Keep Calm and Kanban

We all know a busy day. It’s a new day and you step into the office, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on the day’s challenge.Your first task keeps you focused for an hour or two, and then you go on to the next thing. Most communication is virtual and after 15 minutes, you get multiple pings with urgent requests. You try and help, but before anything can conclude satisfactorily, you need more detail from someone else so you’re stuck – for now. Instead of working through this, the phone rings. It’s a call from a supplier who has changed the delivery date of the copier and the new date does not work. You get the gist.

By mid-day you’ve managed to start 8 jobs and have finished none. By home time, you’ve completed 2 of them but not as well as you wanted to. You know it already: by tomorrow, others will have noticed as well. To exasperate matters, you’ll be asked a bunch of questions that you do not have the answers to. You need to send a piece of work to meet a deadline, but as you read through it again, you barely remember what you were trying to express.

Caption: If I can make like Naruto and multiply with the Kage bunshin no Jutsu

If Monday was a low achiever, Tuesday is not currently set to be on course. You already know that it’s not going to meet your exact standards.

So how can you deliver when you cannot deliver?
Remember the last time someone came up to your desk and you were writing an email? You asked them to bear with you for a few moments?

It would have been rude to let them wait until you had sent the email. Instead, you simply made sure you had noted all the key points you needed to raise. Then you helped the other person. When you got back to the email, you knew every point you needed to make was made, all you had to do, was proof-read, re-word and click ‘Send’.

Define the stages of your work
You delivered your email in stages. Instead of being interrupted, you delivered a stage. When you got back to it, you knew where you left off and had little delay starting again. You did not have to start over – you simply started the next step.

Split every piece of work you do into small stages at the outset and you’ll be able to restart work more quickly – as you’ll know where you left off.

Get your priorities right
There’s something else, though. If on any day you really have 10 things to do at the same time – prioritise them.

If you find it too tiresome to remember the priority of 10 tasks, go old school and use a piece of paper, or even better, use a Kanban board. Create 3 columns:

To Do

Doing

Done

You can arrange the most important tasks at the top, the ones that can wait at the bottom. When you finish one job, you can check if any of the other jobs can be started.

Cut yourself some slack
As you finish a few tasks, you find that your ‘Doing’ column contains a few more, but they are all stuck, waiting on other people to respond.

Should you start the next one? Maybe not. Confirm you’re stuck. Sometimes it could be as simple as them not telling you that it’s already done. Try to reduce your work in progress. If there really is no job you can start, try to pick one from your To Do list that you can push through in one go.

It might be a trivial task, but do that, then go get some fresh air, and buy that bottle of milk if the office stock is depleted. Don’t build up an inventory of incomplete and unfinished work.

Personal Kanban
You might have noticed that the technique I described is Personal Kanban. It’s not about the Kanban Board. Kanban stands for a token – the number of open tickets. Make sure you don’t work on more things than you can manage. In that way, each of the pieces you work on will be completed in less time.

There is plenty of jargon around Personal Kanban and rigid procedures like “fixed work in progress limits,” and you can read more about it here. For your own benefit, though, don’t forget the KISS principle. But that’s another blog post for another time…..