This blogpost summarizes some of the main points from the book titled “Personal Kanban”, by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry

Kanban is a popular project management framework in IT projects. This book is more about applying the framework to one’s personal life. It was almost a year ago when I had to apply Lean principles to a POC that I was working on. I never got to reflect on its efficacy. I had used org mode to manage my task list as a set of TODOs. In that sense, I was still relying on a TODO list for my POC tasks. It was a gigantic TODO list that was demarcated in to various subsections based on the kind of project module that I was working. To satisfy the requirements of the team, I did update the Kanban boards but really did not understand the massive importance of it.

I was mainly interested in reading this book and applying the principles to my personal life so that I can get more focused on my Odyssey journeys.

The premise of the book is that it makes sense to visualize your work states in order to live a harmonious work. Let me summarize the chapters from the book

Basics of Personal Kanban

The authors gives a background to their own work where many task scheduling tools did not yield effective results. Some of the tools experimented by the author and his team were floor-to-ceiling whiteboards, mindmaps, TODO lists. In trying to come out of their frustration, the team created a personal kanban to visualize and manage personal work. The board was designed to be an information radiator.

The key differentiating factor of Personal Kanban to a Project Kanban is the presence of high level of variation and contextual effects in the former. There are two man rules of Personal Kanban

• Rule 1: Visualize your work

It is challenging to understand what we can’t see. We tend to focus on the obvious elements of our work when the real context includes larger, unexpected, and more nebulous elements. Visualizing work gives us power over it. When we see work in its various contexts, real trade-offs become explicit.

• Rule 2: Limit your Work in Progress

Limiting your WIP allows us the time to focus, work quickly, react calmly to change, and do a thoughtful job

Principles take precedence over progress. Whatever process you use, the above two rules should be the guiding rules of personal Kanban.

The authors gives the example of fuel gauge that gives us information on the amount of fuel in the car that helps us take decision on whether to refuel it or not. Kanban is akin to a fuel gauge. Todo lists are akin to a banner on top of fuel gauge that says ‘Refuel the car when you need it’. The message is there, but the information is not present

Personal Kanban gives us context, and shows us how that context impact our ability to make decisions

Why call it Personal Kanban ? This is mainly as this method tracks items of importance to individuals: tasks, appointment, small projects. They vary wildly in size, type and urgency. Organizational Kanban usually tracks items of value to the organization. The components are more predictable and the core idea is to focus on standard work products, organizational efficiencies and waste reduction.

Given that I have used kanban in a corporate setting, I think I get the basic message from this chapter, i.e. by visualizing the Todos and limiting WIP, it makes far easier to focus and get things done.

Building your first Kanban

This chapter walks the reader through the main steps of establishing a personal kanban. The steps are similar to what I had done during the POC last year

My Time Management is in league with the freeway

Capacity and Throughput are different ideas and one often muddles them up. You might have a lot of time, i.e. capacity to do stuff. But what you accomplish, i.e. your throughput might have no correlation with capacity.

To make the roadways of our work to have higher throughput, we need be able to visualize work and measure success by the amount of quality work flowing from READY to DONE over time, not just the volume of work we can cram in to our schedule

If you are able to see the amount of time taken to do various tasks, you will be able to reflect on it and make changes to the way you are working. It is important to get a grip on the projects that you are working on, the way they fit in to flow.

The authors are definitely against multi-tasking. They are also suggesting that TODO lists are inferior to kanban boards. What are the disadvantages of todo lists ? I think one of the main drawbacks of todo list is that you cannot see what you have accomplished so far. It is also a mechanical list of things that we do and do not give an indicator of progress for a certain goal. In fact org-agenda main purpose is to create an agenda view that adds all these relevant features to a todo list such as tags, priorities, etc and make sure that that we can witness the progress in our work. For example if you want to track your habits, org-agenda is fantastic. But at the end of it, you cannot visualize flow of your work. I guess this is a good case for using the org-kanban

I think many of the advantages listed for personal kanban are present in org-agenda

• Liberating : It is liberating as you see the activities are bucketed in to several important personal categories and you have time stamp associated with these tasks
• Proactive: The fact that you can log the activities makes it proactive
• Kinesthetic: By logging in the time, by changing the task state - you get a feedback and that’s important
• Narrative: If you choose a particular theme as a personal goal, you can put in a set of activities around that narrative and get things done
• Prioritize of activities

What do I think are advantages of using org-kanban ?

• May be one gets to know patterns of work that get done or that remain on the board forever
• Get to know the bottlenecks
• Focus on WIP tasks only

Nature Flows

The biggest takeaway from this chapter is Pull vs Push analogy. We are often doing tasks that either have been pushed to us or we have consciously pulled it from our activities list. The higher the proportion of pull tasks, the better we live our lives. It also means that you need to have an inventory of tasks that you identify and start looking to actively pull based on the context, life stage, life patterns . It involves deliberation, reflection and bringing the items to READY state from backlog. When you are bringing an activity from READY to DOING, you are making a choice of doing it that moment.

While pulling won’t make you omniscient, it will give you a better view of existing constraints and potential opportunity costs.

I have been working for the last 20 years but I have never really created such explicit visuals that help me understand push and pull activities. I am happy that at least I will be able to visualize and think about my work from this perspective.

Components of a Quality Life

This chapter talks about kanban board as a tool to get more clarity in our lives. By looking at our lives, by looking at activities that we enjoy, pull, get pushed in to, we get a better sense of work flows and hence will be able to make better decisions as well as strengthen our decision making process.

The point about capturing peak experiences is similar to the suggestions made in the book - “Designing your life” (Good Life Journal)

Finding our Priorities

• Educated guesswork is no substitute for thoughtful observation. Estimates often project our dreams, rather than reflect our reality
• With Personal Kanban, we are in a perpetual state of planning. It becomes part of our work;s flow.
• Use prioritization to the tasks in the backlog and then move it to READY state
• Lead time, cycle time metrics based on time taken to move across various states

Striving for Happiness

One can speed read the last few chapters of the book as the core idea of the book are covered in the first few chapters.

Takeaway

Thanks to “Four thousand weeks” , I picked up this book and read it in a few hours. The proposed system in the book is appealing and I hope to tweak my org-agenda based activity management to include org-kanban features so that I can visualize my work and limit my WIP. Hopefully the enhanced tweak will make my work efficient and effective.