Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

Our capacity for work is limited by a host of factors including the amount of time we have, the predictability of the task at hand, our level of experience with the task type, our energy level, and the amount of work we currently have in progress. Limiting WIP allows us the time to focus, work quickly, react calmly to change, and do a thoughtful jo

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

It is challenging to understand what we can’t see.

Personal Kanban has to be endlessly flexible. It needs to be a system that abhors rules. It’s an enigma. A process that hates process.

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

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

The TODAY column shows us the difference between what we want to do each day and what we can actually achieve. It shows us how we fall short of our daily goal. Once we understand our actual daily capability, we can set more realistic goals at the beginning of the day, and end the day feeling we’ve been effective.

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

Hours, days, weeks of our lives vanish into the ether. Precious time we’ll never recoup because we aren’t paying attention to what we’re doing, we’re just endlessly and mindlessly doing.