Why I Stayed Up All Night Making a Personal Kanban and Why You Should Too!
For the last couple of years I have been doing some work with a great guy named Kevin Behr who wrote The Phoenix Project. He works in the space of IT and continuous improvement and helps organizations get better at what they do. One of the ways they get better fast is to control Work in Progress or WIP, which led me to the concept of “Kanban” (rhymes with bonbon) and I’ve been curious about it for a while now. What’s a Kanban, you might ask… Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: Kanban (かんばん(看板)?) (literally signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time (JIT) production.[2]Kanban is a system to control the logistical chain from a production point of view, and is not an inventory control system. Kanban was developed by Taiichi Ohno, at Toyota, to find a system to improve and maintain a high level of production. Kanban is one method through which JIT is achieved.[3] Kanban became an effective tool in support of running a production system as a whole, and it proved to be an excellent way for promoting improvement. Problem areas were highlighted by reducing the number of Kanban in circulation. That all sounds great for manufacturing, right? But why would I want a personal Kanban? I asked Kevin for a book recommendation to further explore the Kanban concept and he recommended Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson. It is about using a Kanban system to help organize the complex and disparate tasks we all juggle. That is why last night I woke up in the middle of the night and spent a couple of hours creating my own personal Kanban. This book is almost diabolically simple and yet offers a solution to the management of life’s complexity by “managing work.” This idea of calling the complex lists of tasks in my life “work” helps me think about them in a new way. The book suggests we can only focus on one task at a time, thus we should only be actually working on a small number of tasks at any...
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