This is the third post of a three-part guest series on Doing GTD Kanban Style, by Pascal Venier.After 7 years of implementing GTD, I have discovered Personal Kanban by chance and I have found that it offered an elegant solution to the nagging problems, I described in my previous post. Personal Kanban is a lean pattern which is as simple as it gets. It is based on only a couple of rules: (1) visualize your work and (2) limit your work in progress (or WIP). It is nevertheless extremely powerful. I am someone who is very visual and this is why I am so keen on Mind Mapping and other visual thinking techniques and I have always felt frustrated by the GTD system of lists. I have experimented for a time using a Mind Map for implementing Getting Things Done; it worked very well for the horizons of focus, but managing your Next Actions with a Mind Map quickly shows its limits. I eventually settled for using a great GTD task manager, Nozbe. When I discovered Personal Kanban I started by simply introducing a WIP limit to my Next actions and this considerably improved things for me. So much so, that I then tried to go further and went totally low tech by simply using a kanban board - in this case my office wall - and post-it stickies. I must say that the experience is very convincing.Personal Kanban has proven extremely powerful in helping me to manage better the flow of my work. Limiting your Work-in-Progress involved fixing a limit to the number of tasks you are undertaking at a given time. There is a limit to the number of balls you could be juggling with at the same time; it is likewise with the number of tasks you can execute. Limiting the WIP, the Work-in-Progress, does guarantee that the amount of things which gets your attention is limited. PK does introduce a clear constraint which is that items which are in your doing column must be completed, there is no way back, and this is the the end of endemic half-completed projects: “stop starting, start finishing” as the famous Kanban slogan has it. This is incredibly pertinent to me as I have had in the past a strong tendency to start projects which then languish. Limiting your WIP involves consistently applying filters, by establishing priorities. This allows for your Personal Kanban to help you manage very effectively your focus. You end up trying to do a lot less at the same time, but a lot more over time.
As Paul Eastabrook puts it: "Kanban has allowed me to increase the throughput of things getting done."Visualizing your work on a Kanban allows you to have at all time clarity on your work. It really allows you to have, so to speak, a conversation with your work. With the constraints inherent to the use of a Kanban board, reviewing the said board becomes almost inescapable. This is for the very simple reason that if you fail to do so, it becomes far too crowded, and since it is right in front of your eyes, you cannot avoid noticing it and feeling compelled to address the issue. Regularly reviewing your work becomes natural. A ritual stand-up which lasts a few minutes at the beginning of the day, allows you to take stock of your priorities for the day. The Weekly review is also your Kanban retrospective and it is enriched by the visibility of the work you have actually done. This often helps me realize that it consistently takes me a lot more time than I initially think to complete a given project or task. This has provided me with very valuable insights into whether or not it was pertinent for me to take on more tasks or projects, considering that what I can actually deliver is necessarily limited. I have found the concept of chain of value extremely useful as it helps concentrate the mind about the actual value of undertaking or not, specific projects or tasks. This is not all about becoming more productive, i.e. always doing more and more, but about being more effective, doing things which have a greater impact and which you find fulfilling.What I particularly appreciate as an experienced GTD-er is that Personal Kanban allows you to truly practice GTD without loosing anything from the method. This is a striking difference from most of the methods which have borrowed a lot from GTD, but have given a twist to it, which in fine results in an impoverishment rather than an enhancement. I am truly able to say that the more I use Personal Kanban, the more truly I practice Getting Things Done, because the two articulate seamlessly. I have come to see it as the perfect complement to Getting Things Done. I see it as the “front-end” of my GTD system: the GTD workflow process helps you gain control, the Six-level horizons of focus help you to gain perspective, Personal Kanban actually helps you not only get things DONE, but to actually getting the RIGHT things DONE.