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The estimated reading time for Personal Kanban is a few hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Who is the author of Personal Kanban?

The authors of Personal Kanban are Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry.

Productivity

Personal Kanban Book Summary - Personal Kanban Book explained in key points

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Personal Kanban summary

Name: Personal Kanban
Rating: 4.1 (188 reviews)
Author: Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry

Jim Benson Tonianne DeMaria Barry

Mapping Work / Navigating Life

4.1 (188 ratings)

17 mins

Brief summary

Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry is a productivity guide that presents the Kanban system. It helps to prioritize tasks, visualize workloads and improve workflow efficiency.

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Table of Contents

Personal Kanban
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Use Personal Kanban to get a grip on your time.

If you browse the internet or your local bookstore, you’ll find an abundance of time management methods; some are no more than blown-up to-do lists, while others are based on complex computer algorithms. However, they usually all have one thing in common – their ineffectiveness.

At some point, most of us have attempted to get a grasp on our management of time, but none of the available methods get the job done – and we’re still pressed for time!

So why should you try Personal Kanban? Because the Kanban system has been proven to work. Developed by Toyota to streamline production, Kanban worked extremely well, allowing Toyota to reduce production costs while maintaining a high level of quality. Other companies began to adopt the Kanban system – and many of them use it to this day.

Personal Kanban is based on that original Kanban, but it’s been customized for your personal use; for instance, you can customize it to fit with any shifts in your lifestyle.

In these blinks, you’ll learn how to draw a map of all your goals and tasks – both at home and at work – and to visualize them as they move toward completion. Personal Kanban puts an end to procrastination and enables you to regain control of your time.

By reading these blinks, you’ll also learn

about the connection between Piggly Wiggly and a balanced life;
why Personal Kanban is much better than deadlines and to-do lists; and
what unfinished tasks can do to your mind.

A work-life imbalance can cause you to lose sight of meaningful goals, but the Personal Kanban can help.

Have you ever been overloaded with work, stressed out and struggling to find a free moment to kick back and relax? At times like this, even simple pleasures such as meeting friends for a drink seem like a far-off impossibility. Why does this happen?

It all has to do with how we separate our work time from our personal time, a tendency that disturbs our work-life balance. It does this because our personal life and our work life are inseparable parts of the same life. In an ideal world, both aspects of your life are meaningful to you, but a problem arises when you allocate all your time and energy to planning just one part of your life.

For instance, while you might find it silly to jot down a reminder to hang out with friends, you probably readily write to-do lists for work, a fact that may lead to your pursuing work goals until day’s end, at which point you have no energy for socializing.

But that’s not the only problem. When you treat your life and work as separate entities, you risk permanently forgoing life-changing goals, like living abroad or more ethically. That’s because goals like that require taking action in both your work and your personal life. So, if you don’t plan out your goals with both these sides in mind, you likely won’t achieve them.

For example, living a healthier life requires more than exercising and eating a few pieces of fruit. To truly achieve better health, you’ll need to reduce stress by doing things like taking regular breaks from work.

Okay – so you’re ready to plan for both sides of your life. But how do you do it?

With the Personal Kanban. A tool that will help you visualize and plan your to-dos as well as your activities, the Personal Kanban will also put you on the road to achieving your long-term goals.

Kanban was developed for companies, but Personal Kanban is customized for your life.

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.

Building your Personal Kanban is as easy as choosing a medium, putting it in place and following three simple steps.

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?

Working with Personal Kanban is just another four steps away.

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.

Personal Kanban is full of pluses.

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?

Personal Kanban will help you unearth problems before they get out of hand.

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.

Personal Kanban is a better motivator than deadlines, as long as you keep a couple of things in mind.

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?

You can flexibly adapt your Personal Kanban to meet your needs.

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.

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Key ideas in Personal Kanban

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What is Personal Kanban about?

Personal Kanban (2011) is an adaptable tool for visually oriented people. It’ll help you to organize your life and your work, and to strike a balance between the two. These blinks teach you how to set up your own Kanban and how to put it into action, thereby maximizing your efficiency; they also provide insights into life patterns, allowing you to measure progress and limit the tasks on your plate.

Personal Kanban Review

Personal Kanban (2011) offers a practical approach to managing tasks and increasing productivity. Here's why this book is worth reading:

It provides simple yet effective strategies for visualizing workflow and organizing tasks, helping readers improve their productivity and focus.
With its real-life examples and case studies, the book demonstrates the power of the Kanban method in various contexts, making it applicable to a wide range of industries and professions.
The authors' emphasis on flexibility and continuous improvement makes this book highly engaging and relevant for anyone looking to optimize their workflow and achieve better results.

Best quote from Personal Kanban

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted. - John Lennon

—Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry

Who should read Personal Kanban?

Professionals in search of a dynamic and flexible life management tool
Anyone struggling to strike a balance between life and work
Creative people who find themselves unmotivated by rigid, one-dimensional to-do lists

About the Author

Jim Benson has worked for a broad range of organizations – from government agencies to Fortune 10 corporations to startups. He co-owns the software development copy Modus Cooperandi and is a management consultant who uses Personal Kanban to improve working environments.

Tonianne DeMaria Barry is a management consultant. She’s worked in the fashion industry as well as for government agencies, non-profit associations, Fortune 100 corporations and startups.

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