. We hope this tool helps you through this difficult time and invite you to feel free to ask questions in the comments.Image from Hurricane Sandy courtesy of Casual Capture whom we hope is okay.