Jim Benson - Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life

ACCLAIM FOR PERSONAL KANBAN

Were all constrained to just 1,440 minutes a day, so balancing work, family, and social responsibilities can be a challenge. The simple innovation of visualizing your work and limiting multitasking, explained in this engaging book, has me addicted and is paying off big time. It just feels more natural than other approaches and gives me a tool that I can use to manage my work and calendar instead of the other way around.

~ Michael A. Dalton

Author of Simplifying Innovation

Personal productivity systems usually fail in practice because of complexitythey dont reflect the collaborative nature of real work. Personal Kanban provides the simplest structure that could possibly work and lets you achieve a state of flow.

~ Ross Mayfield

CEO of SocialText

As an executive tasked with managing and creating innovation, my mind never gets to stop work at 5pm. In my experience professionally and at home, the methods described in Personal Kanban have greatly increased my productivity and personal satisfaction. Id highly recommend this book to anyone who feels the need to make their lives more manageable and their use of time more effective.

~ Jabe Bloom

CTO of The Library Corporation

Personal Kanban shows you just how revolutionary the technique is. Its a must read for students to senior citizens who want to do fantastic work. Personal Kanban is simplistic and will become second nature; not only does it change with you and your life, it will change your life.

~ Patty Beidleman

Educator, Non-profit Organizer, Caregiver, Mom

Trying to get more effective? Why use Rube Goldberg systems of tabulated notebooks and special-purpose inserts? Instead, consider a system that flows like a stream and focuses your attention, both on the task at hand and on making your process more effective. Thats what Personal Kanban is, and it may just fit your thinking and doing style.

~ Jerry Michalski

guide , Relationship Economy eXpedition

An important new addition to the transliteracy toolbox. And Im enjoying the iPhone app!

~ Sue Thomas

Director of the Institute for Creative Technology

De Montfort University

PERSONAL KANBAN

Mapping Work | Navigating Life

by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry

FIRST MODUS COOPERANDI PRESS EDITION, JANUARY 2011

2011 Modus Cooperandi Press

Cover Photo: 2009 Tonianne DeMaria Barry

Taken At: Aldie Mill, Aldie, VA

E-book ISBN: 978-0-578-07985-1

Cover Design: Wayworks

Back cover cartoon by Jim Benson using ToonDoo: http://toondoo.com

Image on page 5, Kanban Team at Work used with permission by Kenji Hiranabe

Base image on page 49, Trafficjam used with permission by Lynac -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynac/321100379/

DEDICATION

Life is long. Life is short. We never do anything alone. Decades after they left this earth, the following people continue to inspire us. Their words and example at once fill our hearts and leave a void. It is to their memory we gratefully and lovingly dedicate this work.

For Jim:

Corey Sean Smith Who was the first person to truly help me realize my creative side. Who taught me that creative, intellectual, and spiritual expression were one and the same. Who was always more interested in doing than worrying. Who has never left my side.

Nellie Gray Hill Benson Who was around very briefly in my life, but has always been a model of what success really looks like. Driven, unassuming, uncompromising, flexible. You play the hand you are dealt.

For Tonianne:

Robert G. DeFelice Whose passion for the arts was rivaled only by his unbridled generosity and the enormity of his heart. My very own Uncle Drosselmeyer, he showed me from an early age you are never too old for fairy tales, magic truly exists, and angels most certainly walk among us.

Anthony A. DeMaria Whose passing was an incomprehensible loss, but whose faith in me is eternal. He was and remains my greatest teacher, and his words continue to inspire me. His fierce loyalty, insatiable thirst for knowledge, distinctly Neapolitan sense of humor, and appreciation for la bella vita are but a fraction of his bountiful legacy. It was a privilege to call him Daddy, and is a profound honor to be his namesake.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

As an avid reader of business literature and a recovering human capital practitioner, most recently as Deputy, Human Resources at the Central Intelligence Agency, (retired), Ive found Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life both insightful and timely. As we all cope in our own way with managing our work schedules and balancing our personal lives, others expectations of us and our expectations of ourselves, we all suffer from work and information overload. While attempting to keep pace with the myriad knowledge flows, three dimensional conversations and constantly changing priorities among competing workflows, it is imperative that each of us forms new ways with which to adjudicate work; interact with our professional and personal colleaguesand our calendarswith due consideration for balancing what I like to call our crap to fun ratio.

Lets face it: technology precedes anthropology. The knowledge explosion, advent of social tools, new enterprise architectures, and complicated multifaceted workflows coupled with the exponential expansion of available knowledge and information is having a profound impact on how and when we do our work. This new knowledge environment is also impacting how we function both physically and mentally. The seemingly constant pressure to make hundreds and even thousands of decisions per day, some large and some small, and then act on those decisions is innately stress-inducing. Some have postulated that even our physiological brain development is being altered by virtue of how much time and focus we expend online, via mobile devices and constant access to information on demand.

Amidst this chaos and increasing pressure to function at a high level in a digital world where every keystroke is persistent and every thought expressed digitally impacts both our productivity and our personal brands, we are all personally challenged to keep our promises to others and ourselves, to balance work and family, the physical and the spiritualwhile all around us our environments are evolving with increasing speed. Here, the gift to us all is resurrecting the tried and true concept of kanban , a just in time means of visualizing future, current, and past workflows that worked so well for the likes of Toyota (before their current challenges) and othersand then applying this framework personally as Personal Kanban.

Years ago while serving in a particularly demanding overseas position, I cut out an ad for an old software product (I dont even recall which one) that read: Escape the agony of crisis management. I posted this on the whiteboard in my office, which I used both to communicate with my staff and, unwittingly, to categorize future work and work in progress against goals and objectives. In its day, that whiteboard served as an analog social networkas various employees came in to post updates and share information. It wasnt until reading this book that I realized how much better my personal productivity and health could be if I were to use that same approach in my personal and professional life. This work makes this methodology so clear and applicable to our personal lives, I now once again am using a whiteboard at my consulting practice using Personal Kanban as my roadmap.