Chapter 5: Brain Dump Part 2; The Waiting Column.

The Waiting column is a special place on your board: it is the one column you hope to be able to skip completely whenever possible. The purpose of the Waiting column is to act as a parking lot for tasks that you have started working on, but somehow they got stuck.

If you’re like most people, dealing with little sticking points is probably a big part of your day. We live in an “interconnected” world with lots of “dependencies.” That means we will necessarily spend a good deal of time waiting on other people or processes to do their thing.

Waiting is not always a bad thing. In fact, there is a very good kind of waiting: you wait while someone—maybe a client or a colleague—finishes their piece of work and delivers to you all of the necessary materials you need to finish yours. We often don’t do enough of this type of waiting; we get impatient and want to start working on our piece. But when we jump the gun on our work we frequently have to go back and change things once we get new information, or we hit a roadblock where we can’t actually finish a task until some additional information is available. At that point we have to stop what we’re doing, store away the Work in Progress on that task, and switch gears to go work on something else.

That lack of good waiting will almost always lead to a more insidious type of waiting that will divert your time and attention and increase the drag on your entire system. We’ll call it wasteful waiting after the Lean concept of Waste⁵, and it often results from starting a task before it is Ready for your work. Again, if you’re like most people, you probably don’t give much thought to the notion of the task being Ready for you to work on it. Instead you probably focus on whether you feel ready to work on that task.

They are sides of the same coin, but don’t confuse one for the other—they are both necessary conditions for you to be able to work that task to completion. You’ll usually have a good sense of whether or not you’re feeling ready to work on something, but how do you know whether or not the task is Ready for your work? In a few chapters we’re going to talk in detail about the Definition of Ready and its close sibling, the Definition of Done, but it is worth a quick overview now.

In a nutshell, the Definition of Ready is a checklist containing all of the conditions precedent to your being able to complete work on a particular task or stage of a process. All of them. The checklist may contain information, raw materials, tools, a block of time, or completion of a prior task or process phase. For tasks or processes you complete on a regular basis you’ll eventually develop a pretty complete Definition of Ready checklist for each checkpoint along the way. You’ll always be learning and making improvements, but you’ll develop a reliable guide that will tell you whether or not a particular task is Ready for you to begin working on it.

For less common tasks your Definition of Ready may never be totally accurate. But as you train yourself to think in terms of a Definition of Ready you will undoubtedly make improvements on these infrequent tasks as well.

The reason for having a Definition of Ready comes back to the advantages of Single Piece Flow. As I said before, the most efficient and effective way to complete a task is to begin it and work it all the way to completion without interruption. Period. Starting and stopping work on a particular task, or frequently turning your attention from one task to another, has switching costs: Your brain takes time and energy to shut down work on Task #1 and change its focus to Task #2, and the amount of time and energy available to your brain are finite. The more you switch, the more mental resources you waste.

On top of that, the unfinished work on Task #1, the Work In Progress, has a carrying cost. Your brain, and your other systems, must hang on to enough detail about that task to be able to pick it up at another time and continue work. Here too, your ability to do this is limited. You may have a great short-term memory, but it is not infinite. It takes energy to recall specific details and your brain only has so much energy it can use in a single day.

All of this waiting—both the good and bad kinds—lead to tasks that get stuck in your system. And I’ve worked with enough teams to make it a pretty sure bet that stuck tasks are the single biggest source of turbulence in your workflow. The purpose of the Waiting column on your board is to give you the tools and information you need to get those tasks unstuck and restore your system’s flow.

With that background, go to your board and take the “Waiting” column header off the wall. On that sticky (or on a new one if you don’t have room) I’d like you to write the following: “On what?” and “Since when?” These are the crucial pieces of information you need to break those tasks free.

We’re going to focus just on the Bad Waiting tasks at first. Remember, these are tasks that you started working on but had to stop due to some unforeseen dependency. In other words, you hit a roadblock. Often your roadblocks will be external, e.g. waiting on some other person to get you the information you need to continue, but roadblocks can be internal as well. Maybe you need to do more research or get the right tool for the job. Probably you thought it was going to be easier than it turned out to be and you didn’t allot yourself enough time. For now, don’t worry about tasks you haven’t started yet because you are waiting for them to be Ready for Work; we’ll deal with those in a bit.

So grab your blank sticky notes and start writing down tasks you’ve started working on but aren’t able to finish without some additional tools or information. Remember your categories if you’re using them (whether with color or by notation), and, if you know them, write the task’s start date in the top-right corner and the rough value of the task in the lower left (don’t spend a lot of time on these if aren’t top of mind).

At this point the stickies should look a lot like the ones in your Done column. The next step is to note what you are waiting on, and when you started waiting. For now, you can use the space down the right-hand side of the sticky, below the task’s start date. Better yet, I like using a separate sticky note (maybe a slightly smaller one) to capture this information and slap it right on top of the task note (that way the main stickys don’t get too crowded with information).

Notice that I said “on what” instead of “on who.” If you think the who is important, then by all means write it down too. But the actual dependency is the action item, not the actor. Notice also that I suggest noting the date you started waiting rather than imposing a due date. This is a more subtle distinction, but it is my experience that an elapsed time works better in most situations.⁶ I won’t go to the mat on this one, however, so if you think a due date will work better for you then by all means go with that.

Repeat the process for everything you can think of where you are waiting on something before you can finish a task. Place the stickies in the Waiting column in rough order of importance, with more important tasks going toward the top and less important ones below. What’s important? That’s up to you. A roadblocked task may be important because it stands to make you a lot of money, or it may be important because there is a looming deadline. You don’t need to nail it exactly, just give your tasks some relative priority. You can always move things around later.

Once you’ve written down as many of your “Waiting” tasks as you can think of, take a step back and look at your board again. In the past when we’ve done this it has been to inspire a feeling of satisfaction for having completed a task. This time I want to inspire a sense of urgency.

Look at that thin line between “Waiting” and “Done.” Now look at the dollar sign (or whatever currency you chose) that is above that line. This is your payoff line. Your main goal, really your only goal, is to move tasks across this line. When you do that—when you work a task to completion—several good things happen.

First, you get to savor the accomplishment of finishing a task. We’ve been practicing that, and the reason we’ve been practicing is that it is a great motivator. Success breeds confidence, and confidence breeds more success. So think of how good it will feel to get some of those tasks out of the Waiting column and across the line to Done.

Second, you may very well get paid. Not all of your tasks will have immediate payoff, but for client work in particular, finishing your task means you can deliver something of Value to your customer and ideally get paid for it. This is probably the reason you are in business, or at least one of the most important reasons. Sure if you work in a large firm or as an in-house attorney the payment may not be directly to you, but delivering Value is still the main reason for your job to exist and you will take satisfaction in doing that job well.

Finally, and you may not see the benefit of this yet, but by completing tasks you free up some capacity in your system to handle more work. One of our goals here is to increase the Velocity of your work. That is, the speed at which you complete a task once you start working on it. At first Velocity may sound synonymous with efficiency, but they aren’t quite the same thing.

Efficiency is your ability to complete a task without wasted effort, whereas Velocity is your ability to complete a task quickly. Greater efficiency will almost certainly lead to increased Velocity, but it isn’t the only thing keeping you from greater speed. As I keep saying, the amount of Work In Progress you have in your system has a carrying cost, and one of those costs is a tendency to create turbulence for the system as a whole. The more work you are keeping track of—even if you are performing the tasks themselves fairly efficiently—the longer it will take for each task to flow into the Done column.

One of the catch phrases you will sometimes hear about Kanban is “Start less to finish more.” The idea is to carry less Work In Progress in your system as a way to reduce the carrying costs of that work. Lower carrying costs will lead to the remaining tasks flowing through your system at a greater Velocity. And with a greater Velocity, the more tasks you will complete in a given time period and, usually, the more money you will make. This is not necessarily true of efficiency.

Again, this may be hard to see at this point in your Kanban journey. As you keep using your board, learning from that use, and adjusting your methods, however, you’ll see that keeping track of fewer tasks at a time will help you complete those tasks more quickly. Consequently, you will get more tasks done.

So look again at your Waiting column. What does it tell you? Who do you need to call (which is better than email), and what do you need to ask for in order to stop waiting and get that task back to Doing, or even over to Done? Great. Make it so.

Really. Put this book down and spend as much time as you need to triage those tasks in your waiting column and, wherever possible, move them along to Done. Capacity is a beautiful thing, and you’ll need it if you’re going to continue to make incremental improvements to your workflow and productivity.