| | |  | Misc | Home » » » Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life | | | | | | | Description: | | Machines need to be productive. People need to be effective. Productivity books focus on doing more, Jim and Tonianne want you to focus on doing better. Personal Kanban is about choosing the right work at the right time. Recognizing why we do the things we do. Understanding the impact of our actions. Creating value - not just product. For ourselves, our families, our friends, our co-workers. For our legacy. Personal Kanban takes the same Lean principles from manufacturing that led the Japanese auto industry to become a global leader in quality, and applies them to individual and team work. Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work and limit our work-in-progress. Visualizing work allows us to transform our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices. Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve the way we work and the way we make choices to balance our personal, professional, and social lives. Neither a prescription nor a plan, Personal Kanban provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context. This book describes why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban. | | | Product Details: | | | Average Customer Rating:
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Average Customer Review:
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40 of 43 found the following review helpful:
 Converted CynicApr 28, 2011
By Dan Leone
I have seen it all. From the primitive todo to the philistine Covey to digital GTD to the nothing-there ZTD, I am confident saying that there is nothing I have wasted more of my time on than studying how not to waste more of my time. I have active accounts with AppoloHQ, Nirvana, Producteev, HiTask, RTM, TeamLab, PlanBox and a gazillion other task management websites. I approach each of these methodologies and implementations with a cynical eye. I do not inherently trust any "system" and quickly pshaw them right out of the box. But I hang on. I hang on to the hope that as my brain begins to drop more information than it picks up, I will eventually find something that will work.
The prerequisites are simple:
1. No part of this process should take more than 10 minutes to implement
2. It needs to be visual
3. It needs to be visible!
4. I should never be in a position where I say "If only I had an internet connection" or "If only I had my laptop" or "If only my Circa Rhodia pad come unlined."
5. At the "end of the day," I need to be able to report on and measure my performance. We are all accountable for what we produce. My goals are directly tied to what I can accomplish.
6. It's got to FEEL good. Metrics aside, if it is ugly, cumbersome or "kludgy," it will never be a tool for me. I seek beauty through simplicity.
7. It can't be binary. Use it or not, there has to be room for a transition.
8. It should not be mutually exclusive to any other system. If I want to implement Next Actions or Covey's big rocks/little rocks, or a universal capture tool (ie Evernote), then nothing should stop me from doing that.
Perhaps those prerequisites were not so simple after all as it seems that no one was able to meet those criteria. Then came a breath of fresh air within the pages of Personal "Kanban - Mapping Work | Navigating Life." What Tonianne and Jim have done is create the most unnecessary book ever. Because with no more than a few words, anyone can begin using Personal Kanban within a few minutes. Of course, far from an unnecessary book, this book expands on the methodology with insight into how PK evolved from Lean manufacturing principles. It proceeds to discuss the human side of why things don't get done which is the ultimate Achilles' heel for many people...certainly my Achilles' heel.
What PK has managed to do for me is bypass the normal procrastination techniques, missing organizational DNA and the inability to hold greater than two items in my head simultaneously. PK is becoming my "staging area." It is the first thing I do in the morning as I make conscious decisions about what must happen by the end of the day. It feels as natural as what all of us do when we scribble a note on a post-it and stick it to our monitor. But instead of a collage of post-its, PK takes simplicity and mashes it with effectiveness to create a disarmingly simple process.
Tonianne and Jim have done all this in a well-written book with simple examples but it is NOT an oversimplification. It is real, it is beautiful, it is doable and it is waiting for you. Pick up the book today and stay tuned for wonderful to happen.
18 of 19 found the following review helpful:
Teach an old dog new tricks!Apr 01, 2011
By William Tubb
I came to Personal Kanban as a dedicated 30+ year Daytimer user. I've done the Time Management seminars, I've managed my personal and professional life for 40+ years, and quite frankly I thought "Meh, I'm curious and I'll give it a read."
I was not prepared for the changes this book and it's methodology would make in my Tax Practice/Life. I did not realize how incorporating Personal Kanban into my daily life could smooth the flow and reduce the stress of tax season.
Who knew visualizing your backlog and work-in-process on simple little sticky notes would help you to understand when to work, what to work on, and chop the guilt allowing you to spend time on something other than work. By reducing and identifying my work-in-process I've actually worked faster and removed stress from my life.
My wife and I leave on a vacation in 16 days and I'm sure I would have cancelled or postponed it without Personal Kanban. "Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life" is leading me successfully through my tax season with all clients happy (or as happy as they can be with a tax return) and the satisfaction of knowing I've completed every task on time!
Kudos to Jim and Tonianne for a job well done, and a wonderful book.
16 of 19 found the following review helpful:
 A good idea sold in too many pagesAug 27, 2011
By Flavius Stef
The book in a nutshell: create a backlog of your work, add a kanban board (columns: "backlog", "ready", "in progress", "done"), limit your work in progress to a number you determine by trial and error and retrospect periodically to understand what factors influence you to be effective/ineffective for a certain type of task. Adapt.
I think the process suggested (previously defined by David Anderson in his Kanban book; previously developed by Toyota for manufacturing) is valuable, and has made me give up my to-do lists. On the other hand, I don't think you need a whole book to explain it, a simple (if longer) blog post would be sufficient.
The idea I found most valuable was to strive for effectiveness rather than productivity. That is: try to get things done instead of trying to keep yourself busy.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
"Machines Need to be Productive. People Need to be Effective."Jul 22, 2011
By Adam Yuret
Personal Kanban changed the way I think about everything I do.
We all feel like there aren't enough hours in the day to fulfill our commitments to work and family life. How often do we find ourselves saying "I am so busy, I can't seem to get anything done!" How can it be possible to busily accomplish nothing?
When we maintain a large backlog of existential overhead we feel stressed because we don't feel like we're making progress. Thanks to the Zeigarnik effect we focus inordinately on unfinished tasks. When we finish a task it is flushed out of our thoughts because we're constantly focused on the unfinished pile.
Personal Kanban offers a deceptively simple solution to these stresses. Take all the tasks currently occupying that ball of stress in your mind, write them down on sticky-notes and stick them to a board. By writing them down you're able to see that they're not all equally important. You remove them from the amorphous stress ball inside your psyche and stick them to the wall. Suddenly you enjoy the clarity brought by simply visualizing precisely what it is you need to accomplish. A Kanban is a signboard where you visualize your work. In it's simplest form a kanban board contains 3 columns: "Ready", "Doing" and "Done".
I generally reject dogmatic and/or complicated concepts. What Jim and Tonianne have written in Personal Kanban is neither. There are only 2 rules:
1. Visualize your work
2. Limit your Work in Progress (WIP)
I've explained the backlog already, one of the benefits of this backlog is that you can now easily see what needs to be done, and prioritize those tasks according to what's most important to you at the time. Once you've prioritized your tasks you can start pulling those tasks into your "Doing" column. If you moved every task into doing at the same time you'd essentially have created a visualization of the amorphous stress-ball you had previously stored in your head. This would not have much value. So we limit our work in progress.
This book gives some good rules of thumb and suggestions (a WIP limit of no more than 3 is a rule of thumb) but it doesn't say "There is one right way to do this." or "If you do this wrong you're a failure."
It is a breath of fresh air to see authors/experts admit that all things are context driven. Everybody is different. You might do best by only doing 2 tasks at a time or maybe you'd enjoy doing 4. The theory behind limiting WIP suggests that by doing fewer tasks at one time, you'll be able to increase your throughput. Some great analogies are drawn between what a freeway's capacity is, vs it's throughput. When we do less at a given time, we get more done at a higher rate of speed.
Finally when we move the task into the done column we get to celebrate our small successes. A full "done" column feels good. You no longer focus solely on your unfinished work.
This book is a fun read that will make your life both happier and more productive. It acknowledges that productivity without happiness is not a desirable way to live. Being stressed all the time impacts the quality and speed of our work.
Jim and Tonianne have written a book with the potential to change the way you live and work, while putting a greater focus on your own happiness. All that and a great story about a poodle too!
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Clarity, purpose and productivityDec 12, 2011
By Ilya Grigorik
"igrigorik"
Success is not about cramming the most amount of work into least amount of time, instead it is a measure of getting the right stuff done at the right time - that's effectiveness. This book helps you think through the process to support this goal: how to ask the right questions, prioritize the right tasks, and also to establish rules for measuring success. The visual aspects of Kanban, such as a prioritized whiteboard, or a piece of paper are simply mental shortcuts to help you on this path - all great tips, especially if you haven't experienced a Kanban workflow before.
Well written and a thought provoking read. It's easy to swallow this book in one go, but resist the temptation - take the time to process each chapter and reflect its suggestions on your own life.
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