Personal Kanban on the desktop

Posted by vinayakgadkariblog on March 24, 2012
Posted in: Productivity. Tagged: , . 8 Comments

I have been a GTD (Getting Things Done) fan as well as an agile practitioner for years. GTD advocates creating hard deadlines so that your slate is always clean. I have been finding this tough to manage as the WIP (work in progress) has been slowly increasing each day. Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry provided a refreshing view.

Fundamental Principles of Personal Kanban

Personal Kanban book
The two fundamental principles that are harped upon are:

  • Principle 1: Visualize your work. (When you can see your workload, you can understand it better)
  • Principle 2: Limit your WIP (work-in-progress). (Don’t take on more work than you can handle)
In a nutshell:
To visualize work, one pins tasks in typically three swim-lanes – Ready, Doing and Done. Tasks need to be pulled from the Ready lane to Doing lane for execution and then moved off to Done lane after execution. The limit on WIP is set by limiting the tasks in the Doing lane.

Implementing the visualization part

The visualization part was not very intuitive until I tried it out. One of the differences with GTD is visualization – since to-do lists do not really give one an aerial view of the work on plate. I have been using StarDock Fences to segregate my desktop icons into functionally separate areas. After trying a few lame searches to find a desktop tool, I decided to give it a try using Stardock Fences. Here’s the resultant desktop with five swim-lanes: Waiting, Defer, Do, Doing and Done.

Before After
Personal Kanban (Before)
Personal Kanban (After)

Nothing exciting so far :-(. I was using separate functional areas for the desktop icons anyways. The kicker 🙂 was when I moved the “Doing” task to “Done”. The empty Doing swim-lane gave a feeling of contentment. I then started looking at the desktop a bit more and realized that the visualization does indeed help. Here’s what the book says:

Kinesthetic Feedback 2: Pattern Recognition
Each time we move a sticky note, we receive kinesthetic feedback: the tactile action is both a data point and a reward. A regular succession of these movements creates a cadence, a rhythm of work. Cadence creates an expectation. We begin to notice patterns (types of tasks most often delayed, tasks that require additional help), make distinctions (what work we enjoy, who we enjoy working with), and can adjust our prioritizations to suit.

I am still working on this to see how the Limit WIP principle help, more updates later…Heavy stuff, but one needs to actually try it to see if it helps.

8 comments on “Personal Kanban on the desktop”

  1. Hi there,

    I love the idea of creating a workflow directly on your desktop! I’ve been using Personal Kanban actively for the last three years to manage my “delicate work-life balance”, right through from my workload at the office to our family activities. You can check out my Scrumfamily blog for my writings on my many experiments, both fun and serious.

    The one place where I’ve still used some elements of GTD, though, is on my desktop. Until recently I used the Projects, Actions and File folders, and then collapsed Projects and Actions into one, while still keeping File. Your post just made me realize that the “File” folder is in fact the same as having a Done folder that is the last phase in your workflow. Thanks for that connection. 🙂

    Regards,
    Maritza

    Reply

    • Hi Maritza,

      Having the work-flow and tasks in one’s face on the desktop makes them hard to avoid! As an aside, I am also using Gina Trapani’s (Lifehacker) todotxt to manage my daily to-dos and also put them on the desktop. Plan to write this in a post later.

      I looked at your blog site – wow! You have been experimenting with Kanban for a long.. time. I hope to learn some valuable tidbits from your posts since I have got seriously started only recently.

      GTD is amazing and has truly changed my life – thanks to David Allen for that. During the course of my experiments I want to see how GTD can mesh with Personal Kanban.

      Regards,
      Vinayak.

      Reply

      • Hi Vinayak,

        Thanks for the positive feedback on my blog. I don’t post that often, because life keeps me busy. Hey, that’s why I started using Personal Kanban. 😉

        When I recently changed jobs, the first thing I did was to set up my desk-based kanban. I really can’t imagine doing things any other way right now.

        Of course I augment with other mechanisms, too. Pomodoro is great to stay focused for a certain time. And I’m planning to change my backlog to use the Covey quadrants so I can see if I’m focusing on the most high value work or not. I never really embraced GTD, although I did toy with it for a while.

        Regards,
        Maritza

  2. Hi Vinayak,

    I came to about the same idea. But it did not work well with multiscreen configuration when I have to disconnect 2nd monitor sometimes. I finally have made my own solution, you may take a look here: http://dmitryivanov.net/personal-kanban-app/. The funny thing: I spent more time looking for some simple software and experimenting than developing it for myself.

    Regards,
    Dmitry

    Reply

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