The holidays are wonderful times, but also difficult ones.I was interviewing Deb McGee, a client, colleague, and friend about how our time spent working with her team went. At the end, she turned the interview to the fully "personal" side of Personal Kanban. During a holiday season, Deb suffered a profound personal loss, but was determined to give her family a holiday season. She could have done this through denial or burying her feelings. She chose, instead, to meet the holiday's head-on and realistically decide what she could do and what was "too soon".I'll let her tell her own story in the interview. I hope you find it as inspiring as I do.Happy Holidays, everyone.
For Context, Clarity, & Continuous Improvement, Get Rid of That To-Do List
Make list.Become overwhelmed.Cross off low-hanging fruit.Feel good (momentarily).Tackle next easiest task.Repeat.Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But why simply optimize for productivity, when you can shoot for effectiveness?Those seemingly interminable, anxiety-inducing to-do lists - we've all been beholden to them. But if context, clarity, and continuous improvement are what you're looking for, there just might be a better option.For something with such a staggering amount of information, to-do lists fail miserably at providing the context necessary to effectively prioritize our work, understand and communicate our capacity, or surface issues so we can address them in real-time, preventing them from recurring.Rather than create a static, task-focused, prescriptive inventory of your to-dos - inviting little more than an opportunity to react - visualizing your work on a flexible, flow-focused Personal Kanban transforms those to-dos into a narrative of your work that promotes cognitive ease and invites informed action. Tasks are situated in context, options and priorities become obvious, and emergent patterns (like recurring bottlenecks) give us the necessary feedback to invite discussion, collaboration, and/or improvement.
