Project Management

Personal Kanban Week 1

From the The Reluctant Agilist Blog
by Dave Prior

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Categories: Agile, kanban, personal kanban, personal productivity, productivity

This Dysfunction Goes to Eleven

When this experiment started one of my goals for the first time box/iteration was just to see if I could actually give up my Things task list and follow the practice with a board. I had tried a number of other productivity frameworks and found that only pieces of them stuck. (Someday someone will write on a book on how to finish David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” book and I’ll actually get all the way through it.) And while I know that limiting work in progress is a cornerstone of this type of approach, and I did set WIP limits, I decided to be a little loose with the limits since I was just guessing at what they should be.

Because my larger plan is to test out different approaches to Personal Kanban, I wanted to start as simply as I could manage. I created a task board and began to fill it with post-its. The first lesson I learned was that I had far too much in my to do list to fit on my Kanban board. I decided to limit it to the things that seemed to be the most important at the time.

The Architect of my Own Demise

The most basic way to set up my board would have been to create three columns: On Deck, Doing and Done. I know this. However, when I sat down to work on it, I began struggling with how I would be able to visually understand the different types of things I had to do. My plan was to use this not just for work, but for my whole life. So, I made a decision to start with multiple swim-lanes. This is a choice I can’t say I was entirely comfortable with. It seems to violate (my current understanding of) one of the basic premises under which this system is designed to work. But… (I bargain with myself) baby steps. I decided that this would be an okay thing to try while I am working on coming up with a better solution

I started off by dividing my Backlog up into 5 swim-lanes, each feeding into it’s own On Deck and Doing columns (instead of having just one of each). I was able to limit myself to one column for Done though. The reason for this is that there were/are so many things I felt compelled to work on that I was afraid if I put them all in one box, without some kind of designation, I’d lose sight of something critical. (Yes, I realize this is a broken way to look at it.) There was also a part of me that was curious about how I would work through the prioritized items once they hit the On Deck boxes. The swim-lanes I set up were:

Work-ish: Obviously for things somewhat related to work
Reading (later changed to Reading and Research): self explanatory
SA/IT2: for work/volunteering I do for the Scrum Alliance and IT2
Personal Daily: These are things I do every day that I track
Personal: Personal projects and tasks I need to take care of

So here is my basic organizational system:

Even with the swim lanes I was still concerned about understanding the tasks on the board. Not so much from a priority standpoint, because I can handle that pretty easily with the On Deck backlogs. The desire for clarity is more about having a visual way to quickly understand that a given task is related to (work, personal, reading, etc.) This should have been easily handled by the swim-lanes, but there were sub groups I felt I needed to identify even within the lanes. So, I began with a variety of different sized and colored post-its, each one loosely designated to belong to some kind of additional detail on a task.

One of my challenges was (and continues to be) defining “value”. I believe the multi-colored, multi-sized post-its are part of trying to define that. There are tasks that obviously provide direct value to customers, like send Client X a demo license. There are items which provide indirect value to my ability to do my job: Read the new book by Diana Larsen book, “Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams and Projects”. There is work I do volunteering for organizations which provides value for others: Review submissions for Scrum Gathering. But there are other things I do which appear to be valuable only from the perspective of their impact on my body, brain or mood. How to capture this value in relationship to other items in the list continues to be a struggle and is one of the reasons for the multiple swim-lanes in my board. (How for example do I quantify and prioritize based on value if what I am comparing is the value of sending a client a demo license, compared to the mental health boost I get from meditating each day, or maybe just sitting back to read a comic book for fun.

It would be easy to argue that the non-work items do not provide value to a client and do not need to go on the board. But that seems to me to be a pretty thin definition of value. My goal was to try to put everything on the board. The problem was, it didn’t all fit. . One of the most important things I learned that week was that if I don’t put it on the board, it isn’t going to happen. So, I needed a kind of backlog nursery, where I could dump ideas and then periodically replenish the backlog on the board from that nursery.

I decided to hold a little personal retrospective at the end of each week to evaluate how things are going. The first week was really difficult for me, not because following the process was hard – that was actually pretty easy. The hard part was that Nigel Tufnel stopped by to crank the volume on my “obsessive tendencies” up to 11. Here are the important (and painful) things I learned about myself during week 1.

While some of the PK books will tell you to plan to do the unpleasant work first and then work your way towards the stuff you want to do, I found that if I don’t force myself to do the things I want to do, that I cram every possible minute full of the not-fun work and never get around to the enjoyable, recharge-oriented items on my list. (Remember, this is my vacation too.) I actually had to block out time to stop being productive and just sit around and read a book or play my guitar for fun.
I was so focused on getting the items across my board as efficiently and quickly as possible that I actually spent a few nights tossing and turning in a restless series of dreams about the board, the tasks and how to move them. (The last time I had dreams like this was during my brief, but disturbing addiction to playing Doom and Quake. Unfortunately, this time I didn’t get to wake up and grab the BFG to kill off some monsters.)
In my crowning moment of idiocy that week, I climbed off the treadmill halfway through a long workout because I realized I had not moved the card into the doing column. I was unable to continue the workout until I had the car in the right column. (Yes, I have issues.)
Throughout the week I found I was still using Things. As eager as I was to embrace the new system, I was still afraid to let go of the method I had developed in order to keep things from slipping through the cracks.

At the end of the first week, I know I have a long way to go. I’m nowhere near ready to deal with WIP, the waste I am creating or finding a better way of doing this. But, it’s a start. And, by the end of the week I was able to start talking myself down off the ledge of obsessing about moving the cards....But, they say admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.

Here is a snapshot of my board as I got ready to start on the 2nd week.

Posted on: February 12, 2013 03:15 AM | Permalink

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Anonymous

I am interested that doing a workout had a card, which could potentially be compared with, eg, client work for what gets done next.

The personal daily (things done every day) makes me wonder if this swimlane fits in the kanban system? For example in the same way that a project can be distinguished from business as usual by the fact it is a transition to a new business as usual, doing a treadmill workout sounds like business as usual (hopefully!) whereas learning a new piece of equipment might be a project. Putting business as usual work into a project creates the risk that it may not get done (due to being out-prioritised), whereas in an efficient system business as usual is necessary to keep the cogs turning. It also adds more complexity to the planning process, because you have to prioritise and manage tasks which are going to have to be done anyway.

As I read your post, I'm wondering if the swim lanes are in some way a hierarchy of value, eg treadmill workout is a child of personal daily. In a week, say, personal daily might require a minimum of 8 hours, consisting of any of its child tasks. Above that personal daily children compete on an open playing field with everything else.

I wonder if there is also an element of correlation between the next task I choose to do and the priorities of the rest of the backlog. Eg if I do no exercise in a week, then doing one hour of exercise (of any sort) will be a very high priority. But after 10 hours of exercise (of any sort), it's going to be hard justify exercise against an hour of work. So there is a decreasing marginal utility for each additional hour spent on personal daily (therefore lowering the likelihood that a personal daily task will be next highest priority).

Thanks for sharing this experiment, I'm appreciating using this as a mirror to reflect on how I organise myself and look forward to future posts.

Posted: Feb 14, 2013 6:05 PM

Anonymous

Hi Robert - thanks for your comments. I am still on the fence about the swimlanes. On one hand, it seems counter to what I'm trying to do here. On the other, my capacity to process the amount of stuff in the list comes completely unhinged without being able to separate the different types of work. I'm going to keep trying different things.

One thing you hit on that I am still struggling with is the stuff I have to do every day and establishing relative value against things which seem more important. It is easy to decide that sending out an invoice has more "value" than exercising, but I'm not sure if that is because it truly is more valuable or if the problem is that there is no way to quantify the relative value (over time) of something that seems initially non-valuable. This is the same type of issue organizations run into with things like training vs. working. Working today can give you $$ today, but training today could possibly give you $$$$ tomorrow.

In the update I just posted today I talk more about this, but what I've found in trying to practice this is that if I don't prioritize the items that are more "keep Dave sane so he can work" stuff, then I don't do it. I'll spend all day moving cards for work items that do not involve changing the oil and then the burn out starts to creep in.

Posted: Feb 25, 2013 2:56 PM

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Personal Kanban Week 1

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