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Getting It Done Mashup – Extreme Productivity

 

I have now spoken at two conferences about my time management solution, which is not original, but rather a collection of best practices from several approaches to personal productivity. The presentations were very well-received and I was often urged to document the approach, and so I will attempt to do so here.

From David Allen’s Getting Things Done I learned that my brain is for processing, not storage. Most of the stress in my life, perhaps all of it, used to come from the nagging fear that there was something more important that I ought to be doing. From Tony Buzzan I learned that the best way to empty my brain on paper is a mind map. From Steven Covey I learned that I have many roles in life, and the most important are the easiest to forget when budgeting time. From Nick Cernis, the author of Todoodlist, I learned that visualizing my life can be fun. From David Anderson I learned to visualize my workflow and limit my work in process for faster task throughput times. Finally, from Francesco Cirillo, the creator of the Pomodoro technique, I learned to break myself of multi-tasking and the power of focus.

If you’re a personal productivity geek like myself, you might have recognized all of these popular productivity techniques. I have tried them all in their purist form, by the book, and extracted from each those parts which worked best for me.

I own a software company and an event management company. At the present moment, I am coordinating sales with a dozen warm to hot prospects in various stages of the sales process. I am wrapping up the ACE! Conference on Lean and Agile Software Development, and planning the EuRuKo and TEDxKrakow conferences. I am coordinating four product teams developing different web applications. I am about to launch a new magazine and I’m writing a book. Additionally, I do consulting and speak at software conferences. I’ve founded the Krakow Ruby User Group, The ITSBA OpenCoffee Club as well as the IT Small Business Alliance, and I’m starting a local chapter of the Limited WIP Society. I’m also a father, and I value my time with my family. That’s a lot, I think, and it means keeping every one of those projects moving forward against a backdrop of the normal daily chores that any business owner must perform, such as employee motivation, recruiting, marketing, accounting and the like. To make matters worse, I’m a morning person. By 3:00PM my brain shuts down and I’m useless for mental work. I’m also a family man. I’m home by 5:00 every day and I don’t work at home. Essentially, that means that I do almost everything that must be done in about 30 hours a week. This article is about how I pull it off.

Step one involves emptying my mind and ensuring that I capture everything I can think of. I use a mind map styled after the approach presented in Todoodlist. The first time I did it, I used paper. However, once I had it all sorted out like I liked it, I started using an online mind mapping tool, mindmeister.com, for this. I like using a software tool for two reasons. One is that it’s easy to change frequently without lots of eraser marks and scratch outs. The other is that it isn’t convenient to check. I don’t want the whole complexity of my life right in my face all the time. That would drive me nuts. All I want to know at any moment is what I should be doing right now.

Each top-level node is a project. Outcomes are linked to projects. For each outcome, there are linked tasks to accomplish it. This approach lets me focus on one project at a time, and then on one outcome for that project so that I can discover all the tasks required to arrive at the desired outcome. I can do this without losing sight of the big picture because I just have to broaden my focus a movement and see all the outcomes for a project and all the projects in my life in one place.

It took me about an hour to build this document the first time. Now I spend fifteen minutes every Monday morning reviewing and updating it. I add new projects, new tasks, and delete tasks that were completed the week before. If something is urgent, I’ll change the text color to red. If it’s very important, I will make the font larger. This practice makes it easy to see at a glance what I ought to be doing and what I must do.

Here is a detail from the mind map:

(this is not my real mindmap; it’s just a sample. Mine is about twice this size)

Once this mind map is updated, I move all of the urgent and important tasks into a kanban board. My kanban board uses the following workflow:

  • Backlog (where I stick anything I think of whenever it occurs to me)
  • This week (where I put the 25 things I intend to do this week)
  • Today (Where I put the 8 things I intend to do today)
  • Current Pomodoro (where I put the one thing I’m focussing on now)
  • Delegated (Where I put the things I’ve asked someone else to do)
  • Done (this should be clear enough)

So after updating my mind map, I move everything I intend to do this week into the “This Week” column. I set priorities as needed using three states: normal, one star, two stars. For me, two stars means nothing else matters until it is done. One star means I absolutely must do it today. I also add estimates. I use: tiny, small, medium, large and huge. Tiny is for things like my daily reminder to do 50 pushups. Small is for things I can do in 15 minutes. Medium for me is half an hour. Large is an hour or so. Huge tasks I try to avoid, but they are the kind of things I lock the door and unplug the phone for, like tediously typing up 160 invoices because my accounting software mangled a month’s data.

By now, I’ve spent about 20 minutes and I have a very clear view of my goals for the week.

I then pull eight tasks into “Today” and I may sort them by priority or by size, depending on how I feel about them. My planning for the week is done. It’s half an hour into Monday, and I know that I’m doing just what needs to be done to advance all of my projects satisfactorily this week. Everything else on my massive to do list (the whole mind map) I can safely forget about until next Monday.

Now is where the Pomodoro technique comes in to play. At the core of this approach is the value of focusing for short bursts of activity. Specifically, one chooses a task (or set of tasks) to be completed in 25 minutes, sets a timer for 25 minutes, closes the door, unplugs the phone, turns off IM notifications and closes their email software, and works, diligently, on only the task at hand, for 25 minutes. Then you can take a 5 minute break.

You might think that a person could do 16 of these cycles in a day. I’m lucky to get more than two in a day without interruptions. But in those 50 minutes I get more done then I do in the other seven hours of my work day, at least in terms of advancing the most important aspects of my most important projects.

I keep a calendar like a Seinfeld chart on the wall by my desk, and at the end of every day I write the number of completed Pomodoros that I did that day. It often looks like: 1,2,2,1,3,0,1,2,2… By making it visible, I motivate myself to get that number up, and it’s embarrassing to write 0, so I work hard to avoid it.

Throughout the day, I pull items from Today into Current and then give them my full focus until they can be moved to Done. It’s really as simple as that.

I should mention also that tasks which must be done on a certain day or time (renew tram pass on October first, Call John at 3:00 on Tuesday, TEDxKrakow planning meeting at 5PM Wednesday) just go in my Google calendar.

So my grand planning tool is a mind map. My weekly planning tool is a kanban board. My daily planning tool is a to do list (one column of the kanban board) and my calendar.

I’ve found this system keeps my head clear, keeps me sane, and is easily manageable in just half an hour a week.

Lastly, what to do with things that come up during the week? These fall into three categories: things to do now (answer the phone) I just do, things to do soon (get Ewelina a receipt she needs) I put into my kanban board either in Today or This Week, and things to do someday but not urgently I put in an inbox which I review while doing my weekly planning. Those things will either make it into next week’s plan or will be added to the mind map.

If I’m on the run and think of something, I usually have index cards and a Fisher space pen in my pocket. If I don’t I send myself an email from my iPhone.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Eric January 3, 2013, 7:29 pm

    Although this plan appears to have a lot of moving parts, I see how once it is set up it could be easy to maintain, thanks for sharing.

    You mentioned an inbox that you would send non-urgent daily things that come up to be reviewed. What is the difference between that and the backlog?

    Collectively what sources do you pull from for the monday self-scrum to map out your week?

    • pklipp January 3, 2013, 9:44 pm

      I’m glad you find it helpful. To answer your questions: The inbox is a standard, physical office inbox. When something comes up that I don’t have to do this week, I drop it in there and forget it. If it’s not physical, I jot it on a slip of paper and drop it in the inbox. I’ll go though all that stuff the next Monday and decide whether to add it to the backlog of things to do that week or to add it to the mind map.

      On Monday, I empty my inbox onto the desk, update my mindmap, and then from the mindmap, the inbox, and sometimes drawing from ideas that occur to me during the ritual, I build my backlog for the week.

  • Volker February 11, 2013, 1:21 am

    Thank you for sharing. This looks very helpul. I am busy reading and want to give personal kanban a try in a few days.Please allow some questions:

    1. If I remember correctly you posted this as an article in may 2010. Did you keep the same setup and workflow for nearly 2 years without any changes?

    2. What do you do with tasks that have not made it to done by the end of the week? Do they get any special treatment / evaluation? Do you remove them from the board on monday morning?

    3. “Once this mind map is updated, I move all of the urgent and important tasks into a kanban board. My kanban board uses the following workflow:Backlog (where I stick anything I think of whenever it occurs to me) ….”
    So when do you use the backlog and when the mind map? The map only on monday morning and during the rest of the week the backlog? Do you “synchronize” the backlog and the mind map on monday morning? And how about that inbox? What goes into the inbox and what into the backlog?

    4. Do you use any other tools for your planning like omnifocus or things? If so, which?

    5. Why should I use kabanery.com instead of a “real” whiteboard, with “real” post its? What is the advantage, what the disadvantage?

    Thanks in advance

    • pklipp February 11, 2013, 11:15 am

      I’m glad you find the approach helpful. To answer your questions:

      1) I did drift away and try other approaches from time to time when I saw cool-looking apps, but I always came back to the approach I described in this post.

      2) I completely re-assess all tasks every Monday. If something was in the week backlog and didn’t get done, perhaps that’s because it’s not really as important to me as I thought it was.

      3) I do only use the mindmap on Monday morning. It’s like a place to store the big picture including longer-term goals. Once the weekly backlog is done, it’s all I work from unless something urgent arrises during the week. Everything non-urgent goes into the in-box during the week for processing next Monday at which point it finds its way either into the backlog, the mindmap, or the trash.

      4) I tried and liked Wunderlist and Things, but came back to the mindmap and Kanbanery because It helps me to see everything in context of everything else.

      5) I have ditched Kanbanery from time to time in favor of a physical board. For me, it’s a matter of portability. On days when I woke up ill and worked from home, I cursed the fact that my physical board was in the office. A portable physical board is one solution, but you have to carry it around with you, and I like to travel light. If you always have a backpack or laptop bag, then a portable physical board may be ideal for you. I suppose you can photograph the board at the office every evening, just in case you get ill or for some reason need to see it when you’re not in the office, but that would take a lot of discipline. I’m sure the day I forgot would be the day I needed it.

  • Mateusz March 20, 2013, 2:14 pm

    Thanks for your great advises.
    Some projects I do with my friends so we use simply kanban board to visualize our work and now I have problem with organizing my grand kanban and the smaller ones that focus only on 1 project. Should I copy tasks from grand kanban to project kanban(that one I use with team)? I wonder how do you update your team kanban and your personal kanban? Copying seems to be some kind of waste in the whole process, but for now i can’t think about other solution.
    When do you do a project by yourself, do you start a new kanban for it? Or do you just use some new color for that project tasks.