HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #3–Reducing Interruptions

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Four hours ago, I walked up to a big pad of paper and started mind mapping all the types of interruptions we might face while trying to get our work done.

• While I was working, Tonianne, who was on Skype, wanted to do a microphone test.

• Then I received an e-mail for a meeting request from a client.

• While responding to that, I received a lunch request from a colleague.

• While responding to that, e-mail arrived from another client with documents needed for our meeting. So I accepted those Google docs and scanned them.

• While responding to that, my bladder told me that I should rush off for a bio break.

• After that, I rushed to the board and started writing furiously about things that might interrupt us.

• Then Tonianne wanted to discuss some work that was coming up.

• Then I had my meeting.

And now, 3.5 hours later, I am finally writing this blog post.My goal is to get this done by my call at 1 pm.How do we limit our work-in-progress in a world of constant interruptions?Interruptions are more common in knowledge work than work, it seems. They are little things, one minute, five minutes, ten minutes. Happening here and there.

What is an Interruption?

The Free Dictionary defines Interruption as:

in·ter·rupt (nt-rpt)

v.in·ter·rupt·ed, in·ter·rupt·ing, in·ter·rupts

1. To break the continuity or uniformity of: Rain interrupted our baseball game.

2. To hinder or stop the action or discourse of (someone) by breaking in on: The baby interrupted me while I was on the phone.

3. To break in on an action or discourse.

All three of these are important to us at work. While we are working, we are achieving (hopefully) a state of flow. Both in the psychological and the mechanical sense of the word, we are actively focusing, working, and completing the task at hand.An interruption is anything that breaks that flow-state. <The phone just rang. On call for 2m13s.>When we break that flow state, just like that side comment about my own interruption broke up the flow of this post, we have several states we transition through:

1. Initial shock (Oh my god, I’m being Interrupted!)

2. Adjustment (Context switch into new context)

3. Existence (Live in new context)

4. Closure (Close off new context)

5. Return (Return to previous context)

Depending on the detail needed by the interruption, these states can take take minutes, tens of minutes, or more. Luckily for me, my interruption was minor and rather fun, so leaving the blog post and coming back was relatively easy.

Interruptions and You

Since most interruptions are small, routine, and often important, we tend not to notice them. When interruptions are annoying, we do notice them. Then, when we are late in finishing something, we will blame our lateness on the annoying interruption and conveniently forget all the other ones.The 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.We are also social animals. So, if I come into your office and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about the Amalgamated Salamander contract,” you are likely going to say, “Okay,” and we’ll talk. Even if you say “No,” you are unlikely to simply say “No,” and ignore me from then on, because that’s rude. And if you are truly rude, you will not stop at “No,” you’ll tell me exactly why you don’t have time for me which is still an interruption.We cannot declare interruptions as waste, either. Knowledge work and personal work is fraught with rapid changes in context. Micropriorities that never existed on your project plan crop up every day. Like “Hey, Barb’s out sick, you still want to have that meeting?” Or “I just got this fax from the FDA and they are claiming that epoxy isn’t a food and we have to pull our Gluey-Chooies off the market.” Things like that.So, we need to understand what our interruptions really are, before we decide that we want to eliminate them.There are many systems out there to help you isolate yourself from interruptions, but completely closing yourself off from change – in an environment with high degrees of change – doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Understanding Interruptions

In order to know a thing, you must become a thing. So, you must first go out and interrupt as many people as you can.No … scratch that.In order to understand interruptions, a good place to start is to (surprise) visualize them. Here are some suggested ways in increasing levels of complexity.Write Them Down: That’s simple enough. Keep a pad of paper nearby and when you are interrupted by ANYTHING write it down. Even if you are interrupted by daydreaming about how awesome lunch is going to taste.Add Them to Your Kanban: Get a special shaped sticky notes, like maybe ones shaped like the human cochlea (or something) and add substantial interruptions to your board. This way you can track them and see them mixed with your other work.Record Severity:  Create a table on a sheet of paper. 8 rows for the hours of the day, and 12 boxes for five minute increments. Then color in the boxes during which you were interrupted from your primary task.Now that you’ve recorded them. Ask some key questions:

• Are these interruptions necessary?

• Did I provide or receive value while involved in this interruption?

• Does this interruption happen frequently?

• Can I schedule this interruption, making it a planned event?

• Did I have the time and mental capacity to help with this interruption?

Again, the goal is not to eradicate interruptions. The goal is to understand them and work with them. Some will be waste and you can remove them. Some will be part of your job and you must find elegant ways to work with them.

Limiting Work in Progress

After you understand the nature of your interruptions, you can build much more resilient strategies for limiting work-in-progress. We can limit unnecessary interruptions, understand when it is appropriate for us to sequester ourselves in a Pomodoro, and structure our work to allow us to stay as much within our WIP limits as possible.Photo: “Dorrie Interrupts Sissy Bathing” by Paul Schultz.

HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #2–Affinity Mapping

Lightroom-2

Does this look familiar?

This is a problem, because an disorderly and frightening READY column is, in and of itself, a form of work-in-progress. Even if you are limiting your WIP, looking at that huge string of demanding post-its weighs us down just looking at it.

When we limit our personal Work-in-progress, our ultimate goal is to provide a calm, stable, and flowing state of work. We want a system that allows us to focus on the task and hand and complete quality work.

Having a huge, daunting backlog undermines our quality and destroys our focus.

What we need to do is focus this work. We can start by gathering some of those tasks together into groups and taking a look at what they really are.

We can do this by doing a quick exercise called Affinity Mapping.

We take the bulk of the stickies that we have in our read column and we sort them into groups that feel right. These might be easy, medium, and hard. These might be project 1, project 2, project 3. There might be two categories or there might be ten.

Lightroom-3

In the end, however, you’ll have your pile of pain sorted into easy-to-digest groups.

Then, you can name your groups. In this case they are “Household Projects”, “Office Work”, and “End-of-Year Taxes”.

Now we have a little more clarity over what is in our backlog. The previously undifferentiated jumble is a bit more orderly. We can now pull work knowing a few new things:

1. What projects we are really working on

2. What we are completing (and what we are procrastinating on).

3. What work we need to schedule for and what work can simply flow

4. Which tickets are still scary

headings with backlog

Perhaps the most important thing is that the cognitive load of the original backlog was enormous. That added to our work-in-progress. The cognitive load of this new organized backlog (no matter how you feel about doing your taxes or cleaning) is much less. Your brain is spending less time and energy trying to make sense of what’s coming up.

HOW TO: Limit Your Work-in-Progress #1–Calm Down and Finish

We had a long series, which is soon to become a mini-book, on why you should limit your work-in-progress (WIP). In it we focused on the dangerous side effects of being overworked, of which there are many. Those articles show how an organization might begin to limit WIP, but not really the individual.

And, since this is the Personal Kanban site after all, we should probably talk about how we, as individuals, can limit our WIP.

For this first post, we’re going to start with the simplest answer. The sports shoe answer – just do it.

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The key to just doing anything is not doing everything else. David Allen promotes a “stop doing” list to compliment a “to do” list. In that vein, here we don’t want to prematurely end tasks you are working on an never revisit them, but we do want to postpone some tasks so that other can be completed. In the beginning, a large part of our READY column will be populated with tasks we know we already started, but are setting aside to focus on the few tasks in WIP.

Calm Down

The first thing to do here is to recognize that the work you are setting aside will get done. In fact, by setting it aside and waiting to complete the tasks in Doing, you will likely get it done sooner than if you didn’t defer it in the first place.  So, calm down, your current fears of delayed completion are due to how long its taken you to finish things in the past – in a non-WIP limited world.

Why was it so hard before?

We covered this in the Why Limit WIP Series:

• It’s hard to remember well in a chaotic environment

• Completion is fulfilling

• Multi-tasking Creates Overhead

• Context Switching destroys our ability to think

• There is no social cost for taking on work

• We have no healthy constraints to stop us from overworking

• We are fundamentally unaware of the impacts of our workload

When we limit our WIP, we are able to focus, complete faster (much faster), and likely have an end product of higher quality.

We’ve been told over the years that productivity is a good thing. However, true productivity means completing things of quality – not simply doing lots of things at the same time and completing very little.

It should be common sense that if we focus on one thing, we will complete it faster.

We need to lose our irrational fear of not being productive, and replace that with embracing being effective.

So calm down, take a look at the task at hand, focus on it, and finish.

A Note

This will work most of the time. However, there are some complexities. We want to know:

• What is the right thing to work on?

• What is standing in my way of completion?

• How large of tasks should I be taking on?

• I have so many people counting on me, how do I tell some of them to wait?

• I’m interrupted so many times a day, how can I focus?

We will cover these in upcoming posts.

The Pen: The Handoff Column

Modus Board with the Pen

In our work, we have tasks we need to do, tasks we are doing, and tasks we’ve completed. We know we have a WIP limit and that we shouldn’t exceed it. But tasks aren’t always as tidy as we’d like. We don’t just start tasks and work until they’re DONE. Tasks, very often, involve input from others over whom we have little or no control.

For this purpose, Tonianne and I use THE PEN. In the board to our right (our actual board), you can see that Toni started working on getting a contract amended and then had to send that off for review and comment. While it’s gone, we don’t want to take her away from her other tasks. So she’s moved it into The Pen where it will reside until the outside party has done their bit.

We are blessed on this day to only have one item in THE PEN. Ordinarily we have five or six. When they stack up, it’s a sign that we’ve let them linger too long and should follow up on the tickets. We will also, if need be, set a deadline or a reminder on tasks in THE PEN. Today, that’s not the case – she’s reasonably sure that she’ll get a reply sometime by the end of the week.  However, if tasks are going to sit in THE PEN for a long time or if there is a deadline we have to meet, we will certainly set a date to check on it.

We want to limit our WIP to lighten our cognitive load and let us focus. However, we will often find ourselves in a position where we have several things waiting action by others. It’s okay to sequester these tasks and move ahead with active work.

Focus: Why Limit Your WIP VII

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~ Mark Twain

DerekKanban

Eldred comes into work on Monday. He is instantly besieged by requests for work, information, meetings, and product from all five of his teams. His co-workers, his bosses, his clients all need things from him now.Eldred cannot judge the relative importance of these requests. It’s possible, in fact, that they are all equally valuable. Therefore, there is no clear direction for him to take.Eldred calls his five bosses together and cries out, “Just tell me what to do!”

Eldred’s Got No Focus

Knowledge work happens within our brains. It is a product of the mind. Without imagination, without insight, without inspiration, it is simply work.Value creation includes the work creation for a reason. It’s not value reproduction. Or value copying. Knowledge workers create. They invent. The innovate.When we lose our ability to focus, we greatly impair our ability to do these things. We become reactive. We begin to ask bosses things like: “tell us what to do.”What’s worse, we believe that’s what we want.As a boss, if your employees or team members are asking that question – you know they have no focus.

Learned Helplessness

When people specifically ask someone else to tell them what to do, one thing is quite clear:

THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

As the person who is directing knowledge workers, I have bad news for you.This is your fault, and you need to fix it.Eldred’s bosses all start to argue. They all have the highest need for Eldred right now. Things are behind and they, personally, cannot abide any more delays.Not only does this create an unnecessary meeting of people to argue about Eldred’s time – it also is a playhouse of something psychologists call “Learned Helplessness.”Learned helplessness comes from situations where we feel we are utterly powerless to act.An example of this for me comes from the 7th grade. We had an algebra teacher who was a tyrant. After I had the flu, I sat for an exam that I utterly bombed. When I went to him for help, he told me I should study harder. When I said that I had been sick, he told me that wasn’t his problem. I had nowhere to turn and my shame made me not approach my peers. Whenever I talked to the teacher, he let me know this was my problem. My lack of understanding of things at the beginning of the class led to me falling farther and farther behind, ultimately I failed the class – believing it was all due to my inability to learn algebra.I was convinced this was my substandard brain.My parents were concerned, but also were under the impression that this was just Jimmy “not applying himself.”But then they went over to Fred and Donna’s for dinner. They were eating with a group of parents of my friends. Someone mentioned their kid had failed algebra and they were disappointed. My parents said, “Really, us too!” Soon the whole table was filled with the parents of apparent algebra dunces. Coincidence?Root cause discovered, they went to the school and demanded to have us re-tested at the end of the summer.  The school, who apparently didn’t notice the flood of failing grades before, said, “Sure, whatever.”And the lot of us found ourselves getting algebra tutoring over the summer. … and oddly enjoying it.We all tested at the end of the summer, got our A’s and went on with our lives.But to this day, math upsets me. I still feel that learned helplessness and can’t shake it.

Why Eldred Can’t Read

Learned helplessness is insidious. Eldred and his bosses and his co-workers have been buried under a mountain of work. They can not see the mountain. They would not have the authority to react to the mountain even if they could.Lucy is not going to just sit up and say, “You know, this company has too much work. I’m going to kill my project and give my people to the other projects.” First, it’s her job on the line. Second, why her and not someone else? Third, she likely believes her project (as do the others) is the most important. Fourth, she simply lacks the authority to make that kind of determination. And fifth, she and the other project managers are not paid to sit around second guessing corporate decisions.Eldred is in an even worse situation. He cannot get away from any of his five projects. He knows they are all doomed. He is also quite convinced that nothing he can do will improve the situation – because he is also convinced of the necessity of all five projects and his role in them.Learned helplessness here means that rather than attack the root cause of the company’s problems (too many projects in flight) – the groups work on treating symptoms as if they are problems.We see Eldred and his colleagues exhibiting new traits: they appear anxious, less talkative, or depressed. They begin to say things like, “Just tell me what to do.” Managers often like this and will give them direct orders. The workers will then merely do their task – never ask for the context and never work to make things better.This means that tasks begin to more and more be done without an understanding of the actual end goals. The tasks may be completed in a way that meets the description of the work – but does not actually fit into the final product. This creates more work at the end of a project to make ill-fitting work fit into a final product – causing more delays, rework, and shoddy product.That, in turn, creates more learned helplessness.

Limiting WIP as a Cure for Learned Helplessness

Eldred comes to work on Monday and finds that the company has been bought by a new CEO. His name is Markus Blume. Blume walks into the office and declares, “My word! This company has a lot of goals and no products!” Everyone fidgets.Markus says, “You know what? I think it would be a capital idea if we all shelved about half this stuff for Q1 and just focused on completing some things.”Silence.This guy is clearly mental.Everyone, from the project managers to the rank and file, are aghast. “You can’t postpone projects C, D, and E! They are important!”Eldred gives an impassioned speech for D especially.Markus looks simultaneously disgusted and amused.“Of course they are important. But .. just say for a second we actually finish something. Wouldn’t that be important?”Blank stares greet him. Everyone knows that this company doesn’t actually release things. They’ll just lay people off.But, learned helplessness works in Mr Blume’s favor. Everyone goes and does what they are told.Teams are re-formed. Lots of work is put on the back burner, but the front burners are turned way up.Two new, larger and dedicated, teams are directed at projects A and B. A third team, called the Deming team, is built to look around the company and notice where things can be improved. Years of panic-driven management has resulted in tons of bad process, horrible systems, and neglected tasks. The Deming team is there to remove the bad constraints, create healthy ones, and clean up the mess.Eldred is steaming mad for losing project D, the fact that it is scheduled for later in the year is of little comfort. He knows his project, project B, will be delayed just like always.Tuesday, Eldred shows up and gets to work on Project B. At the end of the day, he is still dealing with the loss of project D. So much so that he hardly notices that he was very productive that day.Wednesday, the B team gathers and talks about strategy. They haven’t even been given a deadline! They feel rudderless. How are they going to finish without a deadline? Surely this will take forever.Maybe they need to invent their own goals, someone suggests.And they do. This is post 7 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP.  Read post 8 Awareness: Why Limit Your WIP VIII in the Why Limit Your WIP series.  Also, see the index for a list of all of them.