Personal Kanban in a Nutshell

The practical guide to personal happiness

©2012 Copyright by Jurgen De Smet & Erik Talboom - another www.Co-Learning.be initiative

This version was published on 2012-10-05

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Contents

1 Introduction 1

Why Personal Kanban? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

How to use this book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

What can you expect? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2 Purpose 3

3 Theory of Constraints - TOC 4

4 Visualization 7

5 Categorize & Prioritize 10

6 Create your storyline 14

7 Work In Progress - WIP 17

8 Measure 19

Lead Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Control Charts or Variation Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Cumulative Flow Diagrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

9 Experiment, reflect and adjust 27

10 Time to clean up! 28

Cleaning up your DONE column . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Cleaning up your OPEN column . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

11 Discipline 32

Remove distractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Transparency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Make it easy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

CONTENTS

12 The Personal Kanban Transformer model 34

13 More about the authors 38

Co-Learning.be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Jürgen De Smet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Erik Talboom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

14 Acknowledgments 41

1 IntroductionWhy Personal Kanban?

There are several techniques that can help you organize your work, improve focus and generally helpyou be more productive, but none of them raise questions about your work, or bring enough value,not only professionally but also personally! That’s why we are convinced that personal kanban isthe way to go to bring more value to your life on all levels.

• If you’re struggling with your work-life balance or…

• If you don’t know anymore if you work on the important stuff or urgent stuff or…

• If you start questioning what you actually did during the day or…

• If you feel that you could do more within a day or…

• If you want to move from doing good work to doing great work or…

• If you are juggling multiple things to do and feel trapped or…

• If you think GTD (Getting Things Done) just didn’t provide you with what you needed or…

• …many more…

Then personal kanban will be a worthwhile investment of your valuable time to increase yourpersonal time management skills, day in and day out!

How to use this book?

This book is built in such a way that you’ll be guided through the basics behind the personal kanbansystem, going from the grandfather of all kanban systems over to elaborate metrics and more. But…you could skip everything and immediately jump to the “experiment” chapter which gets you goingwith personal kanban within a couple of minutes.

We do recommend to keep the book at hand for future reference, a handbook to provide improvementideas and thoughts, a re-read to give yourself a kick in the bum to keep experimenting… There is noend to your quest for optimization, even after years of practising personal kanban techniques youwill still be at the beginning of your quest to perfection.

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Introduction 2

What can you expect?

First time you read through the book and follow its instructions, you can expect to have a decent andtrustworthy system at hand towards personal happiness. You will have insights into why the systemworks and you will be aware of many tips and tricks to optimize your personal implementation andbecome a true time management Jedi. Keeping the book at hand for times to come and you’ll beequipped to overcome any obstacle on your path to happiness.

Enjoy the ride…

2 PurposeAs many things in life personal kanban also starts with a purpose: your purpose in life!

As you have bought this book it means that you want to do better, or something is holding you backfrom where you want to be. Before you continue with the rest of this book it is crucial to figure outwhat you want to achieve out of it. There are several very nice ways to figure out what you want,but let us stick to filling out a simple questionnaire for now. Take a pen and paper and answer thefollowing questions:

1. What makes you smile?

2. What activities make you lose track of time?

3. What makes you feel great about yourself?

4. Who inspires you the most?

5. What do people typically say about you?

6. What would you regret not fully doing, being or having in your life?

7. What are some challenges, difficulties and hardships you are in process of overcoming?

8. Where do you lose time?

With the answers in mind and in front of you, imagine you are now 90 years old¹, sitting on a rockingchair on your porch. You are blissful and happy, pleasedwith thewonderful life you have been living.Looking back at your life and all that you have achieved and acquired, all the relationships you havedeveloped… What matters to you most? List the first 3 to 5 things that pop in your head. Re-readall your notes. Let the words guide you to write a single, memorable sentence on the bottom of thepaper. One sentence that defines your purpose to change how you live your life day in day out.Copy that sentence on a small piece of paper and stick it somewhere in your wallet where you seeit every time you open it for cash, cards or anything else. This will remind you why you are doingthings differently during the hard times to come.

Take another piece of paper and write down the things which you think are holding you back fromfully optimizing your life towards that purpose. Keep both papers stored for future reference andevaluation of your personal kanban system. We do recommend to frequently go back to the list ofthings that are holding you back and strike through the items that have become untrue, or weresolved, as you progress with your personal kanban system. Even though it might sound fluffy,acknowledging your victories, wins, in a very tangible way will help you to keep going and to behonest to yourself. It makes you feel good.

¹If you’re 90 don’t bother, you should not be reading this book but enjoying all the free time left connecting to other people. Optimizing yourtime is not a necessity anymore.

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3 Theory of Constraints - TOCIn order to really understand the power of personal kanban, one should start with the grandfatherof all kanban systems: Eliyahu Goldratt’s management theory, the Theory Of Constraints¹ (TOC).

It is in this theory that you will find a lot of wisdom on where to focus, how to optimize your ownReturn On Investment (ROI), and that is exactly what you want to achieve with personal kanban.TOC provides you with 5 focusing steps that you can use to increase your understanding on how touse any kanban system around.

1. Where is the bottleneck?Where is work piling up and where do you have idle time?

2. How can you exploit the bottleneck?Can you optimize your system in order to focus on only doing valuable activities? Can youdelegate less important or less valuable work to others?

3. How can you subordinate and synchronize everything to your bottleneck?Can you change your system, so that you do not take in more than what your system is ableto cope with?

4. How can you elevate the bottleneck?Can you add another “you” into the system?

5. Go back to step 1.

The theory of constraints tells you that whatever system you try to set up, there will always be abottleneck and only one bottleneck. The trick is to see this bottleneck arising before it becomes aproblem. Taking into account there is always a bottleneck, you can keep using the 5 focusing stepsto optimize your (personal) kanban system. As we want to keep this book a bit lightweight we willonly focus on step 3 for now! An important learning to take from the theory of constraints is thefact that it is of no use to start too many things at once and by doing so build up inventory, asthis inventory is reducing the ROI of the person or system it is part of. This is basic throughputaccounting, but not that simple to put in practice as it seems to be.

Net Profit = Throughput - Operational Expense

ROI = Net Profit / Investment

• What is your throughput factor? What do you consider as valuable return on your timeinvested?Example: throughput = small, single direction hypothesis validated; staying physically fit,family time, going out…

¹http://www.goldratt.com/pdfs/toctpwp.pdf

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Theory of Constraints - TOC 5

• What is your operational expense in this equation? What does your time cost you (or others)?What materials and spaces do you use?Example: operational expense = office location, your wage, your car, your time…

• Finally, what is your investment? What is a result of your time used that didn’t provide thefull return (throughput) yet?Example: investment = lines of code not being used by customers; requirements that havenot been delivered to customers (list, document…); defect lists; all the actions started butnot delivered upon, time spent in the garden but garden not properly done yet, time usedin renovating the bathroom but not finished yet… (things started but no value achieved as yet,also called inventory)

Considering the above mathematics and what it means in the context of your day-to-day workand family life, TOC would advice you to focus on throughput, looking at the organization of youractivities and subordinate every decision to the bottleneck. For personal kanban this bottleneckis us, we, me & you! Thus you need to subordinate every decision to yourself and make sure thatyou do not build up too much inventory for yourself.

TOC tells you to optimize your personal ROI by limiting thework taken up and staying focusedon getting things done ASAP before starting a new activity.

It is crucial that you understand the impact of starting too many things at once, without gettingthings done for the remainders of this book. Simply put, it means that it is better to start stoppingand stop starting in order to increase the speed you get things done. When you get more thingsdone and get them done faster, you get the opportunity to guide your own life, instead of your lifebeing guided by the urgency of stuff to be done.

Let us put this statement in the accounting formula: Number of tasks you finished - time you spend= Your Net Profit

example 1: You start working on 15 things at once and are able to finish 10 within 5 days = 5example 2: You start working on 25 things at once and are able to finish 8 within 5 days = 3example 3: You start working on 25 things at once and you are a magician and still able to finish 10within 5 days = 5

And now continue to see how your personal return of your time invested is affected: Your Net Profit/ amount of items you invested time on but are not finished = Your personal ROI.

example 1: 5 / 5 items started and not finished = 1example 2: 3 / 18 items started and not finished = 0,16example 3: 5 / 15 items started and not finished = 0,33–> based on personal ROI example 1 is the better solution.

As you can see in these simple examples, starting 15 items versus 25 has a huge impact on yourpersonal return on investment! As soon as you have your personal kanban system up and running,you can track this for yourself and feel how different life can be by optimizing on your personal ROIas explained above.

Theory of Constraints - TOC 6

In order to limit your commitments, promises and todo’s to an acceptable level you’ll need to figureout how much you are able to do.How do you find out what your real capacity is?How do you know where your personal bottleneck is?

You visualize your work, activities, to-do’s!

As an extra youmight want to try out the TOC² related Bottleneck game - http://www.agilecoach.net/coach-tools/bottleneck-game/³ - in order to require an even better understanding about theprinciples behind the TOC

²http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints³http://www.agilecoach.net/coach-tools/bottleneck-game/

4 VisualizationVisualization is key to get an understanding of what you do! For us the first step towards managinganything is to start visualizing it. In many cases you have a feeling, you know what you do andwhat might be wrong, but still you continue to live your life as you did before and ignore yoursubconscious thoughts around the issues. It is only when people are confronted with the realitythey live in, that actions are taken to improve it. So, even though you think you know what you do,you don’t! That is one of the reasons it is crucial to visualize what you want to optimize. Propervisualization will allow you to gather data and truly validate your feelings about the activities youdo or don’t do and how it affects your life.

One way to visualize what needs to be done is to make to-do lists, one for work, one for groceryshopping, one for the wedding, your agenda for appointments with whom ever, your phone forpeople you need to call back… All these separately kept lists easily get cluttered and of no use todiscover patterns and optimize your activities to your needs. It doesn’t allow you to understandyour capacity, and is thus not helping to optimize your personal time invested versus the return youwould like to achieve, either professionally or personally.

That’s where kanban comes into play! First thing to do is to visualize what ever you still need orwant to do in what is called a backlog of activities and categorize those. The most important reasonwhy you need to visualize everything is to create a sense of security and relaxation in your brain.Some people believe that their mind works like a (structured) backlog of things to come. But inpractice we have seen this is not the case. Did you ever lie awake in the evening trying to fall asleepbut you can’t? Because you are thinking about all the things you still need to do, tomorrow oranytime soon. It is causing so much stress on your mind that it will actually keep you from gettinga good night’s sleep. If we can write down all these things you shouldn’t forget into a system thatyou trust, you alleviate this stress on your mind and this opens up some energy to enjoy life more.

What’s the difference of using kanban to visualize our activities versus a centralized, single todo list?Hmmm, valid question. Let us take a very commonly used todo list to make it clear: a shopping list.It might look like this:

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Visualization 8

In general this list is hanging on the fridge and we add items to it as we run out of them during ourday to day life. This seems to be a good list at first sight, but then we use the same list to go to thegrocery store. We go through the first isle and find the carrots, milk and apples, in the next isle wefind the yoghurt and beer, suddenly we arrive at the checkout desk and we still need toothpaste…damn, must have missed it somehow while wandering through all the isles! We soon experiencethat this pre-filled todo list does not fit the purpose of shopping very well. This is one of the reasonsthat these days (Sept. 2012), we find mobile applications addressing the problem of arranging thepre-filled shopping list to the layout of the grocery stores.

So, if we have mobile applications that solve this issue, what else could be wrong? For the purposeof shopping… nothing. In this case it is sufficient to have an ordered list as the rest is just a binarything: either we have it with us, or we do not have it with us. We might just add quantities to eachitem. But what about using a similar todo list for planning a wedding? Would that be enough?Guess not. Similar to a lot of other activities you do, day in and day out, you cannot just considerthem done or not done, and thus the binary model does not work for all of your activities. In orderto properly visualize your day to day activities you will need a model that takes a multitude ofdimensions into account.

In order to get to a more useful visualization, you provide depth into your backlog of activities,provide visibility on how you get those activities done and last but not least: you visualize movementor progress of your activities. All of this is in one central system, your personal kanban board!

• Depth: categorization and prioritization of your activities according to the insights that seemimportant to you at this moment in time.

• Topography: storyline of how you get your stuff done.

Visualization 9

• Movement: progress you make in the things you need or want to do.

More on these subjects in the following chapters! And keep in mind that you need to visualizeeverything you want to optimize so that you are confronted with the reality you live in. The moreyou leave out of your system, the harder it will be to really improve your personal situation. Andthat’s your goal right?

Also have a look at this article to see a summary of the difference of visualizationin a kanban versus a to-do list: http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/primers/mapping-your-work-with-personal-kanban/¹

¹http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/primers/mapping-your-work-with-personal-kanban/

5 Categorize & PrioritizeIn the previous chapter we briefly addressed the need to provide depth in your visualization inorder to gain insight in what are your real priorities. It is important that you use an easy way ofcategorizing to generate insights into your backlog of activities. A system that supports you, andonly you, in prioritizing your work. The structure you use to visualize your backlog should help youdecide what to do next after finishing a task. It should help you answer the question: “What shouldI do now?”. It is this prioritization or insight into your list of to-do’s that will help you to becomemore focused, productive and live a happier life! Give it some thought.

A very popular and easy way to generate proper insights into your day to day activities is to usequadrants, this is easy to grasp and change. Quadrants give you insight into your activities using2 dimensions, axes, and are thereby relatively easy to populate and manage. We as humans love touse quadrants to visualize or categorize things, just think of the infinite universe we live in and howit is defined in the Star Trek series. That’s right they use quandrants as well, alfa - beta - gamma -delta.

An example of a system you can use is the Eisenhower Matrix¹ where you have quadrants relativeto the urgency and importance of a task.

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method

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Categorize & Prioritize 11

If you start from the Eisenhower Matrix representation you should change things a bit, especiallythe naming, in order to create a better sense of balance in life. If you spend most of your time inthe urgent and important quadrant (as advised), handling crises, then there is not much of a life tolive left and stress is your only option. This thought gets us to propose a similar quadrant systembut named differently. A structure that allows you to easily classify your activities and visualizewhat to do next. The main difference between this model and the one from Eisenhower, is that youshould aim to focus most of your energy on the quadrant of Kaizen so you can more easily avoidactivities ending up in the quadrant of panic.

Categorize & Prioritize 12

Using the tag ‘less important’ instead of ‘not important’ will help you really classify your items asit is easier to admit things are less important than admitting you have non important activities todo, all the things you do are important to you in some way. Choose your words carefully as theywill influence your behavior, try out how words influence your feelings and use the more effectiveones.

You can read the full article on how to use these Matrices for personal kanbanoptimization here: http://talboomerik.be/2012/03/21/transformer-personal-kanban-2/²

Next to using a matrix, you can also use different colors to identify different needs in combinationwith a categorization on size of your work. Example: use yellow for work, green for household, redfor accounting, blue for friends/family and use a quadrant representation to classify them as XL =a lot of work to do, will take a long time; L = couple of days of work but probably not more; M =should be able to finish this task within a single day; S = should be able to finish this in an hour if Ifocus.

²http://talboomerik.be/2012/03/21/transformer-personal-kanban-2/

Categorize & Prioritize 13

Here you already have 2 ways of representing your backlog in different dimensions. It is importantto know that this structure will change frequently as life is passing by! When you are young andsingle, youmight go for business asmuch as possible while this most probably (will) (have) change(d)when getting married and having children running around. So be prepared to change this frequentlyand often as you see or feel the need. You can combine different options, just a quick piece of advice:don’t make it too complicated. It will only frustrate you, make it harder for you to keep an overviewand it will keep you from more important work. Start small and adjust when you feel the need.

There aremanyways to prioritize work: CoveyMatrix³, StoryMapping⁴, AllocationModels⁵, ThemeScoring⁶, Kano Analysis⁷, Innovation Games⁸…

Try, experiment & learn I would say, but foremost keep it simple and keep it changing!

³http://www.orgcoach.net/timematrix.html⁴http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/03/story-map⁵http://www.investmentu.com/asset-allocation-model.html⁶http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/tools/theme-scoring⁷http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model⁸http://innovationgames.com/

6 Create your storylineAs you already have generated insights in what you still need to do (see previous chapter), you alsoneed to build insights in how you do things. You do this by building your personal storyline, asone might call it. A storyline represents the way you do your work, as work is progressing it getsdifferent states, like chapters in a book or acts in a play. The most simple representation we canthink of, is that work is either open (not started),WIP (work in progress, therefore started) orDone(delivered value to us - monetary or any other). But what do those 3 states tell you? Not that much!You need to figure out your own sensible storyline for the work you generally take on. In order togenerate insights in your work try to answer the following questions:

• What does open exactly mean to you?

• Do you already do some work there?

• Do you spend time in preparation?

• What comes after it?

• What is WIP for you?

• What do you do exactly, day in day out?

• What types of activities are those?

• What is done?

• Is it really done or do you still follow up on those things afterwards?

It is with these answers that you can build your own personal Value Stream¹ on how your workenters your system, coming from somewhere and you doing some things to get the work done. ValueStream mapping² is a Lean technique to optimize your process and visualize possible improvementsof non value added (NVA) activities, business value added (BVA) activities and customer valueadded (CVA) activities and with this optimize the process ROI, very similar to what you alreadywanted to achieve with applying the ideas and thoughts behind the Theory of Constraints. Thinkabout…

• CVA as the activities you do that people around you value very much and compliment youwith.Example: doing the dishes more often will provide compliments of your wife, having a walkthrough the park with the family will put a smile on all faces…

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_stream_mapping²http://colearningbe.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/value-stream-mapping/

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Create your storyline 15

• BVA as activities that you have to do but add no extra value to your purpose.Example: doing your accountancy, sleeping…

• NVA as activities that you do but have no contribution to your purpose at all.Example: answering all your incoming mails within 1 minute from arrival (get rid of allthose interrupting notifications now!), reading all unread mail in your mailbox for that matter,giving excuses not to start lawn-mowing…

The idea is to generate insights in what you do, which results in different states your work will gothrough. Important during this exercise is to keep track of the work you have, things to do and workthat is ready to move to the next stage as this will help you to identify your own bottlenecks andthus support your personal time optimization towards your purpose.

An example picture of a Value Stream mapped to kanban board columns:

In this simple example you see that we have 5 stages within our work, these are based on combiningyour activities into types and look for places in your storyline where there is a logical split betweenphases. Sometimes it will make more sense to merge some steps into one stage, depending on thefeedback loops within the Value Stream (# marked). Our basic example shows you to set a dailygoal of what you would like to achieve the next 24 hours - Today column. By doing so you getinformation how well you are able to design your own day to day work and it unconsciously helpsyou to focus. Analyzing how to perform an activity and doing the activity has been put in a single

Create your storyline 16

column as this is a continuous loop (feedback loop) and separation would not provide any usefulinformation. Waiting for feedback from others is kept separate in order for us to make sure that wekeep poking for a result on a regular basis. Another reason to keep a “wait” state is to visually splitwhat is real work and what is not, which allows you to manage your time more appropriately. Takeinto account that this is just a simple example and does not have to be your storyline!

The more accurately you visualize your work, the more you get rid of the cognitive biases³ we livewith. As the New Yorker nicely put it: “Why smart people are stupid!”⁴.

³http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases⁴http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html

7 Work In Progress - WIPSo you have a purpose that is related to your priorities by means of a categorization, generatingfocus, and also a storyline which your work flows through… is that enough? Nope! As you haveseen from the Theory of Constraints you need to limit the work to subordinate to the bottleneckin your system. So you should put limits on your work in progress to optimize your personal timespent.

By putting work in progress limits (WIP limits) you generate a continuous flow of activities throughyour system, which will provide you with a good sense of your personal capacity. This will helpyou to avoid stress and make it easier for you to make promises you can keep. For you to find asuitable limit, you can either guess or do research, the rest is experimenting.

1. Guessing your WIP limitsAnswer the following question: “How many activities from your backlog do you think youcan get done within a single week?”. Then take this answer and divide it by 2 to get youstarted. Use that figure to put a limit on your work in progress. It might sound scary butdon’t forget the purpose of these WIP limits. These will help you to finish things faster andthereby increasing your throughput. This will give you an enormous sense of fulfillment.

2. ResearchIf you do not feel comfortable with putting a WIP limit on your system immediately, thendon’t and discover a valid limit through research. Start using your personal kanban systemwithout any limits and track the amount of items in each columns day in day out for a week or2, while practicing the focussing steps from the Theory of Constraints to eliminate bottlenecks.With this data at hand you can easily retrieve good enough averages to use as WIP limit oneach of your columns. This is not a joker to not implement WIP limits, it will just give youthe opportunity to get started and discover the best starting limits for you.

Applying WIP limits on your system will generate a natural flow from left to right, top to bottomand confront you to finish activities before starting new ones!

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Work In Progress - WIP 18

The challenge you have is to keep buffers (ready columns, today columns, wait columns…) as smallas possible and keep the amount of items in the columns similar to the given WIP limits. Yourinstinctive reaction should be to respect these limits at all times, but it doesn’t mean that you cannever break them. Just keep in mind that the only person you are cheating by breaking your WIPlimits is yourself. It is those WIP limits that you’ll have to experiment with in order to achieve abalance in life! Once you feel comfortable with the limits in your system, it is time to experimentand lower or increase your WIP limit with 1 while investigating the impact it has on your life,productivity, feelings, success, and keep experimenting for optimization. If you didn’t change yourWIP limits for a couple of months then it is time to do so!

If you have read through the book sequentially then you are at a point where you have everythingat hand to start using your personal kanban system. There is only one more recommendation wehave before continuing with some more elaborated topics: JUST DO IT!

8 MeasureHave you created your first personal kanban already? It would be a really good idea to get startedbefore you continue this story, we’ll wait for you, but you’re the boss of your time. So as you know,hypotheses are validated with data! You measure what you do to validate your assumptions aboutthe work you do and optimize your time. Lean is providing very good measurements to work withon process level, so let’s set up a couple for you!

Lead Time

To start measuring your personal effectiveness you must track some basic data which you accu-mulate into simple, understandable graphs that provide you insights into your personal kanbanexperiments. For the sake of simplicity and within the scope of this book, we want to keep it simplefor you and therefore limit it to 2 elements to track:

1. The date when you add a work item into your backlog. If your situation needs more detailsyou could also track the time of adding an item, but at first this would be too much overhead(NVA) and might clutter your results.

2. The date when an item on your board is put on done, the end, final state before it ends up inthe trash can. Again, only track time if your situation requires it.

The time between those 2 markers is what is called Lead Time in Lean. It measures the time it takesyou to go from idea to implementation. And the better you get organized the more you’ll see thistime shortening over time. It gives you a good indication to track if your experiments to manage,and live your live, are delivering as expected.

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Measure 20

Control Charts or Variation Reports

As it is of no use to investigate each separate item one by one you use what is called Control Charts¹or Variation Reports. These charts will provide you with a general overview on how fast yourbacklog items move through your system. Together with some colors to match your categorizationon your kanban board you get insights that allow you to balance your life more appropriately. Itallows you to predict what you can accomplish in a given timeframe and thus allows you to providecommitments to customers, friends and family. Similar as one would do to customers with an SLA- Service Level Agreement. It is the secret sauce to keep promises and avoid stress!

This kind of variation report keeps track of each of your to-do’s lead times and with this data you cansee that in general the to-do items in the above example take between 5 and 8 days to be completed.This is really good SLA data. Above and below the control limits (5 and 8) you can find special causevariation items and it is worth your time to investigate the special cause variation going below thelower control limit (5) and see how you could copy the circumstances, settings and environment ofthese fast moving items and apply these to other to-do’s. Maybe there are structural patterns hiddenthere that increase your personal happiness and productivity tremendously.

¹http://blog.benjaminm.net/2009/05/12/control-capability-charts-on-a-kanban-software-development-project/

Measure 21

Let us guide you through 2 common examples of what you could see from a control chart in thecontext of a personal kanban system.

Example 1:

As you can see in the above image, there are a lot of red dots out of your upper control limit, thisis a pattern. Knowing the red color identifies accounting activities, you ask yourself why those areall taking longer than other activities in life. It seems those activities take a long time because youalways start with the accounting and allow yourself to disrupt your work with other, more fun,things to do. Another thing your recognize while answering the question, is that you always waituntil the last responsible moment to take up those accounting items, having them in your backlogfor a long, long time and thus having a long lead time. With this in mind you could conclude thatthese type of activities are not really valuable to you and thus hire an accountant to take over thoseactivities for you (exploiting from TOC).

Example 2:

Measure 22

In the above image we notice a pattern where all activities fall outside your upper and lower controllimits. This in general shows you that your categorization (colors) does not work for your purposeas certain items stay in your backlog for a long time while others are taken up almost immediately!If this is the case for you, investigate your personal categorization model versus your purpose andexperiment with another model of categorization and thus prioritization.

Cumulative Flow Diagrams

Next to the basic data you can keep track of the amount of items you have in your kanban columns,adding a done number to what was done before, in what is called a Cumulative Flow Diagram².This kind of diagram gives you insights into the application of your WIP limits in relation to theabove mentioned Lead Times. As your kanban system confronts you on a day to day basis with thefact that you need to start finishing and stop starting, you’ll see and feel the effect of having focusand less work in progress. The cumulative flow diagrams can provide you with insights into howeffective your categorization/prioritization is, how well you follow up on items that need feedbackfrom others and many more things.

²http://www.findthatpdf.com/search-53403545-hPDF/download-documents-creating-and-interpreting-cumulative-flow-diagrams-pdf.htm

Measure 23

Below, a couple of images that introduces you how to read a cumulative flow report. This kind ofreporting on top of your personal kanban system might just be too much BVA (business value addedactivities) or NVA (non value added activities) and should only be put in place if really needed.

Measure 24

Measure 25

Measure 26

Tools

This is the moment you will probably need to get back to some computer aided tools. Werecommended you to use excel or google docs to help you generate these trend reports of the singulardata you gathered on your post-its. Does this mean that you have to use these tools on a daily basis?Absolutely not! Once a week or every second week, depending on your context, you duplicate thedata from your done items into the spreadsheet and once this is done you finally remove the itemsfrom your kanban board.

If you get into a situation that you have a lot of items in your done column, then it is due time toadd another item in your backlog with highest priority: “personal retrospective”. As this item hasthe highest priority this will be the next thing to start working on and forces you to have a personalreflection moment.Ask yourself why there are still so many items in your done column?What is the data pointing to? How can you avoid this?What do you need to change in your system?–> Use the answers and your new insight to adjust your personal kanban system and move on.

At this moment you have everything at hand to change your behavior and improve your personalROI. There is no reason not to experiment doing things differently!

9 Experiment, reflect and adjustWith all your work visualized, preferably tangible, in front of you and some basic measurements,you really have all the tools you need to analyze data versus your feelings, find patterns that arekeeping you from getting where you want to be, adjust your behavior and evaluate your systemagain.

Be prepared to constantly challenge yourself and build in some moments of reflection on the datagathered. As you change the way you live your life things will change as well and this changein context will require a change in your personal kanban system. There is no way out, as contextchanges your purpose in life changes as well. In the extreme, you can also change your personalkanban system according the time of year. You might have a Xmas categorization and storylineto get your cruising through this amazing holiday period, buying presents, decorating the house,preparing food, having parties…

The simple steps

1. What is valuable to you at this moment?

2. What categories do you see in the above values?

3. List all the things (personal, professional…) you still have to do in those categories.

4. Build your storyline of getting things done, what is interesting for you to know?

5. Get your items flowing through the board visually, day in day out

6. Measure your personal performance

7. Analyze frequently how things went and adjust/change

Building up and maintaining your personal kanban does not need to take a lot of time, get the basicsup and running and just do it! You do not need all the stuff contained in this book, get your workvisualized in a single backlog with an open, WIP and done column is already going to get you a longway forward in optimizing your own time and investment.

This small investment in visualizing personal activities, to-do lists have been proven an excellenttechnique to help people manage their professional but also private lives and become happier moreeffective people all-round.

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10 Time to clean up!Now that you have your backlog and storyline visualized and are running your first experimentswith your own personal kanban system, it’s time to talk about cleaning it up from time to time. Wealready mentioned this a couple of times, the idea is that work flows through your system as fast aspossible. What we did not talk about yet is the fact that once work moves to your WIP, it has to bedone. So this means that under normal circumstances you will never remove work from your WIParea without finishing it first. It’s possible that you have an exception to this rule from time to time.Maybe something that you started does not need finishing anymore, but as we have experienced thisis almost always a symptom. A sign that you can improve your system. Maybe that item stayed inyour WIP way too long. Maybe it was something that you never really started working on but justput in your WIP because you thought you needed to start it but then did not. So if we can skip WIPin most cases for clean up, this leaves us with the two ends of our flow system OPEN and DONE.

Cleaning up your DONE column

Let’s talk about cleaning up DONE first. So you are cruising through your work, finishing a lot ofthings. They all get moved to your DONE column so that’s great. Maybe you are still wondering,what’s the value of keeping them? They are done, right? Well yes, you are right to some extent.You might be forgetting that our personal kanban system is not only a work management system,it’s also a learning structure. So what can we learn from the things we finished?

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Time to clean up! 29

First of all, we can track our measurements on finished work, remember chapter 8? It is a goodidea to hold a personal retrospective every week to go through you finished items, add them to yourspreadsheet to adjust your graphs and see how things changed. It’s also a good time to think aboutwhat you could change in your work. Are there items in there that made you exceptionally happy?Are there things in there you want to do more of, this means that similar items should be prioritizedhigher in your backlog. Maybe you find some work items in there that give you a bad taste in yourmouth even though you finished them. Do you hate doing administration, really dislike cleaning,it can be whatever. Do you feel as if this is work that you should not be doing and it is keeping youfrom actually working on the most important things for you? Remember the theory of constraints,it’s time to exploit your bottleneck. Can you find someone else to help you with these chores?Would it be more valuable to get an accountant or a cleaning lady? Or would it be a good idea toreserve one pomodoro¹ every day or twice a week to handle these tasks that you dislike but haveto do anyway? By creating this heartbeat, it might be easier for you to focus on what really feelsvaluable to you. So why don’t you go ahead and do that right now, we’ll wait.

¹http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Time to clean up! 30

Cleaning up your OPEN column

Alright, so now you know why it is important to clean up your DONE column from time to time.Let’s take a look at the second point of periodical clean up, the OPEN column. Hey wait a minute,at the start of this book we told you to write down everything you wanted/needed to get done. Andnow we are giving you a way out of this? In a way yes, but hold on for a minute. We’ll explainhow this is a good thing. Did you ever think about doing something, maybe you even wrote it downsomewhere. And then after six months you find that piece of paper, or the to do list you put thatitem in, or you just remember that you wanted to do this. And then you realize that it is totallyirrelevant by now. It means something when tasks stay in your backlog for too long. It might meanthat they are really not that important to you after all. I might also mean that things have changedin your life making these things move to the background. It’s no use keeping these in your system.Whatever system you use for prioritization, these long time residents have a big chance of cloggingup your backlog. So it is a good idea to periodically go through your backlog and see which itemshave been in there for a long time and reflect on these items. Should they still stay in there or it istime to let go of that task? Is it something that you really, really care about or is it just taking upspace?

The more pleasant situation where you can remove items from your backlog is when they havebeen finished, by you or someone else, without you consciously tracking it in your system. These

Time to clean up! 31

things happen, maybe not as often as we would like, but they do happen. These are extra wins tocelebrate and something you can again get feedback from. Were these items picked up by someoneelse? Maybe you can make an arrangment with that person and make it more explicit that he/shewill take care of these things in the future. Did you actually finish them without you moving themthrough your system? Why didn’t you track them, you could have gotten points for them. Or didyou finish these items when you didn’t have your personal kanban structure with you? Learn fromthis how you can improve your system.

Just like cleaning up your DONE column, it’s important to clean up your backlog periodically. Westarted doing this every three months and got the feeling that is took us too long. So we are currentlyexperimenting with doing this every month and it feels like a better heartbeat. Doing this morefrequently now helps us to keep the timebox for this action shorter and makes our cleanup morefocused. We already found some things that we decided to delegate to someone else. We also learnedabout things that are less important to us than we thought when we added them to our backlog. Itis not always easy to let go of these things, but it will free up space in your mind and your systemfor new items.

11 DisciplineThere are many examples to prove that personal kanban is very effective in guiding you to a happierexistence but… You will need to have discipline!

• Discipline to add everything you need to do in life to your system

• Discipline to respect the WIP limits

• Discipline to keep track of your progress

• Discipline to reflect on how things are working out for you

• Discipline to gather relevant data that supports your cause

• Discipline to experiment and adjust according your current context at that moment in time

• Discipline…

You get the picture I presume, discipline is key! So how do you keep disciplined in using yourpersonal kanban system when it confronts you with your own disfunction? The natural reaction toconfrontation is to avoid it and thus stop using the system but that is not what you want of course.So here are some tips and tricks to keep yourself disciplined.

Remove distractions

Up until now you had no guidance to which tools to use for your personal kanban board and thisis on purpose. Most of the people around are tempted to use electronic tools to implement theirown personal kanban system and there is nothing wrong with this but it opens up opportunities toneglect the system and get distracted. When keeping your personal kanban system in an electronictool you are forced to use some kind of electronic device like your mac, PC, smartphone, tablet…All of these electronic devices provide you with a million options for use besides your personalkanban system. Unless you are very disciplined, you can easily get trapped in today’s bad habitof opening social media tools and start mailing, chatting, tweeting… instead of maintaining yourpersonal kanban system. That is the reason we believe it is better to keep your personal kanbansystem away from electronic tools and use tangible materials on a single purpose location instead,avoiding distractions.

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Discipline 33

Transparency

Personal kanban is called personal because it helps you optimize your life towards your purpose andnot necessarily because you have to keep it hidden for everybody else. It is a good habit to allow yourclosest friends, family, wife, kid(s)… follow up on your personal kanban board! By providing thetransparency to the people around you, the people you have given commitments to, on the progressyou make related to those commitments, you generate an informal kind of peer pressure and theurge to really get things moving on the board. This kind of low level pressure will keep you focusedand disciplined and serves you very well in achieving a more balanced and happier life.

Make it easy

You have no distractions to get to your personal kanban system, you have made your personalkanban system transparent to all your friends and family, but your system is so advanced andcomplicated to understand that it takes at least 2 minutes to get an item in the right category inyour backlog. If this is the case then you lose the effect of transparency and you just increased thetime needed to maintain your personal kanban system. By default the time to maintain your systemis at most BVA and should be reduced to the absolute minimal as this time is taking away time frommore valuable activities. As a consequence you become less effective and out of balance! This kindof glitch in your system will generally lead you to reduce the times you update the board. You startbatching the updates with the idea to become more efficient, which might be true. Efficient doesnot mean effective though! Effective means to efficiently do the right things, while efficient leavesyou the option to just do the wrong things faster.

Common results of batching are lower quality, higher complexity and lost information which resultsin a less usable board to guide you towards your purpose in life. This phenomenon might even leadto a reinforcing cycle in the sense that a less usable board will get less attention, less attention willresult in fewer updates, fewer updates results in an even less usable board and this keeps going untilyou stop applying the technique of personal kanban and call it useless. News flash: The techniqueis not useless! What else is?

Point made: Make it easy! Do not batch!

12 The Personal Kanban Transformermodel

The personal kanban transformer model is howwe at www.co-learning.be keep our personal kanbansystem alive and kicking. The complete system is implemented on a collection of pieces of cardboardpaper stuck together in a way that you can fold it to fit a small size bag (man-bag, coat pocket…). Italso allows you to easily change the way of structuring your backlog, adapting your storyline andexperiment with your WIP, limits while at the same time reinforcing them physically.

By using this physical model we have no distraction when addressing our personal kanban board.This system serves only one purpose, to help structure your work. We have it always at hand anddo not need to batch till we get home/office again, and it is easy to fold open and change what needsto be change or add what needs to be added. We can even fold the system in such a way that wegenerate an even bigger focus on the task at hand.

Fold for adding extra items to our backlog will only show us the categories to put a new post-it on,and prevents us to be distracted from our ongoing items or done items for that matter. In this mannerwe create more focus on prioritizing our new work that has come into our backlog. This way wecan relate the new work that has to be categorized, to the work that is already in our backlog. Thatway we can use relative prioritization which has helped us tremendously in the past.

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The Personal Kanban Transformer model 35

A similar folding technique is available to get things moving through our storyline, and allow us tokeep focus on what is really important now. This will again create focus on the planned and ongoingwork, avoiding the trap of going into all the other items we still need to do from our backlog. Bydoing this you also feel more at ease with what is on the agenda next, and are less stressed aboutall the things that still need to be done. In this implementation we also added an area for long termgoal setting, to be able to keep those present and close by. Remember you wrote these down in thefirst chapter? This is your opportunity to add them to your system. Next to that area, we also addedan area for what we call everyday work. In the picture above you can see that Erik is on a diet andneeds to remind himself about that everyday. The last area we added to this system is the Donetoday column. This one was added in this example to help with the feeling of fulfillment on a dailybasis.

The Personal Kanban Transformer model 36

The reason for having a seperate Done area in this model should be obvious for you if you read thechapter about measurements. The work items will stay in here until they are added to the metricgraphs. And these items will also be the starting point for your personal reflection moment. Thisdoes not mean you have to go over each of these items. One way of helping you to reflect on someof these, is to track a kind of happiness index on to-dos that made you really happy or sad. Be sureto only track those items that really stand out, it is no use to start adding smileys (sad or happy ones)to all post-its. This will just create more confusion and will not add any value. On average we trackabout 10% of our post-its with these. And it will be these post-its that will be your highest priorityduring your reflection moment. What can we do to avoid the sad work items? How can we createmore room for the ones that really made you happy?

The Personal Kanban Transformer model 37

As you can see there is no end to your quest! Keep this book at hand and re-read some chapters asyou progress to become a personal kanban Jedi. If you got to this point in the book and you stilldid not start building your own personal kanban system, then there is no excuse anymore! Put thisbook aside and start now!

13 More about the authorsCo-Learning.be

Learning together how to make the world of work a better place!

We help companies on their path to become learning organizations. We guide people towards newinsights and bridge the gap between those newly acquired insights and putting that learning intopractise.

SpecialtiesLean, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Software Development, Management 3.0, Leadership, Craftsmanship,Gamestorming, Innovation Games, Facilitation, Collaboration, co-creation, Innovation, Creativity,Startup, Entrepreneurship, Business Modelling, Effective Operations, TDD

Read ore about our company on our website¹ and blog².

¹http://www.co-learning.be²http://blog.co-learning.be

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More about the authors 39

Jürgen De Smet

Being busy with change since 2001 in different jungles, having met with over 100 different species,we could call him a chameleon with a huge backpack of knowledge, techniques and frameworks tosupport other lions out there to do just enough of the right thing at the right time and be respectedfor it.

In the backpack are tools and techniques out of beyond budgeting, systems thinking, lean, kanban,agile and scrum as well as notions of other less favorable frameworks like Prince2, PMBoK,ITIL, CORBA, ISO… All of this allows this chameleon to effectively support senior and middlemanagement on how to run an effective organization; as well as training people to become part ofa learning organization.

Follow Jurgen on twitter: @JurgenLACoach³Read more about Jurgen on his Blog⁴.

³http://twitter.com/jurgenlacoach⁴http://jurgendesmet.be

More about the authors 40

Erik Talboom

I love helping other people out, it’s something that has been important for me for as long as I canremember. I used to tutor people while I was still in school, helping out fellow students whenever Ihad the chance.

In 2010 I decided to return to teaching class again, combining it with a job as coach. Since then I havetrained and coached several teams on different subjects, ranging from more process oriented topicslike scrum, kanban and effective collaboration through gamestorming to more technical focusedtopics like test automation, test driven development and software craftsmanship principles. As oflast year I have started an adventure in the areas of lean startups and customer development aroundthat. These kinds of volatile ventures also benefit a lot from the agile mindset and craftsmanshipprinciples knowledge I’ve built up the last decade.

Follow Erik on twitter: @TalboomErik⁵Read more about Erik on his Blog⁶.

⁵http://twitter.com/talboomerik⁶http://talboomerik.be

14 AcknowledgmentsWe thank our family for standing by during the hard times and allowing us to do what we do.Veerle, Annelies, Manon, Robbe & Aidan you are the ones we love!

We also would like to thank all the people that helped us build this book, providing valuable feedbackon its content, structure and more: Johan Tre, Yves Hanoulle, Erwin Verweij, …

This book is inspired on the work by Jim Benson, Tonianne DeMaria Barry that are doing a greatjob maintaining a personal kanban focussed website¹. But also inspired by many others, less knownpeople, that are practising personal kanban and share their thoughts, ideas and stories around it.Especially the people who got inspired by our book, classroom training or conference talks, madeus write what we wrote and keep us writing what is to come. Thanks for this!

Last but not least, we would also like to thank you for using the book and we are excited to knowhow it changed your way of life, what you liked, what you did not like… anything. Share your story!

Thanks!

Jurgen & Erik

¹http://www.personalkanban.com

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