Evolving Web

Visualizing the Flow: Polar-State Based Personal Kanban with Habit Trackers

Post 15 in the Personal Kanban Series.

James Mallison shared a bit of insight and I'm passing it along.

In a recent post he discussed issues very close to what I call visualization and flow. He begins with a little story about Jerry Seinfeld:

A couple of years ago there was a little story doing the rounds about a bit of productivity advice from none other than Seinfeld.  He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day, even when you didn’t feel like it. To help achieve this he had a big calendar on his wall and for each day that he did some writing he put a big red cross over that day. After a few days a chain would be created. As the chain gets bigger you’ll not want to break it, so you’ll do what it takes to keep it going.

What Seinfeld did was build the world’s simplest and most effective kanban. It had two polar states.  Done / Not Done. It had one metric, completeness. Once writing was achieved, task is complete.  Any interruption in flow was immediately visible on his calendar based kanban.

Seinfeld didn’t want to “break the chain.”  He didn’t want to interrupt the flow of work.

James has taken this concept and built flow worksheets … or state based kanban that he calls a habit tracker.

James’ Habit tracker looks like this:

In James’ system you create a repetitive task or a “habit” and you simply do it every day. Once it’s done, you can mark it off. For introspection there’s a note field.

This would be an excellent variation on my Sequestering Approach to personal kanban. I can very much see habit trackers on the wall next to the kanban.  

James is looking for comments on the Habit Tracker, so please visit his post and leave feedback.

Personal Kanban and Existential Overhead

Post 14 of the Personal Kanban series.

Existential Overhead - the cost in distraction and stress of uncompleted tasks.

A few years back I started shopping around the concept of existential overhead. The concept is fairly straightforward.  There simply is no such thing as out of sight, out of mind. When you have a workload, you are always thinking about the individual elements of that workload. In the back of your mind, you know what you haven't done. 

When your backlog is an amorphous bunch of tasks, all things are psychically equal. Cleaning the cat box and saving for retirement and getting married all have the same weight. The lack of definition is like waiting for news from someone and they don't call, people start to fill in the blanks with their fears.

Your brain not only thinks about this undifferentiated backlog, it hates it. It wants it to go away. Hate is heavy and negative. 

What's the best way around this? Understanding.

Microsoft's Bing ads are selling Bing as a filter for "search overload".  We have so much information flying at us, search engines need to get better and better at filtering the information so we get what we need. We get the information of value.

Kanban is similar, kanban is a visual filter for the work we have taken on. Kanban helps tame our workload and thus make it cognitively manageable.  When we have more understanding of the work we need to do, its impact on our time, and where value lies - our existential overhead diminishes.  We have less negative or fear-based thoughts of work and replace that with positive and understanding-based thoughts.

Kanban is a metacognitive tool. Your tasks themselves are pieces of understanding about actions you need to take. The kanban takes those bits of uncoordinated understanding and puts them in a framework of systemic understanding.  To the human brain, this is the best chocolate soufflé in history.  Your brain eats this stuff up.

A few posts back I talked about how kanban helped your train your brain. This is the training. Kanban's visual nature gives work a logical flow and a set of evolving, flexible and powerful rules under which to operate.  As your understanding of your work evolves, your kanban grows with it.  As you understand more, you filter better.

As you filter better, your overhead diminishes.  Overhead is where most waste lies.  So if your existential overhead diminishes the time you spend consciously or subconsciously thinking about your undone work dissipates - freeing your brain to think, to do, to learn, or to simply take a break.

The MAN THAT WAS AWFUL approach to Personal Kanban

This is post 13 in the Personal Kanban series.

Kanban is meant to be epiphany heavy, but process light. These approaches are meant to provide simple means to visualize how your work actually flows. Some tasks are going to be horrible. They are going to take longer than you expect, be harder to complete than anticipated, or even just really annoy you.

In life, you want to do things that make you happy and not do things that don't. So why not start noticing what you don't like to do or what takes you away from doing the things you like?

The MAN THAT WAS AWFUL approach is simple. When you finish a task and it was in anyway unpleasant - set it aside. Then, later, take a look at the tasks that were unpleasant and look for patterns. Were the people involved the same? Was it a resource issue? Do you just hate doing those kinds of things?

After you see the patterns you can make choices like:

• when to delegate
• when to refuse work
• what processes you might want to recreate
• if you want a new career 
• to cry

Again, the point here is to make what you are doing explicit. Hopefully bad things will initially fall into some patterns that you can consider and reshape. Awful tasks should become less and less common as you can spot them coming and learn ways to deflect them.

Photo by _Boris

Cadence and the Personal Kanban

This is the 12th post in Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban series.

After teams use a kanban to help manage their work, they see that there’s a cadence to it, an underlying rhythm to work.  When a piece of work enters the group's workflow, how long it takes to accomplish a task, how work is handed off from one person to another, how each person creates value, how they pass that value along, and how it is declared completed.  

There’s a definite cadence to this cycle.

When this cadence is discovered, it can be fine-tuned.  It can be appreciated.  The cadence become reassuring, a reward in and of itself. The cadence represents predictability, efficiency, and a job well done.

This is the dance of business.

Personal work is more frenzied. The cadence is harder to detect. As individuals, we are interrupted more. We are less able to absorb discontinuities.

Working as a team is a sexy tango; working solo is a tap dance.

There is certainly a cadence to working individually, but it is less institutionalized than working in a group.  Over time, you find in tracking your own work more of a repertoire of rhythms to draw from at different times.

After having a personal kanban for about 2 years now, I find that I’m more of a DJ than a time manager. I string together tasks to work on during the day that are part priority, and part rhythm. For me, writing and bookkeeping simply do not go together, they create dissonance. So if I have a bookkeeping day, I balance it out by meeting a colleague for coffee or taking an enjoyable phone call. Bookkeeping, for me, is jarringly anti-rhythmic. I need the syncopation of discourse to smooth it out.

In groups, fine tuning the team’s cadence involves creating one nicely arranged flow though a predictable value stream. For personal kanban, it means being able to create flow from a relatively chaotic value stream.

Photo by Andreas Schepers

CoTweet’s Stored Search Changes How I Use Twitter Overnight

A week or so ago, I wondered aloud in Twitter if CoTweet would start storing searches and within 24 hours the stored search feature appeared.  It is clean and easy to use.  You simply type in a search string and the search appears in an “explore” window.  It remains in the explore window until you delete it.  With each tweet in the searches you can still do all the usual CoTweet work (replying, retweeting, assignging, emailing, etc).  You can also easily subscribe to the query’s atom feed if you need to do more detailed analysis.

What is most important about this is that you can easily keep this on a screen and make twitter a multithreaded meme tracker. You really can join in a topic-specific conversation with people whether you follow them or not. The entire spread of the twittersphere is at your fingertips and is updated in near real time. I find myself in long-running topical conversations about kanban, personal kanban, government 2.0 and more.  Having all the feeds on one page and being able to reply, save, or whatever the individual post is incredible.  This makes the usual firehose of random tweets much more manageable and opens topics for true conversation.

Next, would be searches with operands. Being able to have an "or" in a search string would make it even better.

Again I praise the CoTweet folks.

Every Task is Sacred

Post 11 of the Personal Kanban series.

One of the primary goals of a kanban is to make value explicit. When you spend your time doing something, the reward should be observable. Even if the task is vegging out, the reward is relaxation. You should engage in no task that is valueless. When a task does not provide value, it is considered waste.

Kanban has two main states: a "station,” where value is created, and a “transition,” where the work item is moved from one station to the next. In the kanban below, we see the flow of work for my upcoming book, Instant Karma: 10 Principles of Social Media for Business. In the pre-writing phase, I am creating the initial text for a chapter. When that’s done, and my editor is ready to look at it, she pulls a completed section from my pre-writing section and places it in her “focus” state. There she and I edit and re-edit that chapter until we think it is ready to send off to the crowdsourcers. I was creating value in the pre-writing state, when that value was realized it then went on to the next state of focus, where it remains until that value is realized.

In the kanban above we see that what is moving is not tasks – but the actual chapter. In a work-flow kanban tasks are the mechanics that create value, not the value itself. The value is explicit in the work-flow. Thus, in a kanban, the work-flow is also called a value-stream.

Here we have a task based kanban where I have the task of “Call Bob.”  It’s going to run through my simplistic Backlog | Doing | Done kanban.  But, let’s think about this a bit.  Regardless of my feelings for Bob, does calling Bob ever give me actual value?  No. "Call Bob" is merely a task, a mechanical action that should create value.

Later, if I am going over completed tasks and trying to figure out what makes me successful and what does not, “Call Bob” is a lousy artifact for judgment. There simply isn’t enough information there to let me make a decision.

So why not make the value explicit?

Here my reason for calling Bob is made more explicit.It could be anything you want from “talk about football” to “catch up.” Remember: Kanban isn’t making value judgments of your actions, it's simply reporting the value of what you accomplished. If you really like Bob, and want to call him just to shoot the breeze, that’s value to you. It’s fine. What you want is to discover tasks that don’t provide value and eliminate them, so you have more time to do what makes your life better.

Images created in Agile Zen, which I am loving.

The Task Based Personal Kanban Approach in Detail

This is post 10 in Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban series.

Imagine you have a number of tasks that need completing, and you need to visualize the state of each task. Let’s say that each of these tasks is going to involve several days of information exchange with others. Now let’s suppose that each of these tasks needs to be completed by a certain date, and if you did them in serially with a WIP limit you would spend most of your time waiting for responses. You simply don't have time to fully "complete" each goal and tracking individual subtasks like "bug Bob to send paperwork AGAIN" is a waste of your time.

In a traditional kanban, you’d have a problem. Tasks started but not completed would be “blocked,” and you’d need to solve that blockage before you could move the card. Until you moved that task, it was considered WIP.

But here we have tasks whose very nature require us to wait for others to acheive completion. These tasks are messy.

The task-based personal kanban approach changes the tasks into swim lanes, and allows for a large number of simultaneous tasks.  Your actions should still fall into a WIP limit, but the tasks themselves are unbounded.

I’ll retell the story from the original post:

In the beginning of June, I was suddenly faced with a large number of items that had to be done in a very short period of time. All of them involved interactions with others. So I built I task-based kanban where each swim lane was a specific task and the adjudication of the tasks was “Assembling,” “Assembled,” “Processing,” “Completed,” and “Notes.”  I knew that my WIP was toast; there was simply no way I could limit WIP when the tasks were so dependent on others.  I need to be able to launch things quickly and then let them resolve naturally. 

Context required me to rethink the nature of WIP.  WIP needed to be my personal action state, not the completion of the whole task.

Each project had objects that needed to be assembled. I allowed myself to have a WIP of three for assembling.  So at any given point in time, I’d have three tasks with stars next to them. I would then gather all the background materials I needed for those things.  When I had all the background information, they would be “assembled”.  As items were assembled, I would start the process to complete the task (calling people, emailing them, etc.) – that put a check in the “processing” column.  I would take notes and place text reminders in the “notes” column until the matter was settled.  Then it would get a “Completed” and I could ceremoniously draw a big line through the whole task.

This helped me visualize the full project on a task basis without feeling guilty that I had more than a certain number of tasks active at any given point.  The task based approach helped me track and complete about 35 simultaneous responsibilities during a very stressful time.

Next post: Cadence and the Personal Kanban...

The Sequestering Approach and Personal Kanban

This is the 9th post in Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban series...

Personal tasks are often repetitive or open-ended. Daily phone calls with your kids, an on-going email thread with your college roommate, or follow-up with potential clients are tasks that need to be carried out, but that don’t fit neatly into a kanban. If you have a CMS and need to check in with 3 customers on a daily basis, putting a card on your kanban every day that says “check in with 3 customers” is foolish. Repetitive tasks like this - while they may create value - can also be seen as overhead.

What you can do with these types of tasks is sequester them in a “repeating tasks” category.  On the white board you can list these in a sequestered box, simply checking them off when complete. Then, erase the checkbox when they need to be done again.

Why bother having the sequestered elements on your board at all?  Because the kanban helps visualize your overhead, which your brain will use as input when you are prioritizing and scheduling. Like it or not, the recurring elements are part of your personal work and they do provide value. One of the main goals of kanban is to kill off out-of-sight-out-of-mind management. It behooves you to visualize as much as you can on your personal kanban.

Coming up next: The Task Based Personal Kanban Approach in Detail...

The Subproject Approach to Personal Kanban in Detail

Here we are at post 8 of the Personal Kanban series.

Problematic for personal kanban is that its task-based nature undermines lean’s value-tracking goals. Kanban, not even personal kanban, is not a to-do list.  Personal kanban tracks tasks because that’s primarily how individuals measure work and value.

Your personal kanban can have multiple swim lanes, and they in no way need to be coordinate.  A task based swim lane can rest above one or more subproject swim lanes with a full value stream.

This allows you to see your current work simultaneously in both a task view and a project view.

The more you can move large projects into work-flow based subprojects, the more control you will have over them, and the more insight you will have into their flow.

You have some choices with the subproject approach when its combined with the personal kanban.

Roll Up: The subproject approach can be a roll-up task, tracking the progress of the large project while individual tasks still move through your personal kanban. This lets you see how quickly value moves through your subproject when you are working on other things. Here the roll-up task is the purple ticket that refers to the subproject.

Active Engagement: The subproject is actively used as part of your WIP. If the nature of your work is that you are paying even small amounts of attention to the subproject each day, making tags in your subproject part of your overall WIP may be more honest. This conceptually integrates all your subprojects into your daily routine.  This integration could lead to more meaningful introspection.

In this photo, there are 5 tasks in the WIP.  Three are in the top part of the kanban under “doing”, the other two active for me personally would be under “pre-writing” in the project area.

Tune in next time for: The Sequestering Approach and Personal Kanban...

The Throughput Approach to Personal Kanban in Detail

Blog post seven in Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban Series.

In the previous posts we looked at the Time Capsule workaround to having a backlog cluttered with small tasks of varying importance.  This throughput approach might help mitigate the need to use that approach.

Kanban tends to have swim lanes – or lanes through which value flows. In your personal kanban, it is possible to have a WIP that takes into account varying sizes of tasks?

Let’s say you set a WIP of 5 items: two of these can be large tasks, while three are small.

In the throughput approach, the small items are placed daily, and addressed first. The larger items can be handled throughout the day, and will remain on the board as long as it takes to remove them.

The goal here is to make sure that at least a minimum amount of small tasks are done regularly, to help avoid the pain of a marathon Time Capsule day.

When I’ve done this, I’ve tried to take into account that there will be “flares” – tasks that arise and are completed during the course of a day that don’t make it onto the board. Say your lawyer calls and asks you to track down an email and send it to her. That takes you maybe 15 minutes, but it never makes it onto the board.

This is why I don’t move completed tasks off a throughput board until the end of the day.  If you keep moving them and placing new tasks up there, you really haven’t limited your WIP.  You aren’t maximizing for throughput in the number of cards you are moving with the throughput approach, as much as you are maximizing your productivity.

With this approach, you will get a number of small tasks done but also devote time to the larger tasks and, hopefully, have the bandwidth to deal with flares.

Stay tuned for: The Subproject Approach to Personal Kanban in Detail...