Seeing Our Work is Straight Up Stress Relief
Neglect scales. It's all too easy to find ourselves drowning in tasks, emails, meetings, and general cognitive chaos. Even Tonianne and me. We will find, not infrequently, that work has snuck up on us. A task here, a commitment there. The next thing we know we are frustrated and snapping at each other.
Even years after writing Personal Kanban, we find ourselves having to stop, write down everything on our plate, and adjust. Is it because we are flawed? No. Is it because our tools don’t work?
No.
It’s because we are humans. The world will always change faster than we do. The difference is, Toni and I have strategies to quickly notice when we’ve taken on too much and readjust. Every time we do it, every single time, we feel the same relief and … embarrassment.
We are Human
The thing is, we fall into other traps that people do. We think we have more work than everyone else. We think other people’s work is easier than ours. We know this is flawed thinking, but it is a natural tendency.
That's why we’ve been so passionate about Personal Kanban and being able to see our work and our team’s work. We’ve had wonderful calls over the last few weeks, people coming to classes that we haven’t talked to in years. They are coming with stories of success we never even knew about. Unique and wonderful ways they and their teams have reclaimed focus and agency over their work.
They, too, had stories of starting to visualize their work, things getting better, then they hit a snag, and then they regrouped. There is a desire for the PK board to just work. As if it were some totem or magic object that would make everyone pay attention to everything all the time. But nothing can give you this power, what the boards and visual management do is increase your understanding of the underlying issues causing our overwhelm and lack of clarity.
The Personal Kanban board doesn’t stop you from needing to improve. It doesn’t magically improve you. It shows you where improvement or adjustment is necessary.
When We are Apart We Can Still Be Together
In our case, when we start to get edgy, we know there is something we are not visualizing. We cannot see our own Gemba.
The "gemba" - the actual place where the work happens - for us, because we are distributed across the planet, is our PK and our Obeya (where the PK and our other visualizations live). Creating visual models of our work, like the PK board with its "today" column for setting daily intentions, surfaces bottlenecks and constraints we may have been blind to before. Only by observing how people truly operate can we design systems that harmonize with reality rather than fighting against it.
At the heart of it all is bringing intentionality to how we take on work and spend our most precious resource - our undivided attention. We have near-daily collaborative working sessions that keep the team aligned on real problems, agree on immediate next steps, and get work done together. We use the PK and the visual tools to avoid getting mired in abstract conversations and stay focused on the work's true context.
Ultimately, our use of PK instills a sense of calm, creative flow in our daily efforts. By making our work tangible and limits visible, we can curb cognitively-destructive multitasking and enjoy focused progress. Instead of reacting constantly to new distractions, we become conscious choreographers of how we spend our time and energy.
Because, right now, our time and energy are seriously under attack.
If you haven’t already, I invite you to check out the Personal Kanban book or the PK class on Modus Institute. We also have several live classes scheduled in the upcoming months. Come join the conversation.
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