Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

We crave and deserve context. Without context, being told what to do is a communication failure.

Kaizen is a state of continuous improvement where people naturally look for ways to improve poorly performing practices.

increasing work linearly increases the likelihood of failure exponentially.

Visualizing work gives us power over it. When we see work in its various contexts, real trade-offs become explicit.

This larger view of our work and our context allows us to make better decisions.

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.

When they’re incorporated into your regular WIP limit, repetitive tasks can clutter your Personal Kanban and create wasteful overhead. If you have to check in with three customers daily, creating fifteen sticky notes per week reminding you to contact them is waste. In these types of situations, consider giving repetitive tasks their own visualizati

The only way out is “through.” Often, you can’t delegate, procrastinate, or ignore personal work.

Prioritization for personal work happens at the moment of doing.