Personal Taskboard: Evolution to Kanban

A few weeks ago I setup a personal taskboard at the wall next to my desk. It had three lanes like a Scrum task board: "open", "in progress", and "done". After one day there were lots of things in progress and two tasks were done already:

The major problem was the number of tasks in progress. There were just too many things ongoing so that control could easily get lost. Fortunately things were sorted out a few days later. Lots of things done and few things in progress:

After a while I recognized the repeating problem of too many thing in progress. After a short personal retrospective I decided to improve my focus on the "in progress" lane. It seemed obvious to limit the number of things to work on in parallel. I splitted the "in progress" lane in two parts:
a) an "on hold / wait" part for all the things that have been started but need external help
b) a "working on" part with focus on all the things in progress. This part now is a Kanban box with a limit of two tasks.

The positive effects of this change appeared instantly: things got their focus on the essence! Tasks were done in a much more sustaining pace than before.

I am curious about the next improvements of my personal task board. Let's see what my next retrospectives will expose.

Information Overload: Focus on the essence

Why am I starting to write the first post of my own blog? What do I expect? What do readers expect from my blog? And who has answers to all that questions?

I just asked myself how many time one has to spend to be updated with all news from Facebook friends, Twitter followings, Xing and linkedin contacts, and all other interesting information sources. Summed up I

• have 315 direct social networking contacts,
• am subscribed to 30 interest groups,
• am member of 4 organizations, associations, or institutes, and
• have been in email contact with more than 1.000 people in the last 15 years.

Let's assume an activity rate of 5% for my email contacts and 10% for my social networking contacts. This will lead to some 80 active contacts - with one message a day resulting in 80 messages daily.
Let's further assume that the interest groups and other organizations publish 5 messages as daily average. This will lead to some 170 messages daily.
So I should deal with 250 messages every single day - that sounds quite exciting! This is probably even more exciting when returning from a 10 days vacation...
To make a long story short: it's just not possible to handle such vast amounts of information!
What's the solution of all of this? Focus on the essence in three steps:

1. Read only the subject of an email, the abstract of a paper, the labels of a blog. Dismiss highly uninteresting topics instantly - do not keep them to postpone your time, just get rid of unimportant things.
2. Cluster all information and try to delete as much redundant or outdated messages inside each cluster - this will reduce the number of messages.
3. Dare to delete everything which needs no urgent attention - people will get back to you if it's really necessary.

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Focus on the essence:take care of the interesting, the new, and the urgent - simply ignore all other information.

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Try it and be agile!