Personal Kanban: How to Simplify Your Professional Life with a Task Board
Miscellaneous / / April 03, 2023
A simple method will help streamline the accumulated tasks.
Renowned writer and professor of computer science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport, wrote the book New Principles of Business Communication. In it, he talks about how we arrived at a culture of constant communication and how it affects our productivity and mental health. With the permission of the MIF publishing house, we publish an excerpt from the fifth chapter. It is about how to effectively solve work tasks using a Kanban board.
Jim Benson thought a lot about how to optimize the work in the intellectual field. His consulting firm, Modus Cooperandi, specializes in developing unique procedures to help white-collar workers work together more effectively. Benson has previously worked in software development and is well versed in agile management techniques. This is probably why he often uses task boards in his work. […]
But when it comes to personal productivity, Jim Benson became famous for a thin book he self-published in 2011. It's called Personal Kanban, and it offers an enticing perspective: you can use agile management techniques that help teams of employees to implement complex projects to deal with the tangled tangle of responsibilities in their individual professional life.
The ideas behind the book are quite simple. And Benson briefly described them in a five-minute video that he posted on the book's website. The author is standing next to a large notebook placed on an easel. He fills the center of the sheet with multi-colored self-adhesive pieces of paper. They represent our own expectations, as well as those of relatives, friends, colleagues, and bosses. “All these tasks stick together in one lump in our minds, and every time we think about what to take on, we tear off a piece from this lump,” Jim explains. To do this, we need to wade through this pile of tasks and analyze them carefully in order to decide what to do next. “The task is not pleasant,” Benson sums up.
Personal Kanban offers a solution: structure this set of information with a personal task board. Benson thinks there should be three columns. The first one is called Opportunities. In it, using self-adhesive sheets, you enter information about your responsibilities. Each leaflet contains information about only one task. “And now the nightmarish array of work turns into a nice-looking ordered structure.” The second column is called "In Progress". There you move the sheets reflecting the tasks on which you started working. The key point related to this column (and this is the secret ingredient of the Kanban system as a whole) is that you can work on a strictly defined number of tasks at the same time. In the language of this system, this is "limiting the number of work in progress." In his video, Benson says to work on no more than three tasks at a time. As he explains, if you instead decide to take on a dozen different errands at once, then everything will end up in "a complete mess." He convincingly argues that you should not grab onto everything at once: devote your full attention to two or three things and take on a new task only after completing the previous one.
And so we logically approached the “Done” column. When the work is done, the leaflet moves there. Theoretically, this column is not needed at all, but Benson suggests that the psychological uplift experienced by a person, moving a piece of paper from the “In progress” column to the “Done” column, becomes a powerful stimulant factor. In the years since Benson's book was published, the system has gained hordes of fans. […]
The task board is an incredibly effective tool not only for coordinating the work of different teams, but also for structuring the work of individual employees […].
I have already said that I myself used this idea as a professor. As a graduate student in the computer science department at Georgetown, I organized my work using Trello boards. My spreadsheet looked like Benson's standard template, with "In Progress" and "Done" columns. Like many fans of personal Kanban systems, I created my own columns for those tasks which I want to fulfill, but at the moment I am not actively engaged in them (later I will talk about this more). Every Monday, I studied the information on the board, moved the cards around, and decided what I would work on that week. In the days that followed, I often checked the board to see what I could do during the time I set aside for graduate school duties. As soon as new requests came in - in the form of emails, phone calls or, as is often the case, questions passed past my students' office - I immediately wrote down the information on cards and posted it on the board to work on these moments Later.
Without a task board in my university work, I would depend on communication in style. hyperactive hive mindA workflow that focuses on ongoing communication and is fueled by haphazard flow messages delivered via digital means of communication such as e-mail and messengers.. As a result, I would be bogged down in sluggish correspondence with many people - day after day. I would become a typical victim of a hyperactive hive mind: someone who does not part with a laptop for even one meeting and never let go of his phone as he walked across campus trying to get a thousand things done at the same time. In other words, without this system, my job would be a living hell. With the help of the task board, I was able to significantly reduce resource consumption. Information about the upcoming work is placed on the board, structured, and I methodically complete the tasks in the time allotted for this. That is why, as you may have guessed, I became a strong advocate of using task boards not only for organization of the work of the team, but also to streamline the professional life of individual employees, dealing with mental labor.
To help you with this task, here are some best practice examples to help you get the most out of task boards.
1. Use multiple boards
Many proponents of personal Kanban use only one board to organize their professional tasks. I recommend taking a slightly different approach. Have a separate board for each role that you perform in the professional field. I am currently a university professor in three very different roles: researcher, teacher, and graduate student. For each of these roles, I started a separate board. So when I analyze my teaching activity, I am not disturbed by unrelated tasks in the field of research or work with graduate students. As a result, I do not have to switch between different activities and I solve work issues faster.
I also find it sometimes useful to have a separate board for large projects (say, those that take more than two weeks to complete). For example, not so long ago I was chairing a major scientific conference. This position involved the solution of numerous tasks. That is why I decided that it would be easier to create a separate board, the information on which would not overlap with other areas of my professional life. Once this project was completed, I no longer needed the board.
Of course, you can only operate with a limited number of boards so that the task does not become overwhelming. For this reason, I think it's a sound idea to have a separate board for every professional role and every major project. In this case, most people will have two to four boards that can be easily worked with. On the contrary, if you have ten boards, the resources required to switch between them will outweigh any benefits from task structuring.
2. Have regular one-on-one sessions to analyze information
When we talked about task boards for knowledge teams, I argued that the best way to analyze the information they contain is to have regular meetings. The same goes for your personal board. If you want to get the most out of this tool, set aside time each week to analyze and update the information on the board. During these individual sessions, review the details and move the cards around, updating the status of the work as needed. The process won't take long. If you do this regularly, 5-10 minutes will be enough.
Do not arrange such sessions too often: I came to the conclusion that once a week is enough. But do not ignore this type of activity. If you decide that task board is not a good enough method for storing information about your work responsibilities, then you will return to a feverish correspondence in the spirit of a hyperactive collective mind. Put the information about the individual session in your calendar and take it as seriously as all other meetings and meetings. Custom task boards can make your professional life a lot easier, but only if you're willing to invest your time in working with them.
3. Add a "Negotiable" column
As head of graduate school, I often have to discuss working issues with some of my colleagues: with the dean, with head of the graduate program and with two other professors who are part of the commission, which I heading. On my task board, I added a column for each of these employees and called it "To discuss at the next meeting." As soon as a question arises, when I need to get the opinion of someone from colleagues, I suppress the urge to send him a quick email. Instead, I enter information about the task in the “Discuss at the next meeting” column.
I meet with the head of the PhD Program on a weekly basis at a fixed time. During our meeting, we discuss all the issues that appeared in this column over the past week. As for the dean and committee members, I wait until there are enough questions in the Discuss column and then arrange a meeting to discuss everything at once. This approach may seem too simple to you, but it has had a very positive impact on my work.
Imagine, for example, that in a week there were five information cards in the Discuss with Dean column. During the meeting, which will last 20-30 minutes, we will develop a strategy with him on each of these issues. If I wrote him a letter every time, I would have to conduct five dialogues at the same time during the week. As a result, I would have checked my e-mail ten times and annoyed that I was distracted from work.
If you want to minimize endless messaging and get the most out of individual task boards, this is probably the most valuable piece of advice I can give you. Regular meetings can replace 90% of hectic correspondence. You just have to keep track of exactly what issues need to be discussed. With the help of the task board, this is easy to do.
4. Add a "Waiting for a response" column
If you are collaborating on intellectual work, sometimes you need to pause work on a task while you wait for another person to answer a question or missing information. If you've created a personal task board, these sticky questions can be easily tracked using the Waiting for Answer column. When you move a task there, mark on the card exactly who you are waiting for an answer from and what you will do when you receive the necessary information. This will allow you to stay on course until you have the power to influence the situation, and continue to work effectively when the necessary information arrives. More importantly, you put unresolved issues in a safe place and get rid of the underlying anxietythat something was not done.
The book "New Principles of Business Communication" is based on business cases and the latest research in the field of psychology and neuroscience. From it you will learn how to think systematically, what needs to be done to rebuild the workflow in an organization, in a team and for individual employees, and other interesting things.
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