Customer Reviews

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

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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.

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.

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.

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!

This book is a must have for anyone looking to become not only more productive, but also effective, and efficient. Personal Kanban Mapping Work Navigating Life will give you the knowledge needed to understand how to use personal kanban effectively, whether you are a student, professional, or in the home, no matter what your age. You will learn just how Personal Kanban will grow, flow, and evolve just as naturally as you do. This book will be a constant companion. From front cover, to footnotes, from index to content, this book is a winner.

"When you pull that sticky note into DONE, it's brain candy." ~Personal Kanban Mapping Work Navigating Life

To do lists... Getting Things Done... Time Management... Usually they're all focused on complex methodologies or the amount of things you can accomplish in a given timeframe (usually a day). But instead of being busy, what if you focused on how effective you were in getting the necessary things done? Heck... what if it was also pretty simple? That's what you get in the book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. To me, this was a book that "clicked" immediately and helped me see where I was going wrong in terms of frantically trying to do and be everything to everybody.

Contents: Foreword - The Agony of Crisis Management; Introduction - Personal Kanban - 100% New Age Free; The Basics of Personal Kanban; Building Your First Personal Kanban; My Time Management is in League with the Freeway; Nature Flows; Components of a Quality Life; Finding Our Priorities; Strive for Improvement; Endgame; Appendix A - Personal Kanban Design Patterns; Appendix B - Personal Kanban and Social Media

The basics of Personal Kanban are very simple. You need to be able to place work in context with who you are and what you need to accomplish. Next, limits need to be placed on the WIP (Work In Progress) so that you can be effective in what you're doing. Finally, you look at what you've done and learn how you might be able to do it more effectively next time. That's really about it. The tools to implement Personal Kanban are even more basic... sticky notes and a whiteboard/wall with three columns for Ready, WIP, and Done. As you choose items from your Backlog (all those sticky notes with tasks and to do's written on them) that are ready to be worked based on your overall context, you move them into the Ready column. As you start to work on them, they move into the WIP column. And then to see and feel that sense of completion, the sticky note moves into the Done column. The goal isn't to have 100 items in Ready or WIP all the time. If that's the case, you haven't gained anything. Instead, the items that are Ready are ones that make sense to start based on the current situation. Even more important, the WIP column should only have a small number of items actually being worked on (try starting with three) at any given time. If you have 15 items "in process", you're not managing anything. You're just reacting to whatever is squeaking the loudest. By understanding your own personal workflow limits, you'll know what you can and can't accomplish in a truly effective manner. Again, it's not how productive or busy you are... it's how effective you are in what you choose to do.

The authors have an easy-going flow between them when it comes to writing style. Having also followed them on Twitter, I can see where that comes from. They enjoy what they do, and it shows through in this book. By the time I was a third of the way through, I was already planning out my own implementation. The fact that I could start immediately and improve it as I went along was right in line with what kanban is all about... incremental improvements to become more effective and cut down on wasted effort.

I'd recommend Personal Kanban to anyone who is looking to get their work and/or personal life under control. The concepts work equally well in both environments, and you don't have to commit to an all-or-nothing methodology that costs major dollars to get started "properly". It's hard to argue against sticky notes. :) This will also be a book that I'll revisit on a periodic basis to look for new angles and slants on how I'm doing within the framework. Overall, this is great material with the potential to make major differences in your life.

Disclosure:
Obtained From: Amazon
Payment: Purchase

Personal Kanban is the McGuffy Reader for anyone wanting to work effectively in the current age. If you take on the practices offered in this book, and *practice them* in your personal and professional life, you'll be taking the first step to transforming your approach doing the greatest work you're capable of.

The gems within this book are the simple practices that make the central concepts real. "Visualize your work" and "limit your work in progress" make a lot of sense, but they're worthless ideas without a set of practices by which you can apply them to your own world. Personal Kanban gives you practices to get working more effectively right now, and puts you on the path to improving how you work every day.

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.

Somebody presented the Kanban method at the office, for application in work teams. What can you do, when there's a good method for producing results at work, it's always a temptation to ask, "hey, could I do this for myself individually, and maybe for the rest of my life?" Actually I didn't think about applying it to the rest of my life -- that was the authors' idea. I picked up the book thinking "personal" just meant "individual" though still at work. Anyway, the authors summarize their method early on (page 14/169) in just 2 rules: (1) Visualize your work and (2) Limit your Work-in-Progress (WIP). And they cover how to do it by halfway through (page 80). So that's my problem with this book: too long for what I needed to know. The rest is some stories and a vaguely interesting update to Covey's four quadrants with the important/urgent axes. And me, I am not impressed with the idea that work and personal tasks should be combined into one handling system. As hard as it is for me (in software development, like the authors) to remember, the important activities in personal life are not tasks to be checked off, so we need more, not fewer, boundaries between work and life.

It was about a year ago while searching for a productivity tool for myself that I came across the Personal Kanban system by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. Now they have published a book detailing their system called Personal Kanban: Mapping Work/Navigating Life. Most books on productivity focus on doing more but Jim and Tonianne share a system to focus on doing the right work at the right time.

Personal Kanban is a simple system with dramatic results. It helps us manage ourselves, but also lets us share our work and our goals with others. Personal Kanban creates a visual display of work elements and allows you to manage your workflow.

The beauty of the Personal kanban system is that it is endlessly flexible. Our lives are not static, and neither is our work. Personal Kanban evolves as our context changes, encouraging us to innovate and invent in response to the variation we encounter daily.

There are only two rules with Personal Kanban:

1. Visualize your work
2. Limit your work-in-progress

Think of Personal Kanban as a dynamic, interactive map that surveys your personal landscape for lies heard, what you are doing now, and what you did.

Jim and Tonianne take you through the steps of creating your own Personal Kanban:

1. Getting Your Stuff Ready
2. Establishing Your Value Streams
3. Establishing Your Backlog
4. Establishing Your WIP Limit
5. Begin To Flow or Pull
6. Reflection

They also talk about prioritizing your tasks and relate the Personal Kanban thinking to that of other time management theories like Covey's Urgent and Important Matrix. There is even a section on metrics to help you gauge your progress. Jim and Tonianne conclude with the importance of retrospection and introspection which lead to improvement and solving problems at their source.

Personal Kanban is a fun, practical read on time management. Each chapter ends with several Personal Kanban Flow Tips that summarize the key points of that chapter. The appendix of the book covers several Personal Kanban designs that will surely stimulate thoughts for your system. Jim and Tonianne have included numerous visuals to facilitate learning this productivity system.

There are two key takeaways from this book: Work unseen is work uncontrolled and we can't (and shouldn't) do more work than we can handle. Personal Kanban can help us see life's complexities and make better decisions. With introspection, kaizen, and retrospectives we are better informed, more attentive, and relaxed.

As someone who has used this system, Jim and Tonianne have done a great job in this well written book explaining a novel productivity system. This book is a must have for anyone looking to become not only more productive, but also effective, and efficient. It serves as a guide, a springboard, and a mentor for establishing your own system. And remember Personal Kanban facilitates kaizen.

Originally posted on A Lean Journey Blog