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As much as I try to keep up with and write about trends in Agile project management, I always seem to learn something new! Though the trend of applying Agile for personal productivity is nothing new, the fact that there are two published books on this topic is new to me. Here's a couple of good books that may be worth you while if you are interested in applying Agile for your personal productivity initiatives. The first is titled Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life
As the books blub outlines:
Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work and limit our work-in-progress. Visualizing work allows us to transform our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices. Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve the way we work and the way we make choices to balance our personal, professional, and social lives. Neither a prescription nor a plan, Personal Kanban provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context. This book describes why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban.
Another book with a similar bent, but looking at the application of Lean overall for personal productivity is A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance
by Dan Markovitz:
by Dan Markovitz:
This book's blub outlines the book's content as follows:
A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance describes how you can foster a new mindset and improve your performance by applying Lean methods to your work. It translates powerful Lean tools such as visual management, flow, pull, 5S, and kaizen to your daily work, revealing how they can help to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and link you ever more closely to customer value. This practice will help you develop better self-awareness, more disciplined problem-solving skills, and the ability to self-correct errors.
This book not only provides the tools, but also teaches you how to find the root causes underlying your inefficiencies so you can eliminate them permanently. It will enable you to immediately improve personal productivity while developing the skills needed for continuous improvement. It includes real-world examples that illustrate how these principles have been successfully applied across a range of industries. Providing the perfect mix of what-to-do with why-to-do it, the text details a step-by-step approach to applying Lean principles to your work.
As if you did not have enough books and articles to read! But the payoff for reading these two books may will be worth the effort to spend since if you're already doing Agile, you are already familiar with the tools to become instantly productive for personal projects. For thoese new to Agile, what better way to start realizing the benefits than to see them in your personal life!
In this light, Agile is definitely starting to get pretty personal but in a very good way.
A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance describes how you can foster a new mindset and improve your performance by applying Lean methods to your work. It translates powerful Lean tools such as visual management, flow, pull, 5S, and kaizen to your daily work, revealing how they can help to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and link you ever more closely to customer value. This practice will help you develop better self-awareness, more disciplined problem-solving skills, and the ability to self-correct errors.
This book not only provides the tools, but also teaches you how to find the root causes underlying your inefficiencies so you can eliminate them permanently. It will enable you to immediately improve personal productivity while developing the skills needed for continuous improvement. It includes real-world examples that illustrate how these principles have been successfully applied across a range of industries. Providing the perfect mix of what-to-do with why-to-do it, the text details a step-by-step approach to applying Lean principles to your work.
Posted on: September 17, 2013 01:34 PM |
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