Book Summary of Personal Kanban:
Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban is a productivity tool for people who enjoy tracking and managing things visually. Learn how to set up a Kanban system and make it work for you.
Related Book Summaries to Personal Kanban:
Designing Your Life – Bill Burnett
The Magic Of Thinking Big – David Schwartz
The Pomodoro Technique – Francesco Cirillo
Quotes from Personal Kanban:
In the beginning, it’s advisable to focus on the flow of your work and the idea that your work actually has a shape.
Planning should occur with minimal waste; it shouldn’t become overhead
Work we have yet to complete, or any aspect of our life that distracts us, creates existential overhead. As existential overhead mounts, our effectiveness diminishes.
Personal Kanban Book Summary Big Ideas:
The Work-life Imbalance
Usually a kind of stress sneaks into people lives. We experience it as a feeling that despite having gotten so much done at work during the day, we feel like we have no time to simply put up our feet and relax at the end of the day.
One of the reasons for this feeling is the fact that we preplan and schedule so much of our work day, not to mention our day around our work, yet we plan hardly any of our personal time. It’s not just time that we need to be more careful about how we allocate. We also need to be more aware of how we budget our energy. You only have so much each day to work with, so be mindful of how you allocate it.
The Two Principles Of Kanban
The first is using a board to track your projects. In the Toyota plant where Kanban was born they used a large billboard to show employees what each stage of production was up to so that the employees could be more productive with where they spent their time. You don’t need an entire billboard but a white board or a pin board would be a great substitute. Allowing you to visually represent both all of your projects and their progress.
The second is to limit your work in progress, as much as possible. By doing this you can focus your attention on the tasks you’ve currently chosen to undertake. As a side effect as well it will help you to say no to more. If there are things or commitments your asked about, you can consider if it’s really worth taking space on your board or not. Saying no, to more things, is a great productivity hack.
The Seven Steps Of Personal Kanban
- Choose your medium. We already spoke about whiteboards, get one. Draw three columns on it, use headings such as Ready, Doing and Done to denote the three phases of your system.
- Step two is to get all of your backlogged ideas or projects into your system.
- Choose how many projects you can take on at once. This may take some trial and error but once you have it figured out don’t add more in progress tasks until you knock off another.
- Prioritise the tasks you take on.
- As you complete tasks add the highest priority tasks on next to your Ready column.
- Spend your free time completing the tasks under Doing.
- The final step is to occasionally step back and make sure nothing has slipped through the cracks or been forgotten.
Personal Kanban Book Summary Notes:
- Initially developed by Toyota to streamline production.
- Overburdening your brain can decrease your productivity.
- Productivity isn’t the only thing that suffers when your overburdened, creativity also suffers.
- Personal Kanban helps with this by limiting the number of tasks you can have in progress.
- Small adjustments made early and often can prevent big problems down the line.
- Performing a retrospective on projects you’ve completed or have been struggling to complete can help you realise which of your tasks may be best being outsourced.
- Consider setting due dates, by setting them you can create artificial motivation from the self imposed time frame.
- You can customise your Kanban to suit yourself. For example by adding a Today column for anything you’ve decided to work on today. Or a column with another persons name if you need them to get back to you or if you need to outsource something to them.
