Get Work Done and Stay Healthy

POK Habits

I’ve been watching myself.Asking myself why do I do certain things? Why do I lose track of time?I’ve combined a few regimens that have calmed me down, increased my effectiveness, and made me feel healthier. I’ve created for myself things that some blithely call “habits”. But we all have habits we’re not really proud of and the word “habit” sounds pathological … like you’re Howard Hughes washing your hands.So, one thing with a “habit” is to make it healthy. Something you do, often because you’ve created your own little system to do it. If you don’t, you don’t have a fit or lash out at the world, you just adjust to do better next time (or you just accept that life doesn’t always respect your system).Having said all that, here’s my current system which has me feeling much healthier, successful, and calm.

1. Give yourself obtainable goals: I make sure I have plenty of tickets in my Personal Kanban to move each day.  I try to move several tickets and to make sure that each ticket is either something I MUST do (pay parking ticket, call the cable people) or something that will really move the needle on something I’m trying to complete (finish a Modus Institute class, finalize consulting contracts, write blog posts, etc).

2. Focus on your work and yourself: Perhaps more than ever before, I have been sticking to Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro regimine. I work for 25 minutes on a ticket or two. When the Pomodoro timer chimes, I get up and do one of the following:

   1. Give your brain oxygen: Your brain needs to oxygen in order to work. It does that when you move around. My fitbit gives me nice feedback if I exercise every hour a little bit (250 steps). Whether you do that or some stretching exercises, get up, move, let your mind process quietly, and let your physical systems get some attention.

   2. Give your brain water: You and your brain are made of water, on every break make sure you drink at least a few ounces of water.

   3. Clean or tidy: You know how that one piece of paper over there becomes a pile? By not addressing it. When your surroundings become untidy, it actually stresses you out. The best way to keep things in order is to deal with them in little chunks. On a cleaning break, I’ll just find three quick things to put away, toss out, or otherwise clean up. Some I’m working in a beautiful and calm space.

   4. Remind yourself of what you did: I’ve started saying out loud the things I’ve done over the course of the day and doing an internal check. Am I happy with that list? Did I feel it was enough? Should I have done something else?I’ve found over the last few months that I’m becoming much better at selecting and finishing work that I both should do and am happy doing.

   5. Know when YOU are done: This is harder, of course, when people are expecting you to be in a meeting or make a deadline, but I’ve found that my body will tell me when I’m done for the day.  I’ve generally been running at 6 am to 3 pm each day. Sure I have calls in the middle of the night with people on other continents or, like today, need to start working with a group at 2:30 pm, but I now have much more strength to deal with those situations (and not complain about them) because I’ve let myself finish work when my brain is done.

 Very quickly, a note on awareness. I know that these times are done because a clock bings for the pomodoro or the fitbit watch vibrates. I do need external reminders to take a break. Last week I didn’t set the Pomodoro timer and worked for over 3 hours before I’d noticed.  We get lost in our work … and that doesn’t make things better.The flip side … don’t be pathological. If you are in a 2 hour meeting and you want to get up and run around every 25 minutes, you won’t make any friends. You’ll seem like a person who can’t sit still. Do the best you can, when you can.

What Was I Just Doing? Zeigarnik Forgetfulness

"What was I just doing?""What was I just talking about?"How many times have you been happily working away on something, creating value, just a wonderful productive piece of a great masterful universe then ... you are interrupted.A phone call, an email, someone nearby sneezes, your attention is diverted.Then ... what happened? What was I doing?This is the Zeigarnik effect in action. We were doing something normal, something not out-of-the-ordinary. And now we don't remember it.This is sometimes funny, usually frustrating, often embarrassing - even when no one is around to witness it.But this is a real problem. When people ask us "how long will this take?" we answer not realizing that all these little forgotten moments are in no way included in our response. Our estimate is based on the best of intentions and with all professionalism, but these become blind spots.There are a few easy ways to mitigate this.1. Track true completion times on your Personal Kanban. Include date / time started and date / time completed on your tickets. This will include interruptions.2. Estimate based on how long the project or task took to get from OPTIONS to DONE ... not how long the task itself took. A three hour task that takes you four days to complete is a four day task, not a three hour one.  (Is this a problem for budgeting? You bet it is.)3. Write down tasks that you don't realize you are doing. Sound crazy? Yes ... it is crazy. But we often catch ourselves doing things that aren't on our boards. We laugh it off, but these tasks are often autonomic - they're just things we do. We need to be mindful of them. 

Dream BIG...But Get Those Dreams in Writing

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Perchance to Dream?

No doubt you’ve seen evidence of its ascendance: the cottage industry that’s become a multi-billion dollar “motivational industrial complex” of sorts. Its rallying cry

If you think it, you can achieve it!

is plastered just about everywhere these days. From gilt-framed posters of eagles soaring high above alpine peaks, to bland, bald, and bare-footed Ziggy offering up a side of sentimentality with every calendar-month cartoon affirmation, to treacly-tidings engraved on necklaces and bracelets “Perfect for the graduate in your life,” all echo a variation of that familiar exhortation:

Dream the impossible dream!

However, simply dreaming the impossible dream can actually prove counter-productive, rendering many goals quixotic at best.

Ay! There’s the Rub!

The brain is a pattern-seeking, clarity-needing, ambiguity-hating energy hog. When it comes to actual goal achievement, it needs tangible, achievable steps it can carry out one after the other, in sequence. It likewise wants these steps to be innocuous enough that they don't trigger a fear response by engaging the amygdala - the brain's fight-or-flight mechanism. Science shows when goals are made concrete and then broken down into constituent parts that are actionable, the likelihood for success is significantly higher than if they simply remained a thought exercise.Merely fantasizing about a goal isn’t just de-motivating, it can lead us to self-sabotage. That’s because the brain has difficulty differentiating between projected success and success that has been realized. As such, it produces serotonin regardless. This “happiness molecule” tricks the brain into thinking it’s already achieved what is otherwise still an aspiration, thus preventing any impetus for follow-through.Holding big audacious life goals in our head, or even our daily honey-do list for that matter, consumes energy. It zaps our metabolism, draining us physically and emotionally. Writing down all the things we would like to accomplish not only helps us clarify them, reducing uncertainty and easing anxiety, it likewise holds us accountable and lightens our cognitive load. The subsequent dopamine release - the "motivation molecule" - assists with the momentum needed to see those tasks to fruition.

To Grunt and Sweat

So if it matters to you, and it needs to get done, put pen to paper. Not only will writing down goals help you clarify them, breaking them into actionable steps will help you make progress towards them. The act of seeing your progress will in turn trigger the reward response, incentivizing you towards completion.So the next time your inner bard contemplates whether 

To PK or not to PK?

remember, writing down your goals and decomposing them into actionable steps on your Personal Kanban is an essential part of the achievement process. The visual and kinesthetic feedback produced by completion is a reward in and of itself, creating a virtuous cycle in which confidence, motivation, and momentum can transform those seemingly impossible dreams into reality.

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* The author offers apologies to Cervantes, Shakespeare,

Peter O'Toole

 (whose voice she learned, was actually dubbed), and any Literature majors who might be reading this.

Sleep: Your Workflow's Most Important Form of Slack

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It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. ~ John Steinbeck

In Personal Kanban, Jim and I discuss how workflow should be optimized for throughput, not capacity. Work shouldn’t “fit” into your day but rather, it should flow. Much like how a freeway grinds to a halt when its capacity is exceeded, so too do people who are overloaded experience physical and mental gridlock. As with any system - animate, mechanistic, social, or ecological - the importance of incorporating slack to absorb and /or respond to variation, create efficient processing, and maximize performance is not simply good practice, it’s indispensable.Recently, a series of disconcerting conversations caused me to reflect on how much we tend to undervalue our most important form of slack: sleep.

• A  taxi driver shared how he works 12+ hours per day, with one hour off for lunch, seven days per week because as he explained, “I can sleep when I’m dead”;

• A nail technician who works 7 days each week, 10+ hours per day, and only takes off holidays expressed pride in her “work ethic” while dismissing her colleagues who work 5-6 days per week as “lazy”; and

• A software developer boasted he could - and in fact, does - exist on a diet of Red Bull, chocolate-covered espresso beans, and as little as 2-3 hours of a caffeine-induced coma...but admitted he greeted each morning in a haze of stupor.

Sure these folks might be “productive,” but how effective are they really in the long-term?

I spend endless days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying. When you are too tired to eat, you really need some sleep. A few days later, things become strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, familiar sounds become unfamiliar, and life reinvents itself as a surrealist dream. ~ Henry Rollins

We wear our busyness like a badge of honor. It has become our default way of existing.Sleep, we rationalize, is for the weak and ironically, for “slackers.” We see it not as a function essential to our existence but as a reward to be earned. And when we do finally deem ourselves “worthy” of a healthy night’s sleep we “cheat” in an attempt to compensate for the hours we’ve been deprived of.From the National Sleep Foundation:

Sleep experts say most adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep each night for optimum performance, health and safety. When we don't get adequate sleep, we accumulate a sleep debt that can be difficult to "pay back" if it becomes too big. The resulting sleep deprivation has been linked to health problems such as obesity and high blood pressure, negative mood and behavior, decreased productivity, and safety issues in the home, on the job, and on the road.

Beyond the obvious self-destructive nature of burning the proverbial candle at both ends, fatigue impedes our brain activity which leads to lack of clarity, which necessitates more effort, increases mistakes, diminishes judgment, and further contributes to our WIP.So long as we view sleep as a luxury we will dismiss it as waste, de-prioritizing it when in actuality, it’s the ONLY thing absolutely vital to our workflow.Does it really need to be stated?Humans cannot live without sleep.So I propose we begin looking at sleep as integral to our workflow. Slack is not simply vital to your Personal Kanban, it’s vital for smooth, efficient flow and maximizing performance.If you frame sleep as part of your work, unfinished sleep becomes WIP. We then struggle with focus, multitasking and task-switching become inevitable, creating a vicious cycle that interferes with the quality of other parts of our life. When we are sleep deprived, our WIP limit should actually be reduced.

I work in the quiet of home 7-8am to sort out things that are stuck or unresolved. Only after I have landed that thinking do I go into the office. ~  Tiffany Overton

A quiet mind, a fresh perspective leads to improved memory, longer attention span, sustainable  learning, and improved judgement.Sleep better. Perform better. It really is that simple.

Dave Prior's Quest for Understanding: A PK Interview

Dave Prior's interview covers three or four big things.1. What is our work really? Is it getting things done or is it satisfaction?2. What is collaboration?3. Why does Personal Kanban lead to surprising realizations about the impacts of our choices?4. Backlog guilt.A fun, excellent interview with Dave, a long-time Personal Kanban user and trainer.