5 Ways to Focus and Finish

Focusing on our most important work (so that we can get it out the door and create value) is hard. It’s harder still when work suddenly picks up, is unfamiliar, or arrives with immediate deadlines when we are already busy.

The tyranny of the urgent often distracts us from what is truly important. We lose focus on the important and end up doing a lot of “busy-work”. By then end of the day we are frustrated. The real value wasn’t created, but the business was satisfied.

We need to understand what “most important” means. It’s not always easy to just “know” what task out of the hundreds we have on our plate is the best to jump on right now.

When we visualize our work and limit our work in progress, we can see beyond the urgent and find what’s the best use of our time. We can then sit down with our brains and have an honest chat. What do we need to do? What relies on others? What is stopping us from doing that one task that just sits there in our OPTIONS column and doesn’t move? Why do we promise we’ll get those things done today, but at the end of the day it is still just sitting there?

You’ll see that our latest newsletter is on this theme of finding focus in a world of noise. Focus isn’t a “light” topic, we all struggle with it every day. Below are five of our top ranked posts on focus.

If you have a story about how Personal Kanban has helped you find focus, please leave it in the comments and let us (and the community) know.

1) The Overhead of OverworkIn our work, we take on more and more because the task seems small and we don’t understand our actual capacity. We take on more and more because we can’t see we are already overloaded. One day, we burn out, we break down, we snap.Read more.

2) HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #3–Reducing InterruptionsThe fact is that interruptions are part of knowledge work. We seldom do it alone, which means we have colleagues. Colleagues require information. Information requires communication. Communication requires attention.Read more.

3) Finishing Feels GoodIn order to complete, we need some help. We need something to ground us, something to focus us, and something to propel us. Once we have these elements, projects at work become easier, communication becomes smoother, and motivation is easily found.Read more.

4) Time to CompletionWhat if the game of work was to continuously improve the quality and rate of delivery of your work? The game becomes ways to discover how you can work most effectively, most innovatively. The game stops being how close to an arbitrary deadline can you complete something.Read more.

5)On Focus: Conquering the Shiny SquirrelTask-switching begets more task-switching, not completion. This is often attributed to “the Zeigarnik Effect,” a phenomenon in which information and tasks left incomplete don’t leave our mind. Instead, we dwell on those incomplete tasks, and those intrusive thoughts render us vulnerable to distractions. The energy that consumes–the metabolism task-switching requires–drains our cognitive capacity, causing frustration, burnout, impeding focus and inviting error and rework, preventing us from realizing our optimal potential.Read more.

Deep Focus

What does it take to focus? When we teach or work with clients, the need to focus is always the base of any board or system we create. We are all distracted. We’ve directly addressed this in the Personal Kanban online class. Sign up today and join the hundreds of other PK students from around the world. And stay in touch.

How Many Options Do You Have?

The Options Triangle

The other day I was driving down Point Brown Road in Ocean Shores, Washington. Ocean Shores is a small town with almost no economic base. If you live there you are likely a retiree or work in one of the restaurants or hotels that serve the tourists. The Internet in Ocean Shores is anemic, but it does exist. Yet, when I drove by the McDonalds in the center of town, the sign said, “Now hiring, apply on-line.”There is an assumption that everyone, now, in the United States has access to the Internet.With the Internet, we can reach millions of people in an instant. We can research anything in milliseconds. We can find opportunities.We live in a world of options.Options of growth, options to waste our time, options to be informed, options to be misinformed. We can get a degree. We can write a book. We can work at McDonalds.This is good and this can be overwhelming.  We can now build a wide-range of things to do simply through the electronic slabs in our homes.Further, we have all the expectations placed on us by co-workers, bosses, clients, family, friends, the government, and ourselves. They want us to do things. We want us to do things. All those things are more options.We all have tons of options.When you are creating your first Personal Kanban, your first goal is to simply understand all you could be doing right now or that is expected of you.Here’s how you might start out.

1. Write down all the expectations people have of you.

2. Write down all the things you would like to do (not just work, you want to go to Bali and sit on the beach … write it down.)

3. In your options column make a triangle like the one below

4. Use this to organize your current supply of options by placing the options in the portion of the triangle that best described the mix of obligation, desire, and growth.

5. Ask yourself … what does this mean?

With this quick tool, your work will begin to take shape. Is your work merely obligation? Do you want to do the work on your plate? Is this work building your skills or challenging your intellect? Ideally, we’d like to see tasks working into the middle to middle -right of the triangle. We want to engage in options that allow growth and that we enjoy.This helps us see the context of the options we have amassed. A vacation in Bali will likely be high in desire and even growth.  Moving to Bali and sitting on the beach for eternity might be a good escape, but might not be so high on the growth side.One other thing about this triangle. It’s not the magic triangle – there is no magic triangle.  There is no magic anything except magic erasers for everything else, you have to work.You can swap out any of the words in the triangle at-will. If you want to collaborate more, swap out “growth” for “collaboration”. Your context is your own.  Another triangle might measure risks like “resources” “complexity” and “time”. Make your own, improve on it. Make a better one, but please examine your options carefully and choose wisely.

Q: What stops you from acting? A: You!

Most of us, in our heads, have a list of “If I had onlies”.  These are horrible little things that nag us. If I’d only painted those steps, if I’d only bought those shares when the company was at the bottom, if I’d only … It’s clear we can’t live in a world of regret, but it’s also clear that we often don’t act when we know we should. Regret comes from a combination of inaction and hindsight.But why don’t we act?It’s been shown that we humans tend to default to a mode of conservation of energy, which is another way of saying we will tend to find the least onerous way to do something. Often that means accepting the status quo or outright inaction over changing something or acting. We become action or change averse because it’s simply too much work either to think about of physically do.Procrastination, you might say, is a survival mechanism – but one that is working overtime. We need to remind ourselves of the importance of the goals we want to achieve and the things we want to get done.Studies have found that writing down goals makes us as much as 85% more likely to achieve them, which leaves us little hope for achieving things we don’t write down.It’s not hard to see how Personal Kanban helps here. The act of writing something down and adding it to your Personal Kanban, then regularly revisiting the board to see what you could be doing next both reminds us of the task and reinforces our desire to see that it gets done.

Finding Our Own Value - Growing By Understanding

Tracking Learning, Creating, and Health

There are those days where your Personal Kanban is on fire. You are in a state of flow and tickets are just moving right along. The days go by and you look at your DONE column … it’s full. Really really full. The DONE tickets seem to swim. There are so many of them. You’ve been productive, but what might all that work actually mean?A few weeks ago I started a side experiment. By hand, each day, I wanted to see what the actual impact of my work was … on me.What was I getting from the work I was doing? What was I learning? How was I making sure I was becoming healthier? Was I stuck in the productivity trap and not growing ... not being truly effective?Each day I gathered my Inputs, Outputs, and Maintenance, which is an overly technical way of saying:

• What did I learn today?

• What did I create today?

• What did I do to make sure I stayed healthy.

Reading List in Personal Kanban

LEARN: In the first four days we see here, we see both talking to clients and reading made up the bulk of inputs. Almost immediately this section paid off. I noticed that I specifically set aside time to start reading Humble Inquiry, simply so I’d have something to put in the block. Since starting this, my reading radically shot up, due to this one simple adjustment.CREATE: Creation was anything for work or otherwise, so we have writing proposals, recommendation letters and even sous vide ribs. The question wasn’t necessarily what made me money, but what did I create that kept me … well … creative. MAINTENANCE: Since starting this, I was taken down by a nastylittle bit of pneumonia, but we can see here that from the outset I started walking (a peak of 13.2k steps and 81 floors that week), that I’m talking to friends, and that I’m scheduling needed doctors visits (hard to get time to do when you travel a lot).RESULTS: Immediately, visualizing the very loose goals of simply learning, creating, and maintaining created tickets on my Personal Kanban board, changed the way I organized my day (to allow for frequent short walks), and got me to focus each day on a balance of learning, creating, and being a whole human being.  Shortly after putting the books I was reading on our board, Tonianne added the book column on the right to our shared board.Why is that important? Because my starting to do this was due to her putting, out of the blue, reading time into her Personal Kanban.  She had simply put that she was reading Deep Work on the board. That got me to thinking about what I was reading and one thing led to another. She made a little improvement, I ran a little experiment, she made another little improvement.Meta-Lesson: When we visualize for ourselves or others, new information is created. When we expose ourselves or others to new information, improvement opportunities are exposed.

Construire son premier tableau de Personal Kanban

Construire son premier tableau de Personal Kanban est vraiment quelque chose de très simple.

Tout ce qu'il vous faut est un tableau blanc ou, à défaut, un mur, des crayons-feutres et des feuillets adhésifs.

Une première étape consiste à établir votre chaîne de valeur.

La chaîne de valeur représente le flux de votre travail de son début à son achèvement. Il vous permet de dessiner une véritable carte de votre travail.

Le mieux est de commencer par la chaîne de valeur la plus simple, avec seulement trois colonnes:

• BACKLOG: travail en attente d'exécution
• EN COURS: travail en cours
• FINI: travail achevé

Cette configuration très simple vous permettra de commencer à mieux comprendre le contexte de votre travail. Vous pourrez ensuite le modifier en fonction de vos besoins.

Une deuxième étape consiste à établir votre backlog.

Le backlog représente tout le travail que vous n'avez pas encore fait et qu’il vous reste à exécuter.

Commencez par dresser la liste de toutes les choses à faire. Pour cela, utilisez un feuillet adhésif par tâche ou projet, en prenant soin de ne rien négliger.

Vous vous en sentirez soulagé, car cela vous permettra de prendre la mesure du travail à accomplir.

La troisième étape consiste à établir votre limite de WIP.

La limite de travail en cours ou WIP (de l'anglais Work in Progress) c'est la quantité de travail en cours que vous pouvez gérer à un moment donné.

Nous avons tous une tendance chronique à laisser les tâches à moitié ou même presque terminées. le fait de visualiser permet de prendre conscience de l'accumulation de tâches non complétées. La solution est simple: passez vos tâches en revue, débarrassez-vous-en une à une, finissez le travail.

Pour trouver le juste équilibre dans votre travail, il faut commencer par définir une limite de travail en cours arbitraire, disons pas plus de trois tâches. Ajoutez ce nombre à votre colonne EN COURS. Assurez-vous de commencer avec un nombre réaliste, vous permettant de respirer. Attendez-vous à voir cette limite changer.

La quatriéme étape consite à commencer à tirer les tâches

Tirer: faire passer une tâche d'une colonne de la chaîne de valeur à la suivante.

Chaque fois que vous vous le faites, définissez des priorités en fonction de votre contexte actuel.

Plongez dans votre BACKLOG et de là tirez les tâches de plus haute priorité vers EN COURS. Ne tirez pas plus que votre limite de TAF ne vous le permet.

Quand vous complétez une tâche, tirez celle-ci vers FINI.

Votre colonne FINI devrait rapidement commencer à se remplir, reflétant en cela votre productivité.

C'est aussi simple que cela. Utiliser ce Kanban personnel de base pendant quelque temps vous permettra une meilleure compréhension de votre travail. Son évolution ira de pair avec celle de votre Kanban personnel.