Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

Moments of heightened stress can translate into more WIP than we realize, because we’re simultaneously battling our fears in addition to doing more work.

It lurks behind every accomplishment, insisting No time to celebrate, you’ve got so much more to do!

The Zeigarnik Effect fosters a psychic tension which has a toxic interaction with fears or worries lying around in our psyche. What results is an anxiety feedback loop that can preclude sleep, impact health and for some, become psychologically or physically debilitating.

increasing work linearly increases the likelihood of failure exponentially.

Without visualizing our work, we don’t see the number of incomplete tasks we’ve amassed. This makes it nearly impossible to understand just how many incomplete tasks remain. Our brains hate this because our brains crave closure. No really, they do! Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that the human brain needs closure. This phenomenon—known a

All that stuff we need to do? That’s our backlog. Amorphous and undefined, our backlog is powerful and pernicious.

principles take precedence over process. Process should change with context.

Our board was specifically designed to be an information radiator: we wanted it to show the flow of our work (even from a distance), limit our work-in-progress, and capture all tasks, not just those directly related to software production.

Its focus on team work increased productivity and effectiveness brilliantly. But we were overlooking a vital element—the individual team member.