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

Comments

[topsurf]

I am one who always tries to do the unwanted tasks first when I get into my office but sometimes urgent tasks come up that I need to take care of right away and those unwanted tasks just sit there and stare at me like a neon sign until I get to them. I have never thought of tracking them for a pattern, hopefully after I look at the pattern I won't do the last choice...."to cry" LOL

[Jim Benson]

You are not alone in being the garbage disposal for things at work. But, if though they are unpleasant, some people take those tasks on because they like the challenge and the satisfaction of knowing that it's done and won't bother anyone.

Paramedics expose themselves to the worst experiences of people's lives on a routine basis. Yet, they are dedicated to their jobs. No one is going to call their job "pleasant", but it is rewarding for them.

So, for you, as the one who tries to get things done, you may be the paramedic of the office.