At times we all feel somewhat overwhelmed by all the jobs piling up, whether in our email inbox, or in our own to-do lists. Many are overwhelmed all the time. It’s as if our lives are being driven by that pesky list of demands. It feels like they are pushing us, each vying for first place in our attention and our efforts.
Well, it’s time to stop being pushed by our work. Instead, try pulling your work through.
This week in our Leading Yourself online Workshop, we are going through a module called, From Push to Pull, where we explore the technique called Personal Kanban. Kanban boards originated in lean manufacturing as a powerful way for teams to improve their internal communication and performance. Then Kanban became a common tool used within Agile development teams, so much so that many now think Kanban originated with Agile.
A few years ago, I read Jim Benson and Torianne DeMaria Barry’s Personal Kanban. I was hooked. I introduced it into my Organising Yourself Effectively workshop, and people loved it. It became one of the most popular tools that we covered. Stories came back of how clients had adopted it into their working lives. This was yet another example of people discovering the personal power of tools used more commonly in a project management context.
Personal Kanban became one of the most popular tools in my personal organisation workshop
Here is one of the videos in the Workshop, using the online platform Trello to illustrate the personal kanban.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about Personal Kanban or Trello. A few months ago I posted a piece called, Tools that evolve with our work.
As the above video shows, though, there is something quite powerful about the idea of choosing to pull work through, and not being pushed by it. To become free, we need to think free, and not like victims. Personal Kanban, simple though it is, can help us with that move to freedom in our daily work.
Do you use kanban for your personal organisation? If so, leave a comment below. If not, what do you use?
A free course that takes you through the workflows of how I use bullet journaling for my Daily Heads Up, Gratitude List, Weekly and Monthly reviews.