What? You Say You Have Too Many Projects and Can't Limit WIP?

Tonianne and I run the Personal Kanban, Modus Institute, Modus Cooperandi Corp-o-plex pretty much duo-handed. There's a lot of work. The rules of Personal Kanban apply to us too. We are constantly experimenting with new ways to visualize our work and limit our Work-in-Process.Right now, we have five proposals out, are discussing potential work with four other organizations, are supervising another translation of Personal Kanban, have a major client with seven concurrent internal projects, are putting out a new product (coming soon!), have two other clients that require touch, a new project of Toni's, group classes for Modus Institute to track / schedule / lead, eight conferences to speak or teach at, and the usual biz dev / taxes / paperwork ... oh and we're redesigning web sites, making marketing collateral, and having interviews with the press or conversations with people.So ... how do you limit your WIP when it takes a paragraph to list just the types of work out - not even the tasks.Well, the answer is simple ... ish.I'll write about how we schedule out our weeks in a week or so, when I have more data about how our current shared board is working. But for this post, I just want to talk about this board.This is my personal In-Flight board that is keeping track of all things Modus for me.Blue column headings note client work, business operations, or speaking / open classes.Green Big Bet stickies track my big bets (work I expect to take more than a month to complete or are the entire project).Orange stickies are either the upcoming value delivery package or event (proposal, call, class video, etc).Red stickies are highlights that the Big Bet needs action.Purple are Today's WIP.  (It's Sunday, so I'm just getting two things out and writing this blog post).The columns tomorrow will be joined by our week's Big Bets - Toni and I select two or three things each week to "knock out."  Last week it was to get a prototype design of our new product to the producer. Which, I'm happy to say we did.We pick a few big bets each week that can live in the flow of the work you see here. That way we make sure that company goals and needs are both met.Actual tasks are not tracked on this board.  They are on my pretty eternal "Immediate Personal Kanban" which has been up long enough for the title stickies to be faded and the "Options" column to actually say ready.  (Let this be a testimony to super sticky post its).The two items in doing are the two items in the purple ticket.Mea Culpa - While writing this I "remembered" three other things to put on the portfolio wall and two more things on this board.So ... the important thing to remember is that Personal Kanban is always an exercise to keeping track, keeping honest, and keeping control.  We lose track, we lie to ourselves, and we surely lose control all the time. Don't lose heart, just know that this is part of being human and busy.The Exercise:

1. Take several colors of Super Stickies

2. Decide colors for title, big bet, active work (what you need to do), status (what is in flight and you don't need to act on right now), and current WIP.

3. Start writing down all your responsibilities as projects / big bets

4. Ask yourself as you go along, "Is this how I want to spend my time?"

5. Note big bets, projects, or tasks that you answer "no" to.

6. Begin to strategize how to make that work improve or go away.

7. Systematically and calmly do the rest.

My goal at the end of any day is to get those red stickies to disappear.  In essence, turning the board into active tasks I've let fly.  In this way, I'm able to keep multiple responsibilities in flight while limiting my WIP.Over time, I've asked myself that question a lot.  It's led Toni and me to select customers carefully and extract ourselves from situations in which we were personally invested, but didn't lead to a healthy company or healthy Toni and Jim.So, be busy ... but be busy right.

A Christmas Story of Care, Family, and Healing

The holidays are wonderful times, but also difficult ones.I was interviewing Deb McGee, a client, colleague, and friend about how our time spent working with her team went. At the end, she turned the interview to the fully "personal" side of Personal Kanban. During a holiday season, Deb suffered a profound personal loss, but was determined to give her family a holiday season.  She could have done this through denial or burying her feelings. She chose, instead, to meet the holiday's head-on and realistically decide what she could do and what was "too soon".I'll let her tell her own story in the interview.  I hope you find it as inspiring as I do.Happy Holidays, everyone.

For Context, Clarity, & Continuous Improvement, Get Rid of That To-Do List

Make list.Become overwhelmed.Cross off low-hanging fruit.Feel good (momentarily).Tackle next easiest task.Repeat.Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But why simply optimize for productivity, when you can shoot for effectiveness?Those seemingly interminable, anxiety-inducing to-do lists - we've all been beholden to them. But if context, clarity, and continuous improvement are what you're looking for, there just might be a better option.For something with such a staggering amount of information, to-do lists fail miserably at providing the context necessary to effectively prioritize our work, understand and communicate our capacity, or surface issues so we can address them in real-time, preventing them from recurring.Rather than create a static, task-focused, prescriptive inventory of your to-dos - inviting little more than an opportunity to react - visualizing your work on a flexible, flow-focused Personal Kanban transforms those to-dos into a narrative of your work that promotes cognitive ease and invites informed action. Tasks are situated in context, options and priorities become obvious, and emergent patterns (like recurring bottlenecks) give us the necessary feedback to invite discussion, collaboration, and/or improvement.

Design: The Status Column

The Problem: Sometimes we are waiting to hear the status of something. That status could come at any time and from any type of communication (email, phone, mention in the hallway, etc.). But we are waiting. If we wait too long, not knowing will cause us problems - but waiting isn't a task. We lose track of time and suddenly we are under the gun.The Solution: Build the Personal Kanban to specifically track status items and let us know when they require action.The Narrative: We've all been there. That day when someone says to us, "How's that thing going?" and we realize "Oh crap! I don't know!" Then we have to scramble to find out.Someone else or some group of "someone elses" are responsible to getting something done, but it directly impacts us. We can't call them every day and say, "Are you done yet?" because that's micromanaging. But we do need to have an idea of where they are at.At Modus, we've found specifically calling out items we are waiting for status on (things outside our group and therefore not on our Personal Kanban) allows us to treat them as potential tasks. If someone reports in on time, it simply moves to DONE and never required us to act. If it sits too long, then it becomes a task.

5 Ways to Focus and Finish

Focusing on our most important work (so that we can get it out the door and create value) is hard. It’s harder still when work suddenly picks up, is unfamiliar, or arrives with immediate deadlines when we are already busy.

The tyranny of the urgent often distracts us from what is truly important. We lose focus on the important and end up doing a lot of “busy-work”. By then end of the day we are frustrated. The real value wasn’t created, but the business was satisfied.

We need to understand what “most important” means. It’s not always easy to just “know” what task out of the hundreds we have on our plate is the best to jump on right now.

When we visualize our work and limit our work in progress, we can see beyond the urgent and find what’s the best use of our time. We can then sit down with our brains and have an honest chat. What do we need to do? What relies on others? What is stopping us from doing that one task that just sits there in our OPTIONS column and doesn’t move? Why do we promise we’ll get those things done today, but at the end of the day it is still just sitting there?

You’ll see that our latest newsletter is on this theme of finding focus in a world of noise. Focus isn’t a “light” topic, we all struggle with it every day. Below are five of our top ranked posts on focus.

If you have a story about how Personal Kanban has helped you find focus, please leave it in the comments and let us (and the community) know.

1) The Overhead of OverworkIn our work, we take on more and more because the task seems small and we don’t understand our actual capacity. We take on more and more because we can’t see we are already overloaded. One day, we burn out, we break down, we snap.Read more.

2) HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #3–Reducing InterruptionsThe fact is that interruptions are part of knowledge work. We seldom do it alone, which means we have colleagues. Colleagues require information. Information requires communication. Communication requires attention.Read more.

3) Finishing Feels GoodIn 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.Read more.

4) Time to CompletionWhat if the game of work was to continuously improve the quality and rate of delivery of your work? The game becomes ways to discover how you can work most effectively, most innovatively. The game stops being how close to an arbitrary deadline can you complete something.Read more.

5)On Focus: Conquering the Shiny SquirrelTask-switching begets more task-switching, not completion. This is often attributed to “the Zeigarnik Effect,” a phenomenon in which information and tasks left incomplete don’t leave our mind. Instead, we dwell on those incomplete tasks, and those intrusive thoughts render us vulnerable to distractions. The energy that consumes–the metabolism task-switching requires–drains our cognitive capacity, causing frustration, burnout, impeding focus and inviting error and rework, preventing us from realizing our optimal potential.Read more.

Deep Focus

What does it take to focus? When we teach or work with clients, the need to focus is always the base of any board or system we create. We are all distracted. We’ve directly addressed this in the Personal Kanban online class. Sign up today and join the hundreds of other PK students from around the world. And stay in touch.