Personal Kanban summary

While visiting America, the thing that most impressed Taiichi Ohno, a Toyota engineer, was a trip to the local supermarket. He’d never seen such perfectly stocked shelves. The supermarket, instead of ordering and stocking vast quantities of everything, had on hand only what their customers tended to purchase. Ohno realized that such an approach could greatly improve Toyota’s assembly line – and thus Kanban, aimed at optimizing industrial production, was born.

Since Ohno’s goal was to cut costs while maintaining the quality of the finished product, the obvious area to target was inventory; storing things is expensive and doesn’t mean better cars.

So, you’ve decided that your life would benefit from improved organization. Well, all you need is a pen, a whiteboard and some sticky notes to start mapping your workflow and boosting your productivity.

How do you do this?

Now that you’ve set up your Personal Kanban, you’re ready to start using it. Your first job is to take on new tasks and get your workflow going. Do so by following step four and five:

Step four is to pick the most pressing tasks from your backlog and place them in your workflow. When doing this, it’s key to put the most urgent tasks into the READY column of your board.

It can be hard to turn down juicy new projects, but sometimes saying no is the best thing you can do. Thankfully, Personal Kanban can make you more effective by limiting the number of things on your to-do list.

Why’s this so key?

Do you remember, back in 2006, when NASA sent the New Horizon space shuttle to Pluto? To get where it was going, the spacecraft needed to correct its trajectory, mid-flight, by a precise 5m/sec. If the shuttle’s path hadn’t been adjusted, it would have missed the planet by 80,000 km!

Sometimes small adjustments made early mean major effects down the line. This is good news, because Personal Kanban’s continuous feedback lets you tackle problems while they’re still small. For instance, for that space shuttle, making a small, early correction ensured the desired result with the least disruption.

MIT researchers once conducted an experiment in which three groups of students were required to submit papers; each group had a different deadline. The first group had a clear due date, the second was allowed to choose their own and the third was told to submit their paper anytime during the semester.

The results?

Did you know that Danish designers developed a new type of house with flexible walls, moveable outlets and the ability to change shape as the owner’s desires change? If you have another child, for instance, you can add a room – just like that! If you want to expand your living room, you can move a wall without a second thought. Wouldn’t it be great if life were customizable? Well, Personal Kanban works in the same way.

For example, you can add a TODAY column to your board, maybe before the DOING column, to which you pull tasks for the day. This can be a helpful addition, as people often fail to complete all of a day’s tasks. The TODAY column works by helping you track your achievements and determine your daily capacity. Say you just began teaching. You optimistically pull “mark 60 essays” into your TODAY column and proceed to work until your eyes are bleary, and there are still 30 papers to grade. Now you know how much work you can realistically complete in a day.