Chapter 6A: How to Attain your WIP Limit While Doing Minimal Work.

One more thing before we move over to talk about the “To Do” column: I forgot to mention that you get to cheat!

Okay, cheat isn’t the right word, but if you’re one of those people who has 10 or more items in your “Doing” column, then you may need a little hack to get yourself down to a more manageable number.

Here’s the thing: It is highly unlikely that you are actually working on 10 or more things right now. You may have started working on them, you may have even promised them to someone else, but you can’t actually be working on more than one or two things at a time. (Hopefully I will convince you that it is really only one, but I’ll let that go for now.)

So as you prioritize the items in your “Doing” column by moving the more important ones to the top, ask yourself this: Do I have everything I need to work this thing to Done today? In other words, if you put aside all your other work (including building out your Kanban board), could you finish everything before you go home tonight?

There are only a few possible answers to this question.

First the easy one: If your answer is “yes,” then I recommend that you put away this book and get to it. The book will be here tomorrow, and you should not continue working on your board until the “Expand Kanban Board v1” sticky actually makes it up to the top of your “Doing” column. In other words, don’t continue building out your board until it is the most important thing you should be working on right now.

What if your answer to the question is “no”? Well, there’s a hack that isn’t really a hack at all, it is the whole point of this thing. The most productive way to achieve your WIP limit is to do the work that (1) is ready for your work and (2) most needs to be done. These two criteria can help you figure out where that task should go on your board, because it probably shouldn’t be in your Doing column.

First criteria first. I ask “can you finish this thing before you go home tonight?” and you say, “No, because I need something from somebody before I can get it done.” You’ve probably already guessed that this task actually belongs in the “Waiting” column, complete with an “on what” and “since when” indicator. Of course you should make sure that the person you are waiting on knows that you are waiting. Give ‘em a nudge, give ‘em a deadline, give ‘em a sense of consequence, but also make sure they have all of the things they need to get the thing back to you. Sure you can blame that other person if your delivery is late, but blame doesn’t get the job done and getting things done is all we’re about right now.

But what if your answer to the first question is, “I have everything I need to finish this task, but there is no way I can do it before I go home tonight because I don’t have time.”? My obvious next question will be, “why not?”, to which there are two most likely answers.

One is “because I have all these other things I need to do first,” which, of course, gets you right back to the reason you need a WIP limit to begin with. If this is your answer, then what you have is a capacity problem. It isn’t that you don’t have enough capacity; the idea that we can quickly increase our personal capacity with just the right app or tool is a form of magical thinking that will almost certainly lead to frustration and disappointment. No, the problem is that you do not acknowledge and respect your capacity.

Maybe you have self-doubt, and you think you ought to be able to do more than you usually do. This notion is as common as it is wrong. You do plenty, likely more than you give yourself credit for, but you probably aren’t always doing the right things (in part because you keep trying to do too many). So finish a few of the things that are in your Doing column. Ideally you’d start with the highest-priority items but right now I really don’t care. Just get some things done, maybe start with the easiest things, and then don’t take on new work until you get a few more things done.[^foo651} Once you whittle down your list you can use your WIP limit to first learn your true capacity, then acknowledge it, and then respect it. Once you do, you’ll find that improving your productivity doesn’t come from increasing your capacity nearly so much as from increasing your flow.

The other answer to the problem of not having enough time is that the thing you are trying to do is too big to take care of in one sitting. Here the solution is decomposition: breaking down your larger tasks into “bite-sized” chunks. This concept is surely not new to you: it shares its root with the idiom about taking things “one step at a time.” Hard core project managers may refer to it as a “work breakdown structure,” but we don’t need to get so technical. And while you may be thinking to yourself, “Oh great, now I have another task about figuring our all of the smaller tasks that are wrapped up in this big task,” here’s the hack: you don’t need to plan all of your steps right now, only the next one.

David Allen, in his popular “Getting Things Done” method (and book of the same name), refers to this as the “Next action decision.” Others refer to it as the “next actionable step.” The concept, of course, is much older than GTD: the Tao Te Ching (dated to around the 5th or 6th century BCE) famously states (roughly translated) “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.” The idea is that you’re a smart person and you don’t need a detailed roadmap get where you need to go, you just need to get started with the work of getting there. So figure out what is something you can do to capture some measurable progress on your big task and do it. Maybe give it its own sticky but somehow link it to the other one: I like using a smaller sticky of the same color, though I’ve seen others match them through symbology (letters, numbers, or otherwise). Regardless of how you do it, the key to decomposition is this: right after you finish one sub-part of the task make sure you’ve written a new sticky for at least one other thing you need to do to get the parent task to “Done.”

Finally, one other way to get some tasks off of your plate is to delegate them to someone else. I’m not going to dive into effective delegation strategies, but there are plenty of resources on the web (I like this one) to help. The main thing to keep in mind with delegation is that hand-offs are often one of the biggest sources of additional time spent on a task or project. As soon as you put something on someone elses plate, you’re stuck dealing with their priorities and foibles on top of yours. Often you’re better off just carving out time to do it yourself, at least until you’re confident in your ability to sync up with your team on priorities.

Chapter 6A Takeaways

• One way to be more productive at first is to do all of the easy stuff first. But be careful that you don’t wind up doing only the easy stuff.
• Decomposing larger tasks into more manageable chunks, along with always knowing what is the next actionable step for the larger task, will help.
• Delegating is often a good idea, but there is a difference between delegating and dumping your work on someone else. And when delegating, beware of the added time due to hand-offs.