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workflow

Killing Email Interruptions: Personal Kanban using LeanKit, Gmail, and Zapier

Quick intro from Jim Benson:

We've asked Chris Hefley from Leankit to write a series of posts showing how to integrate tools many of us use everyday with our Personal Kanban. These are fairly technical posts, but also very powerful ones.

In this first post, Chris mentions that his aim is to keep his inbox at zero by taking action items and moving them directly to his Personal Kanban. Tonianne and I have also noticed that we also tend to act on emails the moment they arrive. This means that we allow email to interrupt our flow of work - then we get to the end of the day and are disappointed by how we let those interruptions derail our day.

Chris lays out a simple mechanism to move emails into your Leankit Personal Kanban that can both clean out your inbox and give some of those interruptions their proper priority. Also, I've turned Chris' post into a video which is at the bottom.

Take it away, Chris

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I aspire to keep my inbox at zero. About once every couple of weeks, I actually get there. I’ve got several tools that I use to help me with that, including moving emails to my Personal Kanban board in LeanKit.

LeanKit has a connector available for Zapier, a cloud based integration hub. Zapier provides hundreds more connectors with other applications, which makes it very easy to connect LeanKit with Gmail, ZenDesk, BugZilla, BaseCamp, and many more.In this article, I’ll show you how to set up a “Zap” to create a LeanKit card based on an email in Gmail, complete with a link back to the original email, so that you can get that “to do” item onto your Kanban board and out of your inbox.First, you’ll need to go to Zapier.com and create an account. There’s a free account that should work just fine, and if you need more integrations or faster synchronization you can upgrade later.Once you’ve created your account, you’ll be asked to create your first “Zap”, and presented with the screen below:

Integrating Zapier with LeanKit

On the Trigger (left) side, choose Gmail, and choose “New Thread”.

Choosing Gmail and a New Thread

On the Action side (right side) choose LeanKit and “New-Add Card” for the action.So that when a new Thread is created in Gmail that fits the criteria we will add later, it will create a matching card in LeanKit.

Adding LeanKit

Follow the steps in Zapier to set up your Gmail account:

Selecting an Email Account

…and your LeanKit account.

Conecting LeanKit to Zapier

Now, in a separate browser tab, go into your gmail account, open an email, and create a Label called “lk” (or something similar) for that email. (Help for how to create a label in Gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/118708?hl=en)

Back in Zapier, in the filter for your Gmail Trigger, choose the “lk” label you created in the previous step (it could take a few minutes for the label to show up after you’ve created it. If you don’t see it after a few minutes, try saving your “Zap” incomplete, and then coming back to this step.)

Choosing Triggers

In Zapier, Choose the LeanKit board you’d like to add cards to. This will allow you to select from any board in your LeanKit account (that you have access to with your login).

Choosing a LeanKit Board

After selecting the Board, you’ll be able to select the lane you want new cards added to, and the Card Type you want for your new cards.

Selecting the LeanKit Lane

For the Card Title field, add the Gmail fields  “From Name” and “Subject”, and add “Plain Message” to the description field.

You can also add “ThreadURL” to the Description field if you’re using Basic or Team edition to provide a link back to the email. Or follow the instructions further down to add the link to the card header if you’re using Portfolio edition.

Selecting Card Fields

Test it like so:

Test Your Setup

Testing Your Setup 2

If you’re using LeanKit Portfolio Edition, you can use the “External Card ID” field. Add “ThreadID” to this field from the list of available Gmail fields.

Using the External Card ID Field

Open your LeanKit board in a new browser tab, and in the settings for your leankit board, enable Card ID, and set it up as shown below. The field is where the Gmail ThreadID will go.  (Check the gmail message url by opening an email in your browser and confirming the format of the url shown below for the email).

Enabling LeanKit Card ID

Now, the link to the original thread will appear in the header of the card, allowing you to quickly jump back there without opening the card to view the description.

Links on the LeanKit Task Cards

That should do it. You can test the Zap and turn it on in Zapier. Now, all you have to do is label a message in Gmail with “lk” and then archive it to get it out of your inbox. The next time the Zapier sync process runs, it will pick up that email and create a LeanKit card for it.

Clean Up The DONE Column

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You have my word that after this post, there will be no more memegenerator pictures..

How do you know when to clean up your DONE column?When it is full.I mentioned in our first post in this series that we were showing our board to people in classes and on consulting engagements. The DONE column showed that we were really really productive. It was huge. It went on forever. Hundreds of completed tasks.So, how do we clean up our DONE column?

Retrospective

Every Friday we meet and discuss what we’ve been doing and move the tickets from DONE into an archive column. For a physical Personal Kanban, this might be a box or a folder. We discuss what we did and how things went, focusing on areas of improvement.But what happens if you are on the road for four weeks straight and you can’t have a retrospective?This was happening a lot.

Not Everything Needs to be DiscussedRecently we have discovered that focusing on one or two main projects at a time, the retrospectives change considerably. We set up tactical boards for daily work and focus on that work. We are constantly asking ourselves what needs to be done, how our process is working, and what the best thing is to do next.The DONE column still fills up with tasks, but now we understand the nature of these tasks. We are also starting to flag improvement ideas to discuss. We now pull those tasks in real time, as opposed to waiting for a retrospective. So Tonianne might come up with a few improvement tasks and we’ll discuss them the next morning.This frees us up to archive routine or comfortable tasks when the DONE column starts to fill up.This is the fifth post in the series - Are You Just Doing Things.  You can read the previous post here.Written in Mesa, Arizona

Dominant and Secondary Projects

At Modus we now have a posted, dominant project at all times.

Make dominant projects visible

We post it as a large sticky on the wall. This is the banner saying “If you pull something and have any choice whatsoever, pull it from this backlog.”

This giant kanban token conveys our current organizational focus and promotes completion of that project.

Only when something is completed, does Modus receive any value from it.

This is why long projects with cumbersome deliverables are so difficult for companies and the people in them: long projects require long wait times to realize value.

As the anticipation for completion builds and we meet the inevitable disruptions in schedule, we are disappointed. As we are disappointed, our desire to work, our culture, and the quality of our work suffer.

Providing a constant reminder with a visual control, not just at the standup meeting (which is not a visual control), of the day’s focus has helped considerably.

I’ve noticed that Urgent but not Important tasks like answering emails, dealing with texts, and impromptu conversations not only derail us from the task at hand, but also the day’s focus. I’ve witnessed in others and myself that when we’re interrupted, we often don’t go back to what we were working on, but onto another interruption. After an unexpected phone call, we might suddenly find ourselves checking e-mail.

It seems that any break in flow, breaks the flow.

The visual reminder of major focus helps return us to the day’s project.

This is the fourth post in the series - Are You Just Doing Things.  You can read the previous post here.

Written in Mesa, Arizona

Clean Up Your Backlog

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Does your READY column look like a junk drawer?  

Do you have tasks in there that you are holding onto from six months ago that say “Urgent!” (and have since the day they were created)?

Guess what? You’re learning something about your work.

We have a lot of urgent tasks that strangely don’t get done and no one gets hurt.

Busy-ness is bad for business

We might miss an opportunity or need to do something different in the future, but we don’t complete a lot of tasks we, ourselves, would describe as urgent.In the first post in this series, I mentioned that at Modus our board had built up an unhealthy backlog. It was gigantic.Why did this happen?1. We’re busy! Tonianne and I were traveling constantly, forming partnerships, coming up with new products, working on existing products, keeping notes about things to blog about, juggling demands from clients, and running a business. We were both constantly adding to the board. So much so, Tonianne at one point created a backlog just for her because she couldn’t find things on the board. Busy-ness was becoming bad for business.

2. No custodian No one was in charge of cleaning out the backlog, so even though we are both focused on the board, we became focused on completion - but not hygiene.

3. Focused on the new work As I mentioned we were focused on completion. We would put new urgent work into the board and do it immediately, while old tasks just got older. We needed to maintain a focus, again, on board hygieneSo what to do?Well, we can either clean them up or work them out.Cleaning I took on the role of custodian and started clearing out old, poorly described, or simply unnecessary.  After that, and the backlog regrooming from the previous post, we were able to see all our work and begin to actually complete. When discussing the board, we now talk about old tickets and why certain tickets are there.Batching If there are tickets that really are important, but haven’t been done, we might suggest a pomodoro or two to focus on completing just those tasks, clean them off the board, and move on.This is important because often tickets that languish are of a certain type. They involve writing tedious emails or calling people on the phone, for example. Batching those up and completing them also is a good way to get them out of the backlog.This is the third post in the series - Are You Just Doing Things.  You can read the previous post here.Written in Mesa, Arizona

Categorizing Your Backlog

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Your backlog is hope. Your backlog is pain.  

Your backlog holds all the projects, tasks, demands, desires, and expectations you have and the world has for you.The problem is, today’s apparent emergencies are tomorrow’s waste-of-my-time.If we are focused on completion, we don’t want to complete tasks.We want to complete products.If you find you are completing tasks, but not products ... try making your backlog explicitly show what you need to do to complete the products those tasks make up.

Unorganized Backlog

This board is a typical cluttered backlog. You might be able to see that tasks belong to specific projects, but they are jumbled and incoherent. While each of these tasks might be options we can exercise, the complexity of our decision of what to pull next is directly related to the number of tasks in the READY column and our inability to quickly see what each task is.So .. let’s try to build an explicit BACKLOG before the READY column:

Explicit Backlog

Here we see a board with a categorized backlog. We hold work in the backlog until it’s READY to be done. Only then can we move it into the READY column. Note here that the READY column is limited to seven tasks.So now we’ve split out our work and we can see very clearly what projects we have, how much work is in each, and what we are currently spending our time on.This board is much easier to interpret.In this example, we can see that we are split between marketing, general work, and course creation.This is the second post in the series - Are You Just Doing Things?  You can read the first post here.Written in Mesa, Arizona

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