A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece on Personal Kanban and how it was making it easier to put my Projects and Next Actions in perspective.

This is a pic of the updated Kanban board in my home office. I have made a few changes and abandoned some things that were in my Queue at the beginning. Also, I have split the @Tavern contexts out and moved them to the board in my office at the hotel. This was a tremendous improvement in terms of being able to see what I need to work on in my home office when I am not working in the restaurant. Very important to Job/Work/Life balance.

How Tasks Enter the Kanban System

My process for generating Next Action and Project cards remains the same, they usually come to me while I am making my daily Journal/Morning Pages entries, or when I am reading. Each new card then simply goes into the Queue and each morning I can assess the situation, choose the tasks that I feel are most important (or urgent), and move them into the Work In Progress (WIP) column (this post being one of them on the 27th).

I would like to mention an important caveat here – the Kanban board is not a replacement for your calendar when it comes to the time-specific information that you need to manage. Remember that only three things are to be entered into your calendar:

1. Time-specific actions
2. Day-specific actions
3. Day-specific information

That’s it. Because your calendar is a tool that you use to tell you where you need to be and when you need to be there, or when something is scheduled to happen. Your Kanban board is where you manage Tasks.

Use these two tools together for planning your activities. For example, during your Periodic Review you may decide that there are some Most Important Tasks that you would like to assign as time-specific (or set a deadline for completion). Enter these in your calendar, or create a Next Action Card with a due date on it. Put that card in the Queue column.

When the assigned time arrives, and your calendar reminds you of the Task, move that card from Queue to WIP. This method will work whether you use a paper planner or a digital calendar/PDA.

When you are Done

As Groundhog Day approaches, I am looking forward to moving some more things into the Done column for a simple and easy way of reviewing exactly what was accomplished in the current period. The real beauty of this system is that it replaces messy handwritten lists and gives an instant overview of what is happening right now. This overview provides a tool for managing the backlog of Tasks in the Queue and creates a “Pull” mechanism for adding new tasks to the WIP column.

The “Pull” occurs when a task is completed and a space is created when the card is moved to the Done column. As the cards move from left to right across the board I am able to see and measure the flow of work that is being completed. This visual sense of accomplishment is very gratifying!

Additional Information

For more reading on being done, see Jim Benson’s post on Training Your Mind for Completion.

Dave Seah has a post about how he has seen Kanban pop up in his viewscreen recently, with some links to Scrum:

I first heard the word Kanban at a presentation of the local Scrum Club. Scrum, if you’re not familiar with it, is a team methodology to create working software QUICKLY through short production cycles called sprints. This is in contrast to the waterfall model of software development, which defines the entire process from concept to deployment as a series of blocks that follow each other on a march to the end.

Waterfall, in my mind, is like starting with one giant boulder of time, from which the team must carve a working model of a city in as efficient a manner as possible to conform to the blueprint. SCRUM, by comparison, is like starting with many pebbles of time and working those individually into functioning buildings one-at-a-time; the finished city evolves one working building at a time. This isn’t a perfect analogy, of course, but in general the first approach requires much more care and diligence to make work while wasting time backtracking, while the second approach risks less by avoiding backtracking and using smaller rocks of time.

Read it all here: Kanban, Event Modeling and GTD.

This is the Next Action Cards set on flickr, showing the various pieces of this system:

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