This is the Kanban board I recently set up in my “office” at work. Like the board I set up in my home office, it shows exactly what has been creating a sense of frustration and stress for me – namely, too many things going on at once.

Due to the highly seasonal nature of the restaurant business in a resort town (and this being the off-season) we are operating with minimal staffing. This means that I get to handle all of the tasks and projects that would typically be handled by a team of people. And there are a lot of things to be done.

The Work in Progress cards are arranged by order of urgency and the Queue is currently just a bunch of notes in no particular order. I need to work through the WIP items first, as they are especially urgent. My plan for this is to focus on one thing at a time, in order to pare this down to a manageable size.

The second order of business is to create individual Task and Project cards for the items in the Queue. Most of these notes involve multiple-step activities that also involve other people.

I am finding that this system of managing my activities is very helpful to actual productivity, not the mindless churn that so often happens when we get caught up in the day-to-day routine of handling the fires and interruptions. It is very important to be able to prioritize these activities, because the tasks and projects shown on this board are things that I do to support the main objective of my job – to make sure that our guests have a delightful dining experience. This happens out on the restaurant floor, not in my office or at a computer.

Balancing the time I invest in my primary objective with time invested in its support is the single most difficult thing about this job.

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