Our attention is pulled a million different ways leading to information overload, problems with focus, and a work/life imbalance. I’ve developed a method over the years to keep my life organized and dialed in to give the proper attention to my work practice, my family, and my pursuits. It’s not one-size-fits-all, but, it may just help someone make sense of the signal-to-noise problem.
TLDR; it’s a personal Kanban workflow solution that draws from life & work backlog areas treated as work/value streams that helps in prioritizing incremental improvement. That’s it. Really.
A Bit About What Motivates Me
I’m the type of individual that has to have many (relatively controlled) plates in the air to feel as though I’m getting the most out of life. Now, I’m not one of those “we all have the same 24 hours a day…get out there and crush it!” types that start each morning at 5AM by running on a beach after 4 hours of sleep. I’m not that organized and energetic to squeeze in a million things per day because life is not a sprint for me or even a race. Rather, it’s a series of activities that run in parallel and aren’t time-boxed to 24 hours. Experiences are what really motivates me and it’s usually centered around the learning aspect more than the actual doing, I’ve come to find out over the years.
With learning as the driver, I can try things out and understand how they work well enough to see if they “stick” in terms of providing enduring enjoyment. As such, I’ve noticed this pattern over my lifespan and have come to embrace it in its current technology-enabled form:
- Oh, that looks cool. I wonder what it takes to do that?
- Youtube, tell me how this is done
- I think I can get the gist of this for X cost and Y time commitment
- Try the new thing and either just learn something new by physically doing it but never touch it again or it becomes “something I do/can do sometimes” or “something that defines me”
I’ve used this lens in recent times to learn how to restore a 1964 fiberglass leisure boat to be for fishing/crabbing with up-to-code electrical (almost done), start to learn to get my private pilot’s license (started but on hold for grad school), remodel most of our home including a gut job of the kitchen (nearly done), completely re-learn how to play guitar after 30 years playing (lifelong pursuit), bullet journalling (utter failure), and complete undergrad/start grad school (done/just started). When I was younger, my folly was going all-in on one main thing and devoting all of my energy only to utterly fail at it (skill and learning deficit) or get to the point where I realized I didn’t actually like the “doing” part.
The bravado of youth gave way, thankfully…eventually. I’ve realized that delivering/getting incremental value is the key. Some things — like the work I’m paid to perform — need more attention and much more value delivered, but, the process is the same with just dialing up this, dialing down that, etc.
Kaizen: Stop, Iterate, and Listen.
The Japanese notion of Kaizen is concerned with continuous improvement. Kaizen, as you would expect for someone that works in the product development sector, is at the center of my Product strategy and organizational architecture practice. Constant iteration, however, is not just for processes and outputs, it must apply to people. Learning is part of Growing which leads to Improvement. I am always in a learning phase and I seek to learn elements that I can apply directly to my practice and life in general. For me, my life and work are intertwined because I “do” those things that I “am.”
TASKSTACK: Organize The Spinning Plates
I don’t like chaos and have had to develop a system/framework over the years that is what I refer to as “Agile-ish.” I’ve branded it “TASKSTACK” because I have to brand things for them to be real and, ultimately, that’s literally what the process is. It keeps me focused, somewhat organized, relatively disciplined, and transparent with co-conspirators when needed. More importantly, it emphasizes incremental improvement to achieve the desired result because tackling something in totality is a recipe for failure for me. Without increments, those “plates in the air” become burdens that waste time — our most precious commodity — and resources in the form of energy and money.
I transitioned into Product management/leadership many years ago, but, this practice first began when I was primarily an engineer. With many jobs and tasks, I took an Agile product delivery approach — though not formally as I was not yet up on SAFe and other organizational processes — to task & time management; break out large epics/goals into smaller manageable tasks to scope and set near-future deadlines over a 2 week sprint. From there, I’d compile a ToDo list and block out time on my calendar to accomplish each task in the needed time box.
As my life got more complicated with work duties, children, balancing my hobbies, and education, my workflow evolved to be a personal Kanban board. My deliverables for my work are usually handled within the confines of its organizational architecture but I do keep an outside list of opportunities or learning items I want to explore for work. That said, the “board” is broken up by “life areas” — work (with sub-groups), school, hobbies, home projects, etc., and behaves as a backlog for all of the plates in the air. These life areas are akin to work/value streams in that they are in motion concurrently and may even have dependencies in other areas. I review it every morning while enjoying coffee and at the end of the day over a nice craft beer. I don’t go as far as to have a retro with myself because that’s weird and I don’t make reflection lists because that’s just more work. It’s a case of “what got done?” and “ahhh, right…move that to tomorrow or the next day…must not be a high priority.”
Simple Systems Have Less Moving Parts
This seems like a very simple approach because it is. In recent years — and right before the COVID 19 pandemic — I completed the largest portion of my undergraduate studies while putting 75k miles in the air with a goodly amount of that working in Europe. My workflow found me completing an hour of an outline between an end-of-day meeting and a team happy hour in San Francisco, submitting a 40-page paper after major edits during an afternoon session break at a conference in Lisbon, and even doing outline edits over the Atlantic. Most other times my incremental work is 30 minutes on a school outline after dinner or during lunch, 3 hours Wed. before bed, etc. Little tasks pulled from a “life area” backlog made this all possible.
TASKSTACK is just stacking the things that matter most that need to move forward in a measurable incremental manner that leads to time-boxed tasks. That’s it. There’s no magic framework to apply and I can’t make a Youtube channel devoted to my new & exciting productivity course for $299 that I’ve created via divine inspiration on my 5AM beach run. I could, I suppose, but, I won’t. I’ll just give it for free below:
The whole notion with TASKSTACK is to move Left → Right breaking items down to manageable tasks to incrementally complete larger efforts
- IDEAS: the main brain dump for opportunities to explore assigned to “life areas”
- BACKLOGS: the life areas where fully-baked IDEAS have proceeded/deemed worthwhile with Milestones and a notion of Tasks under each Milestone is a good idea as well since it makes it easier to break things down
- WORK TO DO: the 1st Kanban phase that has received work from a BACKLOG and is feeding IN PROGRESS
- IN PROGRESS: Tasks against Milestones — these should have Due Dates assigned that are achievable otherwise they will sit in this phase
- COMPLETE: the final stage of a Task or even Milestone itself + once all Milestones are cleared for an Item you have succeeded!
Workflow & Productivity Tools
I’m not a “productivity hacker” — whatever that really is — nor do I prescribe to any of the modern GSD activities and software or the Inbox Zero stuff because those systems are complicated or, at least, are just not how my brain works. I’m not anti productivity tools, mind you, I just don’t believe that there is an end-to-end solution to my simple workflow but I’m always trying new stuff when I can.
Presently, I use Evernote but it’s not perfect. When they add the ability to put a Task inside of a Table (a Kanban table column), it might be the closest to good enough I’ve found because the recent Google Calendar snap-in is great for scheduling. That said, this method can be done on paper which I did for many years in a notebook, a Bullet Journal (I tried that but failed miserably), a Google doc or spreadsheet, a physical Kanban board (we do this for household stuff the whole family needs to do), and, of course, myriad software. The key is to keep it simple. No one thing works for everyone because everyone is wired differently.
Experiment, fail, succeed, and enjoy the journey!
