This is blog post six in my Personal Kanban series.
Individual work is a real PITA. Over time, we invariably amass a lot of small tasks that are necessary but not urgent. We end up with a number of things that aren’t high priorities but, the longer we put them off the more they will eventually eat up a lot of our time. Such tasks are waste-in-waiting. They are the five minute nuisances you never got to, that in the end will cost you 10 minutes to apologize for not doing.
The Time Capsule approach is to approach the kanban, notice that there are a multitude of little tasks, pull them all off the board, go to your desk, and start doing them until they’re done or your day is over. And if you have 8 hours of small tasks, well, that’s a learning event for you.
Move them across the desk through 3 stations. Backlog, In Process, and Done.
This is now a speed tasking exercise. Don’t spend a lot of time prioritizing, you already know your backlog. Prioritize on-the-fly. You will most likely game the system by doing some or all of the following:
Sweat the small stuff: Very small tasks can be done very quickly. Doing 20, five minute tasks quickly fills up the “done” column with a satisfying number of post-its.
Launch all missiles: Tasks that require a quick email are easy to get into the “active” column. Today, completion is the goal. Having many active tasks is okay, so long as you know it’s moving toward completion. Remember: You are the only judge of the effectiveness of the time capsule.
Play for Pay: You want to move those tickets to the done side of your desk. Screw convention, screw the Agilistas, screw the WIP monsters – you are only interested in those tickets moving to the right.
Focus after Fast: Tasks that require a bit of your time and focus should be done after the fast things and after the missiles are launched. While those emails are out-reaping rewards, you can work on the more delicate tasks.
Remember this is a strategy for coping with clutter in your backlog. The mess will happen from time to time because personal tasks are unruly. If you find yourself de-cluttering more than once a month, then it’s likely you have too many commitments, or aren’t prioritizing well.
And there's more to come: The Throughput Approach to Personal Kanban in Detail...
It's like you are reading my mind. Today is my last day of work for a week and a half. I have to use the Time Capsule today as I have a great many small nuisance tasks that need to be tackled before I go out of the office for a while. While they truly are a nuisance I know I will find it quite satisfying when I see those post its moved over to the completed lane. Yesterday was the first day I put the personal kanban to task and I found that it helped me to stay on task and to be way more productive.
I would love a way to set up a personal kanban on my phone or laptop because over the next week and a half, while away, I will still have tasks that I need to tend to and move along on my whiteboard.
Posted by: topsurf | 15 July 2009 at 05:44