- Personal Kanban is an information radiator for your work.
- Existential overhead mounts when work is conceptual.
- Visualization makes the conceptual tangible.
- We can’t do more work than we can handle.
- Limiting WIP promotes completion and clarity.
- Flexible systems adapt to changes in context.
- Let your context be your guide—change your Personal Kanban as needed.
- Be honest about your backlog.
- Your value stream may be adapted for specific projects.
- Visualizing the nature of your work is the key to seeing what is really happening.
- When WIP limits are exceeded, stress results.
- Expect the unexpected.
- Manage work with flow and throughput, not time and capacity.
- Like traffic, work doesn’t fit, it flows.
- Capacity is a spatial relationship, throughput is a flow relationship. (Thinking about Cars and roads examples)
- WIP limits can change with context.
- Thoughtful prioritization and completion beats rigorous up-front planning.
- Understanding our options is liberating.
- Life is a balance of order and chaos.
- Patterns and contexts are often emergent. Don’t lock yourself into plans before you have enough information.
- Our actions today impact our choices tomorrow.
- Pull, flow, and cadence give clarity to how we work and which options are appropriate to select.
- Push is a blind act. Pull is informed.
- Pulling is optimal, being pushed is inevitable. Semper Gumby. Always flexible.
- Visualization dispels fear.
- Clarity lets us improve not only our decisions, but our decision-making processes.
- Productivity without effectiveness is waste.
- Notable bursts of effectiveness are the heart of a peak experience.
- Repeatable peak experiences enable kaizen.
- Understanding our work and how we prioritize allows us to find balance between push and pull.
- Expertise is no substitute for observation and measurement.
- Clarity drives prioritization, completion, and effectiveness.
- Metrics don’t have to be difficult.
- Visual controls remove guesswork.
- Real-time flexiblity beats rigid up-front planning.
- Happiness may be the best measure of success.
- Heroes are often misapplied.
- Clarity is the cornerstone of growth.
- Growth requires retrospection and introspection.
- Course corrections are necessary in any endeavor.
- Retrospectives give us the time to balance long and short term needs.
- Solve problems at their source, don’t be fooled by the obvious answer.
Use anything that allows you to take the abstraction of “work I have to do” from inside of your head and put it in front of your eyes.
With Personal Kanban, you build a map of your work. The landscape depicted is your value stream. A value stream visually represents the flow of your work from its beginning through to its completion. The most simple value stream is READY (work waiting to be processed), DOING (work-in-progress), and DONE (completed work).
Backlog: Work you have yet to do.
WIP [Work-in-Progress] Limit: The amount of work you can handle at any given time.
Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that the human brain needs closure. This phenomenon—known as the “Zeigarnik Effect”—states that adults have a 90% chance of remembering interrupted and incomplete thoughts or actions over those that have been seen through to completion. With its tendency to seek out patterns to process meaning, the brain becomes preoccupied with missing pieces of information. Unfinished tasks vie for our attention, causing intrusive thoughts that ultimately impede productivity and increase the opportunity for error.
Pull: To bring a task into DOING when you have capacity for it. Reach into your BACKLOG and pull a few tasks into READY. Then, based on your context, pull the highest priority tasks into DOING. Pull no more than your WIP limit. As you complete a task, pull it into DONE.
After a few days, your DONE column should be getting pretty full, that’s proof you’ve been productive. Take a moment to consider the following: Which tasks did you do particularly well? Which tasks made you feel good about yourself? Which tasks were difficult to complete? Were the right tasks completed at the right time? Did the tasks completed provide value? Then ask yourself Why? => You just completed your first “retrospective,” a processing loop that lets you give thought to what you’re doing, why and how you’re doing it, what you do best, and where there’s room for improvement.
Sequester tasks that are not yet complete but you can’t move forward on in a column called THE PEN. These tasks await additional action that is often beyond your control.
The TODAY column is where you pull tasks you expect to accomplish today.
Saying of the day: We don’t contain work, we process it. Time lost searching for lost time. Step back, relax your focus, and observe.
| Personal Kanban | To-do Lists |
|---|---|
| Liberating | Anxiety Inducing |
| Proactive | Reactive |
| Enduring | Ephemeral |
| Kinesthetic | Didactic |
| Flow Focused | Task Focused |
| Contextual | Detached |
| Optimized for Clarity | Optimized for Cataloging |
| Narrative | Inventory |
| Bottleneck Aware | Bottleneck Ignorant |
| Pull | Push |
| Personal Kanban | To-do Lists |
|---|---|
| Actionable | Overwhelming |
| Collaborative | Autonomous |
| Options-based | Single Points of Failure |
| Flexible | Prescriptive |
| Effectiveness | Productivity |
| Pull | Push |
| Personal Kanban | To-do Lists |
|---|---|
| Adaptable | Static |
| Experiential | Authoritarian |
| Continuous Improvement | Continuous Work |
| Pull | Push |
Flow: The natural progress of work Cadence: The predictable and regular elements of work Slack: The gaps between work that make flow possible. Don’t ‘over-control’ like a novice pilot. Stay loose enough from the flow that you can observe it, modify, and improve it. ~ Donald Rumsfeld
Revisiting the freeway analogy, consider what makes the roadway flow. Is it the cars, or the space between the cars? If there were no cars, there would be nothing to flow. If there was no space, the cars could not move. It’s that balance between cars and open space that gives us flowing traffic. That open space is called “slack.” We need slack in our workflow, we need space to adjust. Without slack, we will overload.
The Oliver Evans’ grist mill-grain example. The car workers production examples (Henry Ford and Toyota) Busboy wisdom: Avoid speaking with the customers and Pull, never push, the bus cart.
We obsess over getting stuff done, rather than getting the right stuff done, and at the right time.
Personal Kanban is: A productivity tool: limiting our WIP helps us accomplish more. An efficiency tool: focusing on our value stream encourages us to find ways to do more while expending less effort. An effectiveness tool: making our options explicit leads us to make informed decisions.
If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. ~ Sun Tzu
Now for the sake of argument, I am an “expert” walker. I know the biometrics, the footware, the technology. I’ve walked in the rain and the snow, in nearly every state in the U.S. and on three continents. Clearly I should be able to estimate my total steps. Take today for example, I was extremely active, and so I estimate my steps to be close to 14,000. Without a visual control, even an educated guess remains just a shot in the dark. Taking the pedometer with its fresh new battery from my pocket, I am immediately proven wrong. We can see it: 9,253 steps. The pedometer shows me what “right” is.
MIT professor Dan Ariely describes an experiment in options. He assigned each of his three classes a different type of deadline for their papers:
- One class was given firm deadlines.
- One class was allowed to set their own personal deadlines ahead of time.
- One class had no deadlines, and could submit their papers at any time during the semester. In all three cases, late papers were penalized. Dr. Ariely found papers submitted by the class with dictated due dates had the best grades, while papers submitted by the class that set their own deadlines came in second. As it turned out, the class with neither dictated nor selfimposed deadlines received the worst grades.
Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. ~ Carl von Clausewitz
I have just erased my to-do list and transformed it in something kanban-like. My own to-do list format, that always worked well for me, had 4 categories:
- Important and urgent: mission-critical events such as unforeseen emergencies, approaching deadlines, angry client demands, and escalated honey-dos
- Less urgent and less important: are those “pleasant activities” that provide no apparent value and distract us from being productive
- Urgent but less important: socially-based activities such as telephone calls, visitors, and meetings
- Important but less urgent: activities such as enhancing skills, removing bottlenecks, and ensuring effectiveness for improvements or kaizen events
Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning "change for the better" or "continuous improvement." It is a Japanese business philosophy regarding the processes that continuously improve operations and involve all employees.
You can observe a lot by just watching. ~ Yogi Berra
Created by David Allen, “Getting Things Done” (GTD) is an organizational method to control backlogs and capture ideas for future work. Think of GTD as a wine cellar for your ideas. It can coherently store a wide array of options that will mature over time. Just as geographic maps use color and shape to communicate certain types of information, so too can your Personal Kanban.
The only real valuable thing is intuition. ~ Albert Einstein
If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny. ~ W. Clement Stone
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions ~ Dalai Lama
Doing things you don’t enjoy reduces your effectiveness. The Subjective Well-Being (SWB) Box. “Subjective well being” is a psychological concept and a qualitative measure that gauges an individual’s current mental state by asking them. If we ask you How are you feeling? and you respond Pretty darn good! then that’s basis for your subjective well-being. How this works is simple. First, draw a box on or near your Personal Kanban (you could even use a physical box). When you complete a task and it moves you to an extreme—leaving you giddy or downright annoyed—annotate whether it was a positive or negative experience, and why. Then move that task to the SWB Box. With every task you deposit into the SWB Box ask yourself: Why did I like or dislike this task? Did the people or resources involved impact my mood positively or negatively? Is this a task I should delegate in the future? Don’t be surprised to discover that the things you enjoy are the things you are also good at. When you find your strengths, you can nurture them. The more you do what you are good at, the more you enjoy your work, and the better you become at the work you enjoy.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. ~ Mark Twain
- Existential Overhead: Existential overhead impedes effectiveness. Clarity dispels existential overhead.
- Manufactured Emergencies: Routinely responding to emergencies begets more emergencies. Clarity leads to kaizen, which breaks the cycle of emergencies.
- Knowledge Deficit: We can’t act on information we don’t have. Clarity creates—and is created by—actionable, meaningful information.
- Hero Worship:
Reliance on heroes undermines daily operations. Clarity raises the bar for “normal” workers.

Neurotic anxiety is a symptom of the fact that some previous crisis has not been met, and to remove the symptom without helping the person get at his underlying conflict is to rob him of his best direction- finder and motivation for self understanding and growth. ~ Rollo May
According to May and Maslow, we progress towards actualization when we adopt a mindset that minimizes fear and embraces growth.
Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system. ~ Le Corbusier
Often we assume written plans are etched in stone, and so we feel compelled to adhere to them at any and all costs. But no matter how well-thought out or well-funded they may be, projects are seldom precise. Some deviation from the original plan is inevitable and frequent small adjustments are unavoidable. Without realizing it, we instinctively course correct all the time. Take driving, for example. If I told you to drive down a straight road for two hours only touching the steering wheel every half hour, would you consider it?
What good is experience if you do not reflect? ~ Fredrick the Great
That’s where introspection comes in. When we’re introspective, we observe our thought processes to understand the reasoning behind our decisions. We look at past events through the filter of our own emotions, motivations, and biases. Why did we decide on A over B? Whose interests were we really serving? Did we make the best choice? Did our choice make us happy? This is the point where we give ourselves the information we need to make good decisions in the future.
If you want to know your past, look into your present conditions. If you want to know your future, look into your present actions. ~ Buddhist Saying
May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far. ~ Irish Saying
Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. ~ Wall Street Saying
Retrospectives are regular and ritualized moments of collective reflection. A practice common to the Agile and Lean communities, retrospectives allow a team to pause and consider what went well with their project, what didn’t go as expected, and what could be improved going forward. Regular retrospectives enable us to identify and act on opportunities for positive change. Whether we hold them on our own, with our families, or with our team at work, retrospectives are an essential tool for reflection.
Emergency retrospectives allow the individuals involved to team up on the problem and devise a solution.
The root cause of any problem is the key to a lasting solution. ~ Taiichi Ohno
The human brain finds it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to fake randomness. ~ Alex Bellosh
“Root cause analyses.” we suggest beginning with two of the simplest: The Five Whys and the Socratic Method. Doing this, you’re driven to ask a more accurate and constructive question.
I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others. ~ Socrates