Book Review: Personal Kanban - Mapping Work/Navigating Flow

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.


Note: The authors provided a copy of this book for review.

Kanban for Personal Management

About a month ago I came across a great concept called the Personal Kanban that I wanted to share.  Taiichi Ohno created the first kanban to communicate with workers how much work needed to get done and how much got done.  Kanban is a Japanese term meaning "sign" or "signboard".  A kanban does three main things:

1. Shows us the work we have in progress

2. Shows us all the work we haven't gotten to yet

3. Shows us how efficiently we work

Personal Kanban is a personal productivity tool based on these principles to create a simple way to visualize and control your work. There are only two real rules with Personal Kanban:

1. Visualize your work 

2. Limit your work-in-progress

Personal Kanban is the idea of Jim Benson, owner of Modus Cooperandi, a consultancy that helps businesses achieve business goals through collaborative means. Jim also blogs at Evolving Web on Lean, Agile Management, and Social Media principles.

Limiting your work in progress is important since the human brain simply does not respond well to the stress of juggling multiple priorities.

We feel like if we have “free time” we have “capacity” and therefore can fit more work in. We are not unlike a freeway.

A freeway can operate from 0 to 100 percent capacity. But when a freeway’s capacity gets over about 65%, it starts to slow down. When it reaches 100% capacity – it stops.

So capacity is a horrible measure of throughput. Multitasking is a horrible way to manage your synapses. If your brain is a highway and you are filling yourself with work, after a time you start to slow down.

Your rush hour gets longer and longer. You find yourself struggling to get out simple tasks.

Simply because you think you can handle more work-in-progress does not make it so.

You can build your first Personal Kanban in 4 simple steps.

1) Establish Your Value Stream

 The flow of work from the moment you start to when it is finished. The most simple value stream possible is Backlog (work waiting to be done), Doing (work being done), and Done (yes, that's right, work that's done). 

2)  Two: Establish Your Backlog

All that stuff you need to do that you haven't done – that's your backlog.  Everything you need to do, start writing it down onto Post-its. Big tasks, small tasks, get them all down.

3) Establish Your WIP Limit
The amount of work you can handle at one time.  Part of what makes kanban work is finding the sweet spot, where we are doing the optimal amount of work at the optimal speed.

4) Begin to Pull

Begin working – pull completed work from one stage of the value stream and into the next.

There is a short presentation to help you get started.

Personal Kanban 101

View more presentations from Jim Benson.

Personal Kanban is easily adaptable and scalable to fit anyone's needs.  There a number of great examples and tools on the website to support you on future improvements to your Personal Kanban.  For those iPhone users there is even an app for Personal Kanban called iKan.

In the next few weeks I hope to transform my previous Visual Task Board to a Personal Kanban of my own.  I would like to hear if anyone has experience with a Personal Kanban they would like to share.

Personal Kanban Kaizen - It's all Digital

In two earlier posts I wrote about the benefits of a personal kanban and showed my first kanban system. One of the weaknesses of this board was the lack of portability of the system with the amount time I spend out of the office.  So I have created digital personal kanban system.

LeanKit Kanban allows you to create a virtual kanban system online.   Their software makes it easy to customize your own kanban board, add color, dates, and more.  They offer several pricing options to meet all your needs from personal to team editions.  The free personal option only allows you to create one kanban board.

Here is the kanban board I made to manage my tasks.

The layout is pretty simple.  If you remember my previous non-digital board I used the following rules to create my personal kanban:

1) Establish Your Value Stream – The flow of work I chose was Backlog, This Week, Today, and Done.

2) Establish Your Backlog – I put every task onto a post-it-note, if the task had a due date I put that on the note as well.

3) Establish Your WIP Limit – I limited my Today column to 3 and therefore limited my This Week column to 15

4) Begin to Pull – As I work on the Today column I pull new tasks into Today.

The built in visuals are a great feature of this kanban.  The color coding helps me manage all aspects of my life in one place.  I use the colors to organize the following grouping of tasks:

Tan - work related tasks: projects, kaizen events, data analysis
Green - personal tasks: kids activities, home projects
Blue - A Lean Journey Blog tasks:  new posts, website maintenance
Red - AME tasks: new workshops, social media posting

If tasks are date sensitive that can be added to the the card and a visual date shows in the bottom right of the card.  When you move the cursor over the task the date is visible.  The date starts out yellow and then turns red if your task is behind.  You can see I was behind a couple on my board.

The software offers a number of analytics to help you understand how well you perform.  I have not really used this information yet to improve my system but it is there.

As I mentioned in the previous system I use this for tasks that take about 1-2 hours.  For smaller tasks I also use a digital system.  I use Google Tasks which is a simple To Do List.  I prefer this over other electronic To Do Lists for the following reasons:
1) It is simple to use.
2) It integrates with my calendar Google Calendar.
3) It is available on my Android phone.
4) I have created 4 lists which match the categories of my Kanban board.

Here is what is looks like in my calendar (which is also color coded), on far right side is the tasks.  There is a tasks shown due on Tue 3/8 for example.

So how do I make this all work. Well, at the end of each day I spend about 15 minutes planning for the next day. It is scheduled on my calendar. I start with the kanban board by looking at what i completed today. Then I look at the This Week area and move 3 items I need to do tomorrow into the Today column. At the end of the week I plan the following week by looking at my backlog of tasks. Also, in this 15 minutes I look at my Google tasks (generally on my phone) and update the list. I pick 3 things I must do the next day and prioritize them as such. As I go through the day i will add tasks to the tasks and kanban board as they come up. This help me keep from losing those thoughts. Since it is digital it only takes a few seconds.

My most productive time is in the morning and generally my most available.  I start with my kanban tasks (at least the first one) and then move to the Google tasks.  I should mention I generally don't check email first thing.  I tend to look at email only 3-4 times per day.  This usually includes a visit to facebook and twitter since I manage several social channels.  I eat lunch in the office most days and use this time to visit all those blogs I highlight once a month.  Learning is a great way to spend my lunch time.

This system isn't perfect but seems to work for me. Hopefully it makse you think about your productivity. In the spirit of continuous improvement and continuous learning share your personal productivity system and advice in the comments here. 

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Meet-up: Personal Kanban's Jim Benson

Today's guest on the meet-up guest is Jim Benson. Jim is the co-author (along with Tonianne DeMaria Barry) of Personal Kanban.  Jim and Tonianne are the ones who got me turned on to use of a kanban system for personal productivity. They wrote a wonderful book that allows anyone to visualize work in a simple system to limit activity, prioritize tasks, and focus productivity effectively. Over the last few years we have talked about personal productivity systems on a number of occasions.  I have used many of his tips in my own personal kanban system.


Who are you and what do you do?
I am Jim Benson. My partner Tonianne and I focus our work on Lean for knowledge workers. We specialize in helping people and organizations actually understand their work. We also have developed two specific Lean management patterns - Personal Kanban and Lean Coffee. Personal Kanban helps individuals and small teams see their work, limit their work-in-progress, and run visible experiments of continuous improvement. Lean Coffee is a Lean meetings tool that provides a light framework to have coherent and collaborative meetings.

How and when did you learn Lean?
I got my start in urban planning, so I used to build what A.A. Milne might have called Very Big Things. I built subways, bridges, and freeways. During that time, I gained an appreciation for the large number of moving parts some projects can have, the interfaces between the design and implementation worlds, and how to meet the needs of individuals as they worked in multiple systems simultaneously. In 2000, I started a software company that catered to the government sphere. We developed software using proto-Lean practices called “Agile Methodologies.” Agile was very helpful in getting projects completed, its strength was that it used iterative delivery to compensate for historic poor communications between developers and their customers. Once we found Agile, we looked for more toolsets to incorporate and make our processes even more adaptive. 

That’s where we found Lean, which at that time was mainly focused on manufacturing. The concepts of flow, limiting work-in-progress, and systems thinking were immediately compelling. However, it was the underlying message of respect that really caught our eye. The combination of continuous improvement with respect for workers led to immediate and exciting results.

How and why did you start blogging or writing about Lean?
That’s hard to say. I’ve been writing since I was kid, when I got my first manual typewriter. So I’ve always been writing. I would say that my first specific Lean writing would have been around 2005 when we started managing software projects specifically with Lean principles. The first Personal Kanban posts appeared in 2007, the Personal Kanban book was published in 2010. My personal belief is that our practices cannot evolve without writing and communication. It doesn’t help if we focus only on our own teams, we only learn if we read and write.

What does Lean mean to you?
For me, the key to Lean is Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. The intersection of systems, variation, learning, and psychology give Lean flexibility and resilience. Deming’s understanding that when we form a company, we collaborate on the creation of value. That can only be done if all actors are fully and personally invested in the outcome.

What is the biggest myth or misconception of Lean?
That it’s goal is the reduction of waste. Professionals in a continuous improvement culture will remove waste as a matter of course. When we introduce Lean initiative focusing on the word “Waste”, we start with a value judgement that closes off conversations and increases fear. This is, in my opinion, the root cause of many Lean transition failures.

What is your current Lean passion, project, or initiative?
We have been working with organizations to create Lean systems that help get knowledge workers like IT, sales, creatives, and HR to communicate better with their organizations, to set up projects with more intelligent deadlines and budgets, and to calm overly aggressive project portfolios to reward actual completion with quality. 

Our passion and root of our success is linking the work of the individual to that of the projects they have. People uniformly are overburdened, often distracted, and unaware of the impacts that this has on the quality and quantity of their work. When we highlight the value streams, project loads, and other burdens of individuals, we quickly find the root causes of the frustrations and wastes of the companies they work for.

Personal Kanban Kaizen

A couple of months ago I talked about a kanban for personal management. This concept had two desirable elements:

1) Visualizing your work
2) Limiting your work.

In my previous visual task board I found prioritization meaningless. Tasks are either important or not. If it is important then put it on the list. If not then don't waste time or space pretending that you'll get to it, because you won't.

Dan Markovitz from TimeBack Management and I had several discussions on the set-up of a personal kanban. We discussed how to determine the size of WIP. The WIP limit shouldn't be determined by the number of items, because one large task/project consumes as much time (which is your critical resource) as eight small tasks. Unlike a production line where the cycle time is both known and constant, knowledge work is inherently more variable. So it's tough to determine the appropriate WIP level.

We also talked about using the calendar as kanban. By designating dates and times for specific tasks and projects, you've essentially created a production schedule for your work, with the calendar (and the calendar alerts) acting as a kanban that pulls work forward.

I decided to try to create my own kanban system following these steps:

1) Establish Your Value Stream – The flow of work I chose was Backlog, This Week, Today, and Done.

2) Establish Your Backlog – I put every task onto a post-it-note, if the task had a due date I put that on the note as well.

3) Establish Your WIP Limit – I limited my Today column to 3 (good place to start) and therefore limited my This Week column to 15

4) Begin to Pull – I moved tasks into the next two columns and got to work.

Below you can see the result on my new kanban:

I have been using my kanban system for a little while and I want to share some things I have learned thus far:

1) For really small tasks I still keep a todo list with paper and pen.
2) This Week column allows me to plan out my week.
3) A WIP of 3 has been working for me for tasks around 1-2 hours in length.
4) The size of the task is not too important. Smaller tasks make you pull faster. For larger tasks I try to break them up into workable chunks.
5) The current board is not portable which I need.
6) Adding color to this system would help distinguish different types of tasks.

While looking at various ways to improve my kanban system I came across this presentation on kanban designs the inspire flow.

InfoPak3 Personal Kanban Design Patterns from Jim Benson

In the next version of my kanban I will attempt to address some of the previous short comings. Just as in Kaizen in your organization, having tried a quick and easy manual version of this kanban I found what works and what doesn't.  Now making those improvements will be even easier.

Guest Post: Second Try at My Personal Kanban

Today I am pleased to share a guest post from my friend Matt Wrye who blogs at Beyond Lean. With Matt's 10+ years of lean implementation and problem solving experience, he is able to draw on his successes and failures to tackle new challenges by presenting fresh perspectives and results-driven solutions. Through his exposure to multiple business operation facets in divergent industries that include aluminum, electronics, auto, HVAC, and consumer goods, he is able to provide real-life lean solutions to everyday business challenges.
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His cornerstone belief is that all levels of the business unit should be educated on lean thinking and principles. To this point, Matt diligently challenges his own lean knowledge while working with all business levels ranging from human resources, accounting and the manufacturing floor to senior managers, executives and presidents. By adhering to this continuous learning philosophy, Matt is able to focus his lean efforts to provide continuous improvement.

Matt has a Bachelor of Science degree from Purdue University in Industrial Engineering. Among his other accomplishments, he is a certified Shainin Red X Journeyman and is certified in Statistical analysis and Kepner-Tregoe problem solving methodology. He is proud to have played a large and significant role in starting the Smith County Lean Consortium in Tyler, TX.
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As I look for ways to improve, I am inspired by other lean thinkers and bloggers. I see what they are trying and look to how that might work for me. I try and experiment with things in order to make my job easier and to feel more in control and organized. 

I decided to start a series that will be based on what I have tried in order to make my work better. It may be small or large things and most likely it was an inspiration I got from someone else. I hope that by passing along what I have learned that it may inspire others the way others have inspired me.

About three months ago, I posted a blog about my first attempt at a personal kanban. It was not successful at all. With some encouragement from fellow blogger Tim McMahon, I reflected more on why it didn't work and then learned more about how to apply personal kanban. "Personal Kanban" by Jim Benson and Tonianne Barry was a helpful resource for me.

At the end of my previous post, I talked about digitizing my kanban board. I almost fell prey to a common error.....looking for a technology solution when a process has not even been established. I was tempted by the dark side, but resisted. A digital format may be what I need in the future but first I must establish a process that works.

The second try at a personal kanban board has been very successful. Here is a picture of my board. It isn't very clear, but I think it will help with the discussion.

My value stream is Ready (my queue of work), Doing (what I am working on), Pen (items I have worked on but waiting for input), and Done. I have set my max for Doing and Pen at 3 items. I move items for Ready to Doing after I have moved all items from Doing to Done or Pen. This prevents one thing from sitting in the Doing column for a long time because I move the other two items and avoid the third.

Down in the bottom right-hand corner I have a color key. The color of the Post-It notes is related to a specific area of work.

Also, I have blog posts that I do weekly. It doesn't matter what day the posts are written but I would like to write 3 a week. It would get monotonous if I used Post-Its for writing three blog posts every week. Instead of using Post-Its, I put up three check boxes. I put a check after in th box after I finish a blog post. The section below it is a place I can put an idea for a blog post. When I want to write a post, I can grab one of the ideas from that section.
The board has helped me keep track of my work and made it visual to my boss all that I have going on. It has helped my boss understand where I am spending most of my time.

One of the keys is to choose the correct work chunk to put on a Post-It. Too small of a item is a quick to-do. An example of something too small would be to send an email or make a call. Too big of a chunk and nothing will ever move. XYZ Project would be too big. There is a middle ground. Breaking the XYZ Project into smaller chunks has helped me. Create charter for project. Study the current state of the process. Update action item list. These are examples of the middle ground that I have found.

I hope this helps others looking at trying a personal kanban. It isn't easy, but when it works it feels good and keeps the work flowing. Now I get to go check a box for blog posts!



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New Sponsor - LeanKit Kanban

I am pleased to announce a new sponsor on A Lean Journey Blog - LeanKit Kanban.

LeanKit Kanban is tool that was originally conceived for managing software development that has come to be used in lots of other business areas, construction, manufacturing, logistics, fleet vehicle maintenance, etc., for teams from one to hundreds. I have been using this product for several years now. 

LeanKit Kanban was first highlighted by me in my personal kanban series of posts. I showed how LeanKit Kanban allows you to create a virtual kanban system online. Their software makes it easy to customize your own kanban board, add color, dates, and more like this one. 

I recommend you explore the use of a personal kanban system for improving your productivity and that of your team.  LeanKit Kanban gives you an easy way to convey a tremendous amount of information for the entire organization.


If you are interested in advertising your business on A Lean Journey you can find more information about that here.

New Webapp - Pomodoro Daisuki is a Simple Kanban Board

I recently reviewed a new webapp call Pomodoro Daisuki on a tip from Jim Benson at Personal Kanban. Pomodoro Daisuki is a chrome app that combines  a simple digital personal kanban board along with the the basic functionality of the pomodoro technique.

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management philosophy that aims to provide the user with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less mental fatigue.

The process is simple. For every project throughout the day, you budget your time into short increments and take breaks periodically. You work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes.

Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, named after the Italian word for tomato. Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato as his personal timer, and thus the method’s name.

After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a 15-20 minute break.

Every time you finish a pomodoro, you mark your progress with an “X”, and note the number of times you had the impulse to procrastinate or switch gears to work on another task for each 25-minute chunk of time.

The Pomodoro techniques isn't for everyone in every situation but it can provide a systematic way to tackle you daily to-do list. Personally it is not for me.

I am a big fan of the personal kanban system as I have written about before so if you are looking for a simple easy to set-up kanban board this may be for you.  It costs nothing so give it a try.  Let us know what you think by leaving a comment here.