"Yes, well that's the fallacy of work / life balance, isn't it? I mean...it's all life.”~ Lean Coffee participant, Sydney June 2011

The Fallacy of Work / Life Balance – Work life balance is more than personal and it is more than a choice. Whether we are employers or employees, we need to recognize and respect that “work” is part of life, not some opposing force we balance against life. Studies show that a strong collaborative corporate culture helps organizations weather the current economic downturn better. Pre-Lean Campconversations have drawn focus on this fallacy and toward respect in the workplace.Work / Life Balance. It's one of those concepts that just simply falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. At what point at work do we cease to be alive?I've just come off two weeks of working / living with AMP, a large financial services firm based in Sydney, Australia. This is a conservative company that is examining just what "conservative" actually means. The conclusions people were coming to were very exciting for me.Several people agreed that people at AMP bifurcated their lives. They would come to work, focus on work, and then leave at the end of the work day to return to their homes and presumably to their “lives.” Everyone agreed that this scenario was true…for other people. But not for themselves.As we spoke they realized that they were holding back at the office, because they assumed their co-workers were bifurcating their lives – but in reality very few people actually did so. Everyone was wanting work / life … balance?No.They like their work. They like their lives. There was no division. There was no opposing weight to balance.What they wanted was their home life to respect their work life and vice versa. They wanted these two elements of their lives to stop being a zero sum game. Some days home life happened during working hours. Some days it was the other way around.Some days …? Or maybe all days.Definitely all days.Life happens during life hours.Work / Life Balance is a fallacy. It's all living. Right now, you are living. Wherever you are reading this, you are living. And everywhere you go today, you'll be living there, too.Now, I ask you. In this moment, what is the thing of highest value you could be doing?Think about it.Then do it.Image by Tonianne DeMaria Barry.

The whole point of having a visual control is to extract information from it quickly. In this respect, the personal kanban is much like a geographic map.Geographic maps convey more than merely the physical environment, they show us things like political, historic, organizational characteristics - both real and imagined spatial constraints - which give locations their context. Similarly, the personal kanban is a map of your work. It captures not just the tasks - but the logic, the flow that gives it an actionable framework

This is known as a pattern language.

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A language that helps us describe complex concepts simplisticly, by understanding their contexts.

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As we use the kanban to learn the pattern language of work, we have more kaizen events, more epiphanies, because we are finally understanding its true context. We learn what value really is, what our capabilities really are.

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threats disappear

This is known as a "pattern language," a language that helps us describe complex concepts simplistically, by understanding their contexts. As we use the personal kanban to discern the pattern language of our work, we encounter more kaizen events - more epiphanies - because we are finally understanding its true context. We learn what value really is, and what our capabilities really are. Soon, threats disappear.

I have intentionally made this personal kanban screenshot illegible because the text does not matter. What matters are the visual cues - the colors, the assignments, and the states.In this kanban, we have three staging columns: a working column, "The Pen" (to hold tasks in a state of workus interruptus), and "Complete."Immediately we see that today our WIP is filled with teal tasks. Those happen to be for the creation of Gov 2.0 University, one of our projects. We’re getting ready to launch the web site and conduct some media events, so this particular day was spent focusing on those tasks.We also see that yellow tasks (biz dev with a specific channel partner) make up most of the work in a waiting state. So now we understand that on our plates for this day, we have a lot of focus on G2U, but that biz dev might rear its head as an activity from The Pen becomes active.So while those yellow tasks might interrupt us, the kanban has mentally prepared us for them.Those yellow tags likewise tell us a story over time. We know their history. Did they appear yesterday or did the come up over time? Are those tasks ones that recur and just never go away?Do we have a deluge of project tasks (e.g. teal) that need to be batched and processed as a day with a single focus? Perhaps we have a deluge of different projects, but all similar task types (e.g. phone calls) that can be batched.What personal kanban reminds us is to look beyond the tasks to the patterns that arise on the board. Work now has a shape. You can begin to think of it in other ways.You can situate it in its context. Work has a geography.With personal kanban you can now see the entire river – where it emanates from, where it reaches, and how it flows – rather than dismiss it simply as a body of water.In an upcoming post, the pattern language of work will be explored.