Off the Rails…
It was all going so very well. By the start of the 3rd
week I was beginning to get the hang of the process. I wasn’t a shining model
of productivity, but I was certainly making improvements. I was learning a lot about how I worked and
what I needed to do to become more productive. I had started making notes about
all the experiments I wanted to run in the coming weeks. I was keeping my PK Journal up to date. The
only issue was that I hadn’t tried it with real work yet because I was also
still on staycation. (I travel a lot for work, so when it comes to vacation,
I’m totally happy to just spend the time at home becoming fully present with
what a bad decision it was for someone who is horribly allergic to cats to
adopt three of them.) Being at home for the first part of this experiment had
allowed me to establish the physical habits of personal kanban and my hope was
that this would keep me rooted in the practice once I was on the road again.
So naturally, the obvious next step was to completely screw that
all up.
I had planned to be away on a retreat for a few days during
the 3rd week. While I was there I picked up a slight cold that
immediately turned me into a walker for about 8 days. Both of these events
meant that for a period of almost 2 weeks, I was completely unable to do work
on anything on my board.
Failure Bow
So… time for a Failure Bow
(If you aren't familiar with the Failure Bow, I'd like to recommend watching the Matt Smith TED talk below.)
While it would be easy to rip myself up for losing step, I
knew that was going to happen at some point. What I was more interested in was what
it would take for me to recover when it did happen.
Since I’d been keeping detailed notes on what was and was
not working I turned to those to try and see what issues were causing the
biggest trouble.
“Hi, My name is Dave… and I’m a Things-aholic.”
I was still using Things every day. I was recording tasks on
my board and working them, but there were additional items in Things that I
worked on and they never made it to the Kanban board. Most of them were
personal items, but it did seem kinda of pointless to me to be working with two
tools at once. It just divided my focus and make getting anything done that
much more complicated.
I decided that I was going to start capturing everything I
do on the board. I took everything listed in Things and created a post it for
each item. I sorted and grouped the whole thing on my Kanban board. My plan was
to try and go one week without using Things. During that time I would rely 100%
on the Kanban board.
I made some modifications to the layout of my board as well.
I added blocked boxes for some of the swimlanes and also made adjustments to my
WIP limits.
I decided that I would start each day with
(re)prioritization
I had learned that travel can have a very negative impact on
working this way. I had a number of jobs coming up that would require travel.
So, I decided to start researching electronic tools so I could test one out
during my next trip.
One of the things I have found to be invaluable in this
whole process is having the physical board to return to when things break down.
There have been a number of events and situations that resulted in me needing
to reset my approach. I’ll be posting
about them in the coming weeks. For anyone who is going to try personal kanban,
my first advice would be to start out with a physical board and develop good
habits with your practice. These will be an important touchstone for you as you
work through the changes this approach will have on your work.
The final thing that came out of my retrospective for
iterations 3 and 4, was a new question… what should I do about recurring tasks?
Was it really going to be worth creating post-its for recurring each item so
that there was a card for each one on each day of the week? That seemed
ridiculous. I had no answer, but sometimes, just having the question is a good start.
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