Even though I have been using Personal Kanban for a number of years, even though I am fully aware that I have a limited amount of time to do stuff each day, even though I know overplanning each day is exactly what I am not supposed to be doing. I do that… pretty much every day.

And, like most people who keep a backlog or a ToDo list of some kind, I carry stuff from one day to the next. One of the reasons I bailed on GTD and switched to Personal Kanban was that I found I was spending so much time each day just changing due dates in Things for all my unfinished work.

BRING THE SHAME

So now I have this stuff and it just sits, in the backlog. For a while I used Trello and stuff would start to change color if it sat too long. Some kind of subtle visual cue to let me know I just wasn’t getting it done. <SHAME=”on”> So, I’d just move the card up or down in the list and BANG! It’s like a shiny brand-new thing that hasn’t actually been sitting there for six weeks.

TASK BLINDNESS

Visualizing work is a big reason Personal Kanban works. Those visual cues can be very helpful. I noticed early on that there’d be stuff on my board that just sat. Sometimes things just sat because even though they seemed important enough to add, they ended up apparently not being compelling enough to spark action. (This includes the action of removing them from the board.) These cards end up just sitting there, taking up space. I stop noticing them when I look at the board.

But there were other things on the board. They started out as totally neutral, keep the lights on kinda stuff. They would bring me neither joy nor pain. Just stuff I had to do. And the longer those neutral things sat there, the less neutral they became. And the less neutral they became, the more ways I found to not be able to have time to do them.

YOUR BACKLOG IS MOCKING YOU

It’s kind of like that paper you had to write in high school. When the assignment was given, it wasn’t a big deal. It was something you figured you could knock out in an evening. And so you blew it off for a bit and let it sit, and the more it sat, the more it stressed you out. Like it was just sitting there mocking you and your total inability to get it done. And you start thinking if it is such a trivial thing, why haven’t I done it yet? And then “OMG IT MUST BE HUGE AND I DON’T HAVE TIME!” and then “I AM GOING TO TOTALLY FAIL” and then, you resign yourself to the fact that you will spend the rest of your days alone and unemployed… in Greenland!

And then it’s really hard to get started.

THE NEGATIVE WEIGHT

The longer I let those little innocuous things sit on my board, the more negative weight they have. The more negative weight they have, the more time I spend making sure I don’t get them done… which adds to the weight. It’s a nice little vicious circle of psychological anti-productivity.

THE QUESTIONS TO ASK

So, even though it is not a visual cue, I do have to question myself about this each day when I look at my board.

Where are the term papers I am avoiding?
How am I avoiding them?
Why am I avoiding them?

PRIORITIZATION BY RESISTANCE

This has led me to one of my prioritization patterns. Prioritization by Resistance. Some days (especially Sunday), I have to prioritize to do the things I want to do the least first. That way, each thing done offers two rewards. The first is a decent reduction in stress because I have one less negative weight thing to worry about. The second is that because I am doing the thing I want to do the least first, everything I am about to do is always going to bring more joy (or just suck less) than what I am doing now.

The “Focus” I wanted

When I started using Personal Kanban what I was looking for was a system to help me get more things done. I wanted something to focus my time and energy so I could DO MORE THINGS and squeeze more productivity out of every single minute. We’re all only on this planet for a short period of time… I felt like my job was to get as many things done as I possibly could.

When I started, I asked a colleague of mine to act as my coach. What I was looking for was someone I could trust to hold up the mirror when need be and someone who be willing to call me out on stuff when I cheated because I know myself well enough to know that there was a 100% chance that would happen.

The “Focus” I got

Maybe If I had started following other productivity systems with the aid of a coach they would have worked better for me, but maybe not. I can say that having someone act as a coach for me as I got started with Personal Kanban was a big part of why it had such a huge impact on me. In addition to creating a board and working the items on it, the person coaching me asked me to do a few other things. One of the things he asked me to do was to sign up for a happiness tracking tool that would ping me throughout the day to ask me what I was doing and assess how much joy it was bringing me. He also asked me to make notes about how I was working. I started keeping notes about what things I was getting done each day and what I was not getting done each day.

What I found was that the things I felt I needed to “focus” on the most were often not really that important and were being done at the expense of things that were either more important (like things that had a deadline or dependency) and things that didn’t look important but were critical to self-care and maintenance (like playing guitar and meditation).

I think this was maybe the first massive epiphany I got from using PK… learning that it wasn’t really that I wasn’t focused… I’m actually pretty good at being focused. The issue was that I was focused on things that were not the most important things.

The “Focus” I have now

I’ve been working with Personal Kanban for almost 10 years. I tend to think of this as a practice, not a thing I do. In the same way that I have a meditation practice. There is no end goal… just an evolving, learning engagement. The way I practice Personal Kanban has changed a lot over the years and the way I do it now is very different from how I started. At some point along the way, my idea of “focus” changed as well. While I started with a “focus” on getting things done, what I am focused on now is deepening my understanding of how I work, the choices I make, and why I am doing what I do. Instead of “how do I get more done?” I’m curious about why certain things do and don’t get done. Little by little, I am getting better at letting the board teach me ways to be better at working.

The Negative Weight of the Undone

The Other Side of Focus