Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

The TODAY column shows us the difference between what we want to do each day and what we can actually achieve. It shows us how we fall short of our daily goal. Once we understand our actual daily capability, we can set more realistic goals at the beginning of the day, and end the day feeling we’ve been effective.

Manufactured Emergencies: Routinely responding to emergencies begets more emergencies. Clarity leads to kaizen, which breaks the cycle of emergencies.

The game of Personal Kanban has a grand goal: to live effectively. To win at this game, we need to define our work, rather than let our work define us. To escape the tyranny of push, we must complete what we start, exercise options for effectiveness, and increase the occurrence of what brings us joy. To achieve these objectives, we need to understa

Context dictates the way we prioritize our personal work.

In the self-application of the Socratic Method, you question your own assumptions, stripping away confounding information to reveal the truth embedded in your position. Critical self-inquiry—playing your own devil’s advocate—requires both patience and honesty, but is essential in the quest for improvement. As Socrates shows us, so many of the assum

Kaizen is a state of continuous improvement where people naturally look for ways to improve poorly performing practices.

A-listers were successful not because they had superior programming skills, but because they took the time to learn why they were building the software in the first place. They sought clarity from the onset, gathering vital information and incorporating it into their design. If the pertinent information wasn’t readily available, they used deductive

Research consistently shows we cannot reach our maximum effectiveness while multitasking. Instead, maximum effectiveness results when we limit our WIP and focus on the task before us.

All that stuff we need to do? That’s our backlog. Amorphous and undefined, our backlog is powerful and pernicious.

We cannot do more than we are capable of doing.