Journals From The Front

Over the last couple of years I've read a lot of books on personal development, and especially personal efficiency. The best two books so far are No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline by Brian Tracy and Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen . Both of these authors have many books on this subject and related matters.

Recently I read an article (Norwegian only) written by a colleague of mine in Bekk, Jørn Hunskaar, in which he mentioned the webapp kanbanery. I had a quick look at it and fell in love instantly (with the webapp, not with Jørn). He also explains the Pomodoro technique for focusing on one task for a certain amount of time. Read more about that on the pomodoro technique website.

Kanban is a method of working on a set of tasks in a project originally developed at Toyota's car manufactoring plant by Taiichi Ohno. Read more kanban on Wikipedia. Basically it is a system that helps you plan what to do, how much and when, in relation to your other tasks. And the kanbanery webapp helps you set up all the tasks in different categories so that you can get a clear overview over things you plan to do. At the same time, it let you move the tasks between diffrent columns so that visually, it is very easy to see what is waiting, what is in progress, and what is completed.

Kanbanery comes with a nice default column setup. I added a few columns based on tips from David Allen and based on what I know about how, or really where, I work on different projects.
The default columns in Kanbanery are

1. Todo : All tasks go in this one first
2. This week : Tasks you plan to to sometime this week
3. Doing : Tasks you have begun doing
4. Done : Completed tasks

Jørn added a Pomodoro column, where you can only have one task at the same time. Even if you try to focus for 25 minutes, interruptions will often happen. Having the one task in the Pomodoro column is a quick reminder about what you were doing before the interruption.

I've added a few more columns. I'll explain how I use Kanbanery throughout the week as this will hopefully make it more clear why I've chosen to add the columns.

1. Sunday. After a mind purge (tip from David Allan) into the Todo-column, I plan the coming week as much I as I can by moving tasks from the Todo-column to This Week
2. Monday Morning. After syncing a bit with mail, the rest of the team and other projects at work that may need my input I move tasks into the Today-column (which is a new column). Some tasks that are triggered by mail go into Todo, This Week or Today
3. Throughout the workday. I move tasks (hopefully) from Today via Doing@Work, Pomodoro and to Done. And there is another new column : Doing@Work. It contains tasks I have started, but not completed. Kanbanery lets you set a maximum number of tasks for each column. Keeping the numbers low will help you maintain good self discipline
4. After the workday is over, and if I have the time and energy to sit down with some more coding and/or photography after the kids have gone to bed, I look at the Doing@Home column and try to complete those via the Pomodoro column, unless I can think of a really long sentence to write that is.
5. Sunday again. I have a few tasks that I recycle every week : Mind Purge, Going through mail tagged Follow-up, Going through bookmarks in the audiobooks I have listened to this week. These tasks end up in the Done column like the others, but will be moved to the This Week column before I archive the other completed tasks.

And that is more or less the way I use Kanbanery, and I find it helps me keep my focus. Some might think that having a strict system limits creativity. But, it is quite the opposite that happens. When you have a good system for handling the mundane organization of tasks like this, your brain is relieved from keeping it all under control. Thus it has more time to be creative.

And on that note, here is a nice TED-talk about why work is not happening in the work place.

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