Task Board Practice #4: Use Card Conversations to Replace Hive Mind Chatter

A good production process, in other words, should minimize both ambiguity about what’s going on and the amount of unscheduled communication required to accomplish this work.

changing your objective from making your own unit as efficient as possible to helping your organization produce as much value as possible doesn’t need to reduce the quality or sustainability of the work involved.

When the friction involved in asking someone to do something was removed, the number of these requests spiraled out of control.

In most knowledge work settings, it’s the specialists who directly produce the valuable output that sustains their organization. Given this reality, a better objective for support units would be the following: to effectively fulfill their administrative duties with as small an impact as possible on the specialists’ main work obligations.

For such a system to truly be a backup, and not just a back door that returns you to the hive mind, it must induce enough friction that you won’t use it unless the situation is sufficiently urgent.

Task Board Practice #1: Cards Should Be Clear and Informative

In knowledge work, any type of valuable result that you or your organization regularly produces can be understood as the output of a production process.

Once we understand the contours of our frustrations with knowledge work, we recognize that we have the potential to make these efforts not only massively more productive, but also massively more fulfilling and sustainable.