Personal kanban and process-oriented work...

So several weeks have passed since I wrote my last post about doing personal kanban and about using a weekly board and pulling cards on to this board.

The big thing is I'm still using this system - which is a big deal for me.  I've been going at it for many weeks and I feel I'm unlikely to discard it any time soon.  But things have changed (evolved) quite a bit...

The biggest thing I've noticed is that an activity that I had earmarked as an everyday one, that I would do for as little 10 minutes in some cases and record in a tally next to my weekly board, very quickly became part of my daily habit.  It was really "sticking".  And it led me to this realisation: If you want to get good at something, you should do it regularly.

Mind-blowing I know, but I think it bears examining more carefully here.  I'd wager that small, continual, regular sessions learning a skill beat longer and irregular ones any time, though this might depend on the activity you are doing and also the way in which you spend that time.  At any rate if you're trying to build a skill that's really important to you, work on it either everyday or very regularly (think "recurring") even if it's for a short period.  [Note: my context for writing this is that I am trying to make efficient use of the time I have outside of regular work and other commitments that I already have.]

How does this fit in with (personal) kanban and WIP?  I think for the moment I have to make a distinction between activities that have a recurring nature, that don't easily fit into a backlog, and other activities that are more discrete, task-like in nature and which do.  That distinction is the difference between

• process-oriented work, and
• goal-oriented work

This is the difference that is described in Thomas Sterner's book "The Practicing Mind".  In his book, Sterner, a musician and piano tuner amongst other things, points out the power of process-oriented work and its de-emphasis in the western mindset and culture.  The Western mindset is goal-oriented; it is one of getting results and measuring success by results to the point that how the result is achieved becomes irrelevant (eg "cheating" an exam or faking a result).  Thinking in terms of outcomes or results isn't intrinsically bad.  I think it can be powerful way to think.  But there is a darker side perhaps symptomatic of a culture that only knows how to think this way.  It is a culture that assesses people's worth and capabilities purely by some abstract metric (a mark or grade), that is materialistic ... "If I get this [thing], *then* I'll have made it / I'll be happy" etc...

By contrast, process-oriented thinking is about focusing on what you are doing, the quality of what you are doing, how you are doing it, what you focus on as you do it. Process-oriented behaviour focuses on the process of achieving a goal rather than focusing on having it.  You don't achieve something, you do it, and in a neurological sense, you are what you do, because you're building connections in your brain as you do something hopefully making you better at doing it, if you do it enough and focus on the right things.

As a quick aside Timothy Gallwey's analogy of the "10 cent computer" which is your conscious mind and the "billion dollar computer" which is the rest of your brain, is apt here.  It is your billion dollar computer (the not-so-conscious part of you) that performs the juggling you spent a week learning how to do, or hit a golf ball effortlessly (if you ever got that far), or a tennis ball, or writes code cleanly in a programming language or framework that you've mastered.  When you're engaging in recurring tasks, in a process-oriented way, your 10 cent computer is directing ("allowing" might be a better word) your billion dollar computer in what to focus on, steadily and regularly, allowing it to learn subtleties and complexities that you could never perform consciously without such an investment.  And every day you wake up to do it again, with your brain having formed new connections overnight from the previous day, ready to make new insights.

So picking something to work on everyday or with similar level of regularity is quite a significant thing.

For me, I can support maybe 2 "everyday"-type things.  There's a limit here, just like there's a limit on the number of discrete, goal-oriented / task-oriented things you should be tackling (your WIP); you can only make yourself do so many different things every day, and you might just want to start with one and see how many more you can add from there.  Mine are currently a musical skill I'm trying to work on, and the other is a set of technical skills I'm trying to build.  These things are so important to me, that I make a point of doing them everyday, even if it's just 10 to 20 minutes that I can spare.   

There are other recurring, process-oriented things you can fit into your week that don't have that "everyday" type of intensity.  For instance there are things you might do 2 or 3 times a week, such as  exercise.  These things might require scheduling, so I have cards for these that I put on to my weekly board.  They may be things you want to tally (do "n" times a week) or simply make a habit of doing on a particular day etc... The weekly board really helps me to plan these out and shuffle them around as circumstances change.

Process-oriented elements in my personal kanban give me something else: balance.
In the past (before personal kanban and visualising my situation), if I wanted to work on a skill, I'd spend long periods on it, usually late into the evening.  Then maybe a day or two later, I'd totally neglect it or be distracted by some other task, eventually I'd lose track of it or revisit it after a long hiatus.  This irregular and lumpy workflow doesn't happen so much now.  I know I can't spend indefinite periods of time on a favoured activity du jour anymore.  If I did, other things both mundane and important would suffer.  On the flip-side, when time is short, I will try to work on an everyday type activity even if I can only spare 10 or 20 minutes of my time for that day.  At least I've kept it "warm".

My personal kanban (if I can call it that) is a marriage of the "smooth": continuous, process-oriented elements and the granular: discrete, task-like goal-oriented elements.  I don't see these 2 ways of thinking as antithetical or incompatible; as I engage in a process-oriented way, specific goals and tasks may emerge that I can put into my backlog.

These roughly are the main elements in my pkb now:

• a weekly board with days of the week with cards that represent both process-oriented and goal-oriented items of work; I've dispensed with the "blue" cards that I push on
• an everyday / tally column for recording recurring things
• a backlog of goal-oriented items, short range and long range; the short range stuff is a bit like a sprint, a small number of things I want to try to achieve that week; I actually have some more specific backlogs for different things that feed into this 
• skill area columns; I have about 4 of these that represent areas I want to focus on in a process-oriented way; these are the home of my process-oriented efforts.

Personal kanban evolution

In this blog post I look at the idea of a "daily or day-of-the-week WIP" in the context of a personal week.  Some of this takes its cues from the Personal Kanban book [PKB], which discusses things like sequestering, "large project" approach with "roll up" tasks - basically, techniques to visualise recurring personal tasks and recurring work generated from on-going projects.

Perhaps the biggest idea I've gotten from kanban so far is the importance of visualisation or representing your situation.  It's hard to start thinking about WIP or fine-tuning things until you've had time to do this and evolve it a bit.  So here goes...

It started with...

My situation and context for this article: I'm always trying to do stuff outside of my day job for one reason or another, and I'm interested in how to get the most out of myself given such a huge constraint.   So I started trying out personal kanban after reading the personal kanban book a couple of weeks ago.

The 2 rules of personal kanban are:

• visualise your work
• limit your work-in-progress (WIP) (aka "don't multitask or avoid incessantly switching between (unfinished) things")

I started with a backlog of things I wanted to do in trello with a "READY" column for things that I could potentially work on, a "DOING" column where you limit how many things you are working on and a "DONE" column.

This was an interesting exercise as I realised just how much I tend to jump around from one thing to another. Having a WIP limit on my work forces me to focus and it forces me to think about what I want to do next.

What to do with recurring things....

As I was reading through the first part of the book however I started wondering about periodic or recurring things.

There are things I really don't want to record like brushing my teeth - that makes no sense. And I feel like there are definitely things I'd rather leave "unstructured".  But there are other periodic things which are things I want to do but which don't have any kind of immediate goal or end state but which I'm keen to track in some way.  Things like going for a run for instance - especially in winter, when I need to motivate myself. Or doing some weight training or doing some music exercises because I want to train my ear.  These are regular things that I want to coordinate but I don't want to drag them repeatedly into a "done" column.

The appendix A of PKB turns out to be the most interesting part from my perspective because the authors discuss some real case studies where recurring work was important.  One case involves handling both a training regime and a regular study schedule. In these cases additional "value streams" or swim lanes (grids or additional boards of some sort) were created in addition to the main board with the express purpose of visualising the recurring work and tracking it.

Finding a better visualisation...

So, a week into my trello pkb experience I started thinking...   How do I track these little regular things I want to do alongside the bigger projects and things I want to take on... all outside of my regular job?

I can plan big goals and projects; prioritize them,  put them into a backlog,  split them up and manage in a semi-scrum like fashion.

But my initial attempts to visualise the recurring aspects of my life involved having a daily column or a weekly column and using things like trello checklists or cards that recorded tallies for particular activities. One of the limitations I was hitting was my desire to use more grid-like visualisations (ones that had both rows and columns) to explore better ways to do this rather than the columnar approach that trello provides.

The weekly board...

This is what I came up with (still in trello), after allowing my thinking to evolve over about a week...

• I created a new board I call the "weekly board" separate to my backlog board
• I created a column for each day of the week (a list in trello) - something I had seen in one of the case studies at the back of the PKB book. 
• I added an "everyday / tally" column for (a small number of) things that were daily that I wanted to track or tally over weekly or even more extended periods  (one way might be to use a trello checklist inside a card and periodically resetting it). 

Next to these I have a whole bunch of other columns, but 2 in particular are:

• recurring list containing recurring things,  things that are weekly or less regular than weekly; 
• and a list I call the "try-to-do" list, also a list of recurring things which I'll discuss shortly
• (An example of another column I have is a "calendar" list; it lists things like particular meetups I want to try to go to or at least be aware of during the week etc)

Where my recurring list consists of regular chores and the stuff of life,  my "try to do" column focuses on recurring things I want to target on a regular basis because they are significant to me in some way.

So for running, I create 2 cards that initially go in my "try to do" column one for each run. Let's also say I want to target doing 3 weight training sessions per week if I can possibly squeeze this in. And maybe I want to do 2 music reading exercises during the week as well.

So:

• I create the requisite number of cards for each of these activities and have them all start in my "try to do" column
• Then I push these cards onto my weekly board - onto one of the days of the week. 

I have to space out the running and the weights with rest days between like-exercises.  I regularly review my "recurring" list and drag things from there onto my weekly board as well, things like shopping and cooking (if I don't plan cooking I end up eating badly the whole week).  And there are potentially "one-off" cards that I need to create.

Next to my days of the week is my "everyday / tally" column where I have a small number of cards that are so important to me I want to track or do them every day.  This reduces clutter on my week day columns since I don't have to create a card for each day of the week.

Getting a weekly rhythm - the engine

The final inversion of my PKB experience occurred when I created some additional "try to do" cards explicitly for the purpose of doing "work".  These "work" cards are placeholders to indicate time spent doing "non-recurring" stuff, at the moment each one is roughly equivalent to an hour.   I push these onto my day columns along with my recurring cards.  I colour my "work" cards blue in trello so they stick out as points where I hope to do a solid block of (non-recurring) work.  Knowing where I can put these work cards and how many I can sustain on top of my regular week is one of the key things I want to visualise.

And suddenly... I have a dashboard;  a gauge (or set of gauges??) showing my week.  Each day of the week on my board has a WIP limit of sorts;  I can see if I've got too much on any given day. I can drag things around and make trade-offs as unexpected things happen during the course of the week, and I can prioritise my day, eg "can I try to do this before I go to work" etc .

I say "inversion" because prior to building my weekly board, my main focus was my backlog board with a single WIP (doing) column.  Now my primary dashboard is my weekly board with a column for each day of the week forming a "daily WIP" in conjunction with the "everyday / tally" column.  Is it a WIP in the kanban sense?  Well, maybe it roughly maps to the idea of a "today" column as proposed in the Personal Kanban book.  When I'm ready to do one of my blue "work" cards that I've scheduled for the current day, I can switch to my backlog board to easily see and review what my current focus / WIP for non-recurring work is.

My aim is to build up a "rhythm" between my recurring "try to do's" and my non-recurring "work" items whilst fitting all the other recurring stuff in as necessary.

The PKB book mentions that small tasks can be periodically rounded up and "sweated out" to help you clear out your backlog - these tasks are dubbed "ankle biters".  Small recurring things for me are handled by my weekly board.  I've rounded up the other small non-recurring stuff into a mini-backlog on my weekly board so that I can drag items from there to a day of the week as and when I think I can do them - I could even create a couple of "sweat-out" cards if I wanted. [Actually, I've put the ankle biters backlog list back on my backlog board next to my main backlog.  It's a way to weed out smaller things from my backlog.]

So, my backlog board is allowed to focus on the bigger things I'm trying to do with my life and my weekly board is the engine I need to tune to help do that as best I can given all my other constraints.

Sprinting on (non-recurring) work?

Knowing how my week is going to look when I plan out my weekly board also means I can look to gauge how much (non-recurring) "work" (on my backlog board) I can try achieve in a week and on which day.  So I corral some high-priority cards on my backlog board into a "week" column.  This maybe is a little bit like creating a scrum sprint inside kanban.  This gives me a weekly focus or goal, it makes me think more sharply about what I'm trying to do with my blue non-recurring placeholder "work" cards on my weekly board.

Every gauge needs a dial - using a slider card....

For each day of the week on my weekly board I also have a "slider" card called "-- done --" which starts at the top of the list.  As I complete tasks I drag this slider card down so that only cards not done are below it. This gives me a nice little indicator of where I'm at during the day, and a visual indicator of how much I got done on previous days and what didn't get done... plus I get a small dopamine hit for pushing things above that "--done--" card :)

Is my week a "value stream"?  Maybe, hopefully, I come out at the end of it a little better and a little closer to what I want to do. For me, Sunday is a good day to review the week, look how far my "-- done --" sliders got, think about which days were good or bad, whether I hit my everyday / tally targets, what rhythms or discoveries I made about how to do things better.   There's usually a relationship between my (recurring) try-to-dos and my "work" items as they represent things that are significant to me, as well as rhythms around the more humdrum stuff I have to do.