Chapter 6: The Doing Column.

Phew. We just introduced a lot of new concepts in our discussion of the waiting column. If you’re playing along at home—and again, I truly hope that you are—now might be a good time for another one of those replenishing breaks.

If you feel like you need to check your email or voicemail, or tackle some other bit of work that is tugging at your conscience, I understand. Please remember, however, that doing different work is not a break. Before you move on to some other thing, I recommend you take a real break first to digest this new information and let your brain rebound a bit. If you do, you’ll be much better equipped to carry on with your day.

Ready? Great.

The Doing column is where you’ll put the work that you are actually and actively doing right now. This is not your “I should be doing something” wish list and it is not your “I promised someone I would do this” list. It is where you have committed to doing a task, have started working on it, and intend to see it done.

Right now there should be one item in that Doing column: “Expand Kanban Board v1.” We’ve been working on completing that item since Chapter 3, and we’ve still got some work left to do.

Whether you’ve actually been working on just that one thing this whole time is another matter. If I had to guess, I’d say you haven’t. Heck, I even gave you permission to go do other work a few paragraphs ago. This is normal, and natural, but that doesn’t mean it is optimal.

So the first step in setting up your Doing column is to go ahead and fill it up with all of the things you are actively working on. You may come up with your own criteria for what “doing” means to you, but I’ll suggest the following: A task goes in the Doing column if the following conditions are met:

1. You have started work on it (or are immediately about to start).
2. You are capable of finishing all of the required work without any outside help, materials, or information.
3. You intend to finish it before moving on to something else.⁸

In other words, you are “doing” a task if you have begun working on it and will finish it on your own.

Take a few minutes now to write down the tasks that fit your definition of “Doing,” one per sticky, and put them on your board (keeping with the card format you developed in the Waiting chapter). While you do this, you may realize you have a few more items where you are actually waiting on some outside resource before you can continue work; you probably guessed that these should go over in the Waiting column. You might also come up with things you need or want to do but haven’t started yet. Write those down too, but put them two steps to the left in the “Queue” column (we are going to have a separate set of rules for the “To Do” column, so leave it empty for now).

A lot of people start to freak out a little once they fill up their Doing column. Many folks are astonished at the number of things they are trying to accomplish at once that they’ve been holding in their heads. Even those who already use checklists or other productivity tools are often surprised at how it feels to see physical representations of their tasks right there in the room with them rather than tucked away in a notebook or on a screen. This minor freak-out is normal, and it is a feeling we’re going to try to harness as a weak version of revulsion therapy.

Finished? Okay.

I won’t pretend to be able to guess how many tasks you just put in your Doing column, but I’ll bet you’re not very close to that Single Piece Flow I keep talking about. (And if you are, you probably don’t need this book). As I keep saying, working one thing at a time, and working on it until it is finished, is the best way to get lots of things done;⁹ however, it is something of a Platonic ideal. We should all aspire to it, and we might approach or even achieve it with practice, focus, and retrospection. But I’m certainly not there yet, and you probably won’t be anytime soon.

The question, then, is how can we erect a support system to help us move towards this ideal of “one thing at a time,” or at the very least reduce our susceptibility to doing too many things at once.

This gets to one of the great benefits of Kanban (and many productivity methods that precede it): it provides a framework to help us combat some of our perfectly normal (but ultimately harmful) tendencies in our quest for improved Flow.

You’ve already been experiencing the visual representation of otherwise invisible work, which I think is Kanban’s most effective tool. But this next one runs a close second: We are going to establish a constraint on the number of items each stage of your workflow can process at a time. Specifically, we are going to limit the number of items you are allowed to put into your “Doing” column at once.

“Wait a minute,” you say, “we are going to create a constraint? I thought the whole point of this exercise was to ease constraints, not introduce new ones.”

First off, this will be an artificial constraint—it is a construct, not a commandment, and you are free to break it so long as you do so intentionally. That way we won’t be introducing any actual bottlenecks. In fact, this false constraint will have the opposite effect: it will reduce the pressure on your actual bottlenecks, thereby improving the Flow of your work through them.

What we are about to do, then, is establish your first WIP Limit. Remember from the last chapter, a reasonable customer will not pay you until you have delivered something of value. We lawyers sometimes pervert this simple law of economics by assuming that our time is what is valuable to our customers. It is not, and surely you know it is not.¹⁰ What is valuable to our customers is outcomes, and customers will pay for outcomes (or, if you’ve set expectations well, for clear milestones along the way to an outcome).¹¹

WIP limits help you deliver Value to your customer more quickly by forcing encouraging you to finish (and ideally deliver) one thing before starting another. It is the antidote to having “too many balls in the air,” because a WIP limit prevents you from launching a new ball until one has landed. Remember that Kanban catchphrase: “Start less, finish more.”

Enough background. If we are going to establish a WIP Limit to your “Doing” column, what should that limit be? This is a personal choice. I’ve mentioned the Platonic ideal of doing just one thing at a time, but most people find a WIP limit of 1 to be challenging, especially at first (though if you think you can do it, by all means give it a try!). Other numbers have their own strengths and weaknesses, but the trick is to find one that works for you.

I’ll offer two possible suggestions. If you just want to pick a number and go with it, I usually say to shoot for somewhere between 3 and 5. The lower the better, but 3–5 seems to be a range that most people can achieve and sustain with a little practice. If you have fewer than 10 items in your column, I’d suggest going for this range. But if you’re used to having lots and lots of balls in the air, then even getting down to five may be too aggressive at first.

My second suggestion, then, is to simply count up the number of items in your “Doing” column and reduce it by 25%. If you put 12 items in there, your first WIP limit will be 9, if you’ve stacked it up with 20 items, try to whittle it down to 16 and see how that feels. But the whittling should be iterative. Once you’ve made it from 20 to 16 (meaning you’ve finished four items without letting new things come in), then you should try to get it down to 12, then to 8, then to that 3–5 range, and then (if you can) down to just 1. It may take a few weeks to get there, but that is OK.

Whatever number you choose, go ahead and take your “Doing” sticky (the column header) off the wall and write your WIP limit in parentheses after the word “Doing” (or make a new sticky if you didn’t leave room). Now, if you’re really motivated, see if you can complete a few tasks to get the number of stickies in your Doing column down to your WIP limit. But don’t worry if this seems like too heavy a lift right now—you’ll be just fine if it takes you a day or three to get down to the limit.

One final thought before we leave the Doing column for now: think about using vertical positioning of your stickies within each column as an indicator of priority. In other words, put your highest priority items at the top of the column and your lower priority ones beneath. And make “Doing” a single vertical column—no stickies should be side-by-side. You ought to be able to give each task a priority relative to the others (and if you can’t then the order of similar priority tasks probably isn’t important). This isn’t to say you absolutely positively have to work on your highest priority tasks first, but if you are going to work on a lower priority one (say because it better fits the time you have available), I want to you do it intentionally. We’ll use this vertical ranking concept for all of the columns on your board.

Now when that “Expand Kanban Board v1” sticky makes it to the top of your “Doing” column, you’ll be ready to continue this exercise by working on the “To-do” column.

Chapter 6: The Doing Column | Key Takeaways

1. The only items that should be in your Doing column are those where
   • You have started work on it (or are immediately about to start);
   • You are capable of finishing all of the required work without any outside help, materials, or information; and
   • You intend to finish it before moving on to something else.
2. Establish a WIP limit to encourage work to flow through your Doing column rather than getting stuck there. You may need to finish some things that are already on your plate to get down to your limit, and that’s a good thing.
3. Put all of your Doing stickies in a single column, and prioritize them vertically (highest priorities up top). Then, when you do your work, always work from the top of the column, even if you don’t feel like it.