What is Kanban?

Kanban is a system to manage your productivity. It has two basic principles:

• Visualize your work - when you can see your workload, you can understand it better
• Limit your work in progress - Don’t take on more work than you can handle

These principles are put into practice by simply creating a board with 3 lanes – Ready, Doing and Done. You write your tasks down on post-its, and place the post-its in the appropriate lanes. At a glance, you can then see exactly what tasks are waiting to get done, the ones that you are currently doing, and the ones you have completed. To make sure that you don’t take on more work that you can handle, you can set a limit of number of items in certain columns. For example, in the Doing column, setting a limit of 3 items, means that you can only be working on 3 items at a time. You must finish a task before you can pull in a new one.

How does this work in practice?

The great thing about the Kanban system is that it is pretty simple! I use a whiteboard sheet, and I’ve got a bunch of coloured post-its, with each colour representing a different project. I put them in the relevant columns, and move them along as appropriate! For a while, my kanban board was purely electronic. I use AgileZen to manage my tasks and it has served me very well. It is a great tool to use if you want a bit more power in managing your tasks, as well as being able to collaborate with others on projects. But, the awesome thing about using a physical kanban board is that it is a daily, stark reminder of the stuff you need to do. Its great to have this in your face.

In reality, I use a mixture of an electronic and this physical board. The electronic AgileZen board serves as more of a backlog and a task to-do list (you can assign tasks to each story up on your board), as well as being incredibly useful when I am not at home. The physical kanban board is merely a snapshot of my electronic board and serves to let me know precisely what I’ve got to do THIS SECOND! It makes sure that I don’t feel overwhelmed.

How do you manage your productivity?  Use kanban? How does it work for you?

In the meantime, I thought I’d give you a little look at how I plan what life list items I will be crossing off next! Its really important to have a plan when trying to cross items off a life list, because you can very easily just write the list and never actually get round to doing anything that you write on it! The list is actually pretty unimportant; its having the actual experiences that counts. But it seems like a lot of people forget that bit.

To avoid this happening to me, I wanted to keep my eye on the ball, and keep my life list items really close.  So I came up with a little solution:

Using the awesomeness of magic whiteboard sheets, I made little boxes that correspond to the different life list categories that I have on my blog. In each box, I’ve written the category it represents, and have left space to put post-its inside each box, like this:

The post-its are the life list items that either I decide I want to tackle next or are already in progress. Having them on my wall staring me in the face every day keeps me accountable to the goals that I have committed to and keeps me motivated to getting them done.

You’ll also notice that I’ve put a few inspirational quotes along the side to remind me of why I’m doing this and to give me big smiles!

And thats it; a quick look at how I manage my life list and keep getting things done!

Do you have a life list? How do you keep motivated and accountable to your goals? I’d love to hear from you!

Last Month

The results of my first month were incredibly enlightening. Some top line figures:

- Out of all the available working hours in the month, I only used 9.74% of my available hours.

- I had discarded 98 pomodoros – meaning that if I had been allowed to work through those pomodoros to the end, I could have added 41 hours worked to my overall tally. Lame-o!

- I logged 64 pomodoros of meeting time, equating to 27 hours spent in meetings!

- Looking at my pomodoro stats day on day, I found that whilst I aim to get 4 hours of work done a day, I actually only achieve 2.4 hours of work each day. This was the most depressing statistic of all. Out of an 8 hour day, I’m seemingly only doing 2.4 hours of actual work?

Making some changes

I was incredibly happy that I got to analyse last month’s figures. It really highlighted how much time gets wasted and drained every month, time that I can’t get back. Following the pretty dismal stats, I decided to make some small changes to the way I worked to see whether this would have any effect on my stats this month.

Some changes that I made were:

- Assign myself a morning, afternoon and evening pomodoro. The morning pomodoro gets completed first thing in the morning, the afternoon pomodoro straight after lunch, and the evening pomodoro just before I leave. These pomodoros are my 3 opportunities in the day to do what I like to call clean up. These are periods of time where I get to organise what I will be doing, arrange any meetings, and also to sort out any outstanding emails and small tasks. The benefit of having dedicated periods three times a day for this is that these small tasks don’t clog up my time during the day.

- Split up tasks better. One of the main reasons I found that I didn’t actually get to complete pomodoros last month was because I didn’t define the tasks involved well enough. Often I was writing tasks down that didn’t really detail exactly what it was that I needed to do – I’d write a title like “Analyse user testing” and assign a few pomodoros to it. If I had sat down and actually written out the discrete tasks involved, I would have been better able to get stuck in quicker, and not waste time deciding what the task actually involved.

- Estimate smarter. Estimating time is an art form that I have definitely got better at the longer I stick at pomodoro. But a trap that I was often falling into was purposefully overestimating, because then I felt I would have some breathing room. This was a fatal error – the task always expands to fill the time allotted to it – overestimating time just meant that I was taking longer to do it. This month, I made a conscious effort to estimate smarter and really push myself to do things in the given timeframe.

- More focus. Realising that last month I only achieved half of what I wanted to on average each day gave me a real push to improve. It was unacceptable that I was only reaching 2.4hours of work a day, when I was estimating double the amount of work. I needed to improve my focus and just get things done! This month I really tried to up my game and improve those stats!

This month

Okay, so this month, there were 480 hours of working time. Here are the main figures:

- The number of pomodoros that I wanted to complete = 319 = 133 hours a month

- The number of pomodoros I actually completed = 231 = 96.15 hours a month

- Number of pomodoros discarded = 72 = 30 hours a month

- % of month worked = 20.03%

- Average number of pomodoros wanted to complete in a day = 15 = 6.25 hrs a day

- Average number of pomodoros actually completed in a day = 10.27 = 4.28 hrs a day

- Difference in pomodoros = 4.73 = 1.97 hrs a day

Improvement?

So the first thing to say is I am really happy with my improvements this month. Not only did I aim high and significantly up the number of pomodoros I wanted to complete, I also nicely improved on the amount of pomodoros that I actually completed. Last month, I completed 60.36% of my target pomodoros; this month, I completed 72.41%

Another good improvement was that I reduced the number of pomodoros that I discarded by 11 pomodoros – this means I gained 4.58 hours of productivity this month wahey!

One of the stats that I was most interested in checking out was how much of the available hours this month I worked. Last month it was less than 10%, a horrible number! This month, that increased to 20.03%, more than doubling last month’s figure. Whilst this is still actually pretty low, doubling the amount of time worked this month is pretty sweet!

Finally, another awesome improvement was found by looking at my average number of pomodoros I was completing per day. Last month, this produced the depressing news that I was only attempting to complete around 4 hours of work a day, and only actually reaching 2.46 hours of work. This month, I found that I was attempting to complete 6.25 hours of work a day, and actually reaching 4.28 hours! This means that I again doubled the amount of work I was doing this month!

Conclusions

Looking at a comparison of this months figures versus last months, I have to say that I am very happy with how I have improved. Making some small changes to the way I work has noticeably and significantly improved how productive I am. I am most proud of the fact that I’ve really upped my game in the average number of pomodoros that I am completing, and the amount of time that I am actually working productively.

Having said that, there is a lot of refinement to be done to get these figures up even further. I’m still not reaching the number of pomodoros I want to complete, and I’m still discarding a lot of pomodoros. Additionally, I’m still only working productively for a small amount of my time available.

Next month will be month 3 using the Pomodoro technique. My goal is to reach working productively for at least 30% of my available time, and to complete 80% of my target pomodoros.

I’m looking forward to seeing how much I can push myself to improve further and what new changes I can implement in my working day to achieve my goals!

Rob spoke about the importance of being focused when working, of tracking your time so that you know what you have been working on and for how long, about detailing how and why you lose your focus or become distracted when working, and about prioritising your time so that you are working on the things that are really important.

This all made sense, but sounded pretty complicated to implement in day to day life – if there is one thing I definitely don’t need, it is some sort of heavy-weight process that embeds itself in everything that I do so that I actually end up spending more time maintaining the process than actually getting anything done.

Luckily, if Pomodoro was a person, he would be that awesome chill dude who is always there for you, but just lets you do your own thing until you realise that you actually really want to hang out. In essence, Pomodoro is Hurley.

What is Pomodoro?

In a nutshell, Pomodoro involves writing a to-do list each day, and for each task, assigning 1 pomodoro for every 25 minutes you think it will take to complete. So if you think something is going to take an hour, thats 3 pomodoros. There is no concept of half-pomodoros – each pomodoro is a discrete block of 25 minutes. You get started on your tasks, and cross off each pomodoro every time that you get through one without being interrupted/distracted by something else. If you are distracted, you have to throw out that pomodoro, and you don’t count it as completed. If extra things come up during the day that you hadn’t planned for, add them bottom-up to your list. At the end of the day, review the pomodoros you completed and those you threw away and the reasons for doing so. Iterate and improve the next day, and so on.

Thats basically it. Its a simple concept but actually has awesome power! By tracking your time in this way, you are not only able to see exactly what you have been working on, but for how long, as well as reasons that you weren’t able to continue working on it. I find this really useful not only because it enables me to remain accountable with my time to those around me, but also because you can then easily track helpful or destructive patterns that aid or impede your workflow. You can see what unplanned items keep on coming up, how long you are spending in meetings, or that the big scary task you had to do actually took you half the time you thought it would.

But there are lots of resources on Pomodoro that you can check out if you are interested in learning more. Here, I’d instead like to talk about my first month on Pomodoro and what I’ve learned.

My First Month using Pomodoro

So lets start with some good ol fashioned stats:

There were 672 hours in my first month using Pomodoro. I was staggered to learn that only 69 of these hours were used to do work. 69! Out of 672! That meant that I was only using 9.74% of my available hours. At this point in my analysis, I started feeling slightly like a failure!

Next, I started to look into the amount of pomodoros that I actually completed, versus the amount that I set out to do. Here, again I found a staggering difference of 109 pomodoros – meaning that to achieve everything that I wanted, I would have had to work for an extra 45 hours! 45 hours may sound like a lot, but after learning that I was using less than 10% of my available time, it is time that I could have easily found. Again, my inability to manage my time properly started kicking me in the face!

Onwards and upwards I thought. Next up: how many pomodoros did I discard? That is, how many pomodoros did I get partway through but then had to throw because I was distracted or interrupted? To be honest, throughout this month I had been feeling like I had been doing pretty well because I didn’t think I had been interrupted too much. However, the stats do not lie, and I had in fact been interrupted pretty heavily! I had discarded 98 pomodoros – meaning that if I had been allowed to work through those pomodoros to the end, I could have added 41 hours to my overall tally. Lame-o!

One statistic that I was particularly interested in investigating was the amount of time that I had spent in meetings. In my organisation, like many others, we go to a lot of meetings. I noticed very quickly that a lot of my time was being spent on meetings, something that I knew, but that was made so much more depressing having it written out starkly in pomodoros! Chatting to Rob about it, it became clear that there were a few options available to me:

- Prepare properly for meetings so that meeting time isn’t wasted

- Make meetings shorter: 30 minutes is usually enough yet we schedule 1 hour meetings which then get filled up with unnecessary chat

- Try and embed a culture of less meetings in the office – the more people that push back, the more it will become the norm

- Most importantly, Say No! If people invite you to meetings that aren’t “necessary”, politely decline

I started attempting all these strategies in Week 2 of my first pomodoro month. According to the stats, I logged 64 pomodoros of meeting time, equating to 27 hours! I shudder to think how much larger that number would’ve been without Rob’s mini intervention, so whilst this number is pretty high, its no way as bad as I thought it would be. So I’m congratulating myself for this one (with a long way to go, of course!)

Finally, I wanted to look at my pomodoro stats day on day. I always write out the ideal list of stuff I want to get done and work from there and I very rarely complete my list. I thought it’d be interesting to compare how close I got to my ideal! Turns out that on average, I aim to get 9.8 pomodoros completed but I actually only complete 5.9. This stat doesn’t sound too bad until you convert pomodoros into minutes. This means that I aim to get 4 hours of work done a day, but actually, I only achieve 2.4 hours of work each day. This was the most depressing statistic of all. Out of an 8 hour day, I’m seemingly only doing 2.4 hours of actual work?

Conclusions

Man oh man do I have a lot of work to do!

This past month working with pomodoros has actually been awesome and fun! I’m getting a lot better at estimating my time, managing meetings and actually focusing on my work.

Conversely, I am still getting distracted/interrupted a lot by various things (colleagues, unplanned items, my own limited attention span..!), resulting in a lot of wasted pomodoros. Additionally, the amount of actual work that I get to do on any given day appears to be depressingly low, resulting in terrible statistics overall. And annoyingly, I actually keep on forgetting to turn on focus booster more than I should be (9 times! WTF?!)

I have got a long way to go! This coming month, I will be working on discovering and fixing some of the problems that are blocking me from achieving more with my time. I’ll talk about this in a separate forthcoming post!

Finally, although the statistics appear to be all doom and gloom, a reminder that actually, just by doing the pomodoro technique, I’m in a much better place that I thought I’d be. I get to recognise the problem areas and start making positive steps forward. I’m excited

There are some fantastic apps out there that can really help anybody looking to cut down on unnecessary computer wrangling!

Here are my favourite apps that I use on a regular basis to amp up my productivity.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is an absolutely fantastic piece of software. In essence, it is a launcher for any file, folder, contact, application on your computer operated very simply and quickly using a shortcut command of your choice. It is able to search and open anything in your system instantly, but it does a lot more than that too. For any thing that you want to open, you can also decide to choose another action instead of open; for example, you can move a file, queue a song in itunes, or search the contents of an item. It is a piece of incredibly easy to use software and something that once you start using, you won’t be able to believe how longwinded doing everything actually is without it.

Site Launcher

Site Launcher is a sweeet Firefox add-on that allows you to set lots of keyboard shortcuts within Firefox that direct you straight to any website. You can set up as many as shortcuts as you want, and to any URL. Its perfect for anyone that has a bunch of websites that they visit incredibly often. With a quick tap of your keyboard shortcut, the website will launch instantly in a new tab/window. Lovely!

Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the best apps ever created, and if you haven’t started using it, you need to download it now. It is simply the best way to sync your files between as many computers as you want. The basic (free) account gets you 2gb of storage space, but the next plan up offers a hefty 50gb storage for a very reasonable price. I use Dropbox to house my ‘Projects’ files at work, which means that everything I create gets synced automatically to the cloud and to my laptop, and has saved my butt on a MASSIVE number of occasions. Dropbox saves you a ridiculous amount of time that you probably didn’t even realise you spent on hunting around for USB sticks, downloading files from various clouds online and in your emails, all by automatically syncing your files in the background. Its incredibly good. Get it!

Those are my top 3 apps for streamlining by workflow. What are yours?

- This is awesome. Zombie Designers.

- A useful article about the best practices of Conducting a Usability Review

- I love this article about how to promote a creative atmosphere in your office by the Adaptive Path guys

- 20 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Freelance – some great points and good discussion in the comments.

Thats all for this week folks, have an awesome weekend.

- Why is Checkout Abandonment on the Rise?

- This is an awesome infographic: East Meets West, looking at the differences in Eastern and Western mentalities

- The Definitive Guide to Organising Your Life and Getting Rid of Clutter

- A Beginner’s Guide to the Business Side of Freelancing

Hope you are on course to having an enjoyable and productive weekend. Catch you all on Monday!

- 36 Secrets the Productivity Gurus Won’t Tell You (But Our Heretics Will) – featuring from awesome advice from Chris Guillebeau, Dave Navarro, Jonathan Fields and others!

- Some great creative resumes to give those jobhunting some inspiration!

- The Coolest Thing I’ve Seen One Man and an Iphone Do – mustwatch!

In the first post in my series on how I keep productive, I talked through an overall view of my productivity system, including the main steps and rules that I use to keep me at my most efficient. I spoke about Omnifocus in some detail, mostly touching upon how I integrate it into my everyday routine.

In this post, I would like to delve a bit deeper into Omnifocus and talk about some of its best and most helpful features and how this helps me maintain high productivity day to day.

So, what is Omnifocus?

OmniFocus is an awesome piece of software available for your computer, iPhone and iPad. It is a system that helps you to process all your thoughts into actionable to-do items, making sure that you never forget to do anything, and allowing you to see easily what needs to be done and when. By using OmniFocus and its myriad of great features, everything that you need to get done is organised in 1 place, making sure that you can easily stay on top of all the things you need to do. Once you become familiar with Omnifocus and the more it becomes a regular part of your everyday routine, the less you worry that you have ‘forgotten to do something’ and the more you just Get Things Done!

Key Omnifocus Features

QUICK ENTRY
I don’t know about you, but I am often sitting at my desk, or on the train, or even just walking down the vegetable aisle in the supermarket, and a thought about something that I need to do or remember will enter my mind. Before Omnifocus, my usual response to this would be to think “Ah, better remember that!” and then carry on with whatever I was doing. Occasionally, if it was really important, I would try and write the thought down on whatever I could – a notepad, a spare piece of paper, as a text message on my phone, the back of my hand. However, I would mostly forget all about the thought later on – even if I had written the thought down somewhere, I would often forget that I had written it down in, or I would lose the piece of paper anyway. This started to become a serious problem and something HAD to be done. Having Omnifocus on my computer (for when I’m at home) and on my iPhone (for when I am out), means that this need never be a problem again. Entering these random thoughts into Omnifocus is quick and simple with its Quick Entry system – it puts all your entries straight into your inbox, where they stay until you are ready to process and organise them properly. Now, when I think of something I need to do/remember, all I do is take out a minute of my time to record the item in Omnifocus, and I know that it’ll be there waiting for me when I am ready to deal with it.

CONTEXTS
Another big problem that I have is focusing on one kind of task at a time. There are some tasks that are just meant to be grouped together – for example, household chores, that, if you did them all at the same time, would save you a lot of running around. To help with this, Omnifocus allows you to assign each of your to-do items with a context. For example, one of my to-do items is ‘Finish editing About page on blog’ – this item was assigned to the context of Blog, together with any other to-do items that relate to my blog. This means that all my to-do items are categorized by their context, incredibly helpful when I just want to see all my to-do items from a particular sphere of my life. This means that instead of checking out all the to-do items I have on my plate today, I can just focus on everything I need to go done on my blog by clicking on the Blog context in Omnifocus to filter out everything except the blog-related items. Simple, but genius.

SYNCHRONISATION
Being able to simply and quickly synchronise my Macs/iPhone/iPod Touch so that I have the same information at my fingertips no matter what device I am using or where I am is a must-have feature for any productivity system. With Omnifocus, you do not need to do anything to achieve synchronicity; Omnifocus does this all in the background for a really simple experience. It is really an amazing feature that I can be entering a task into my iPhone when I am on the go, and access it later at home on my iMac without even thinking about it.

ACTIONABLE NEXT STEPS
The thing that would always put me off just writing to-do lists would be that there was nothing intrinsic in a to-do list that would make me actually remember to do the item. I’d end up with list upon list of to-do items, many repeated accidentally, and I’d just sit there, forgetting about every single one of them. The luxury of entering items in Omnifocus means that you can just as easily give each task a start date and a due date. Due dates are especially important for me. I do not allow myself to leave an item in Omnifocus without a due date. Being able to see clearly when I have to complete all my tasks by has done wonders for my time management skills – now I can properly prioritise and plan my time.

NOTIFICATION BADGE
One of my favourite Omnifocus features has to be its notification badge feature; the red circle that tells you how many overdue items you have got going on at any one time. I like how its all red and in your face and shouting at you to be more productive (‘You’ve got EIGHT! overdue items, missy. And you want nap time? You cannot be SERIOUS!) Having the notification badge there constantly really does give me a kick up the ass – always being incredibly aware of all the things that you have really got to do, as opposed to my usual modus operandi of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, will be a bit of a freak-out at first, but in a good way. Oh and the satisfaction watching it slowly creep down as you cross items off your list? Amazing.

Productivity Benefits

Having this system in place has seriously and quickly upped my productivity. Now, I always know what is on my plate, how long I have to complete all my tasks, and how many new tasks I can practicably take on without swamping myself – all at the click of a couple of buttons. I can do things like go shopping, and bring up my ‘To Buy’ project on my iPhone, and I can actually remember to buy everything that I need to. Or, I’m waiting for a train, and I can bring up my ‘To Call’ project, and I spend my waiting time making my way through my list of people that I need to speak to. Having tasks like these at my fingertips cuts through all the stress and annoyance of actually having to think about what I need to be doing and helps me actually just do it.

Additionally, being able to filter my to-do lists into home/work contexts means that I am much more focused on one area of my life at a time. Now, my life feels like I have specific ‘work’ times when I can focus on getting all of my work tasks completed, and specific ‘home’ times, when I can just bring up all my home tasks and get through those. Before, without being able to easily delineate between the 2, I was spending a whole lot of time flipping between the 2, wasting my time and resources as I remembered one random task at a time.

Lessons Learned

Two big lessons that Omnifocus has taught me are:

Even when I’m not specifically looking at OmniFocus, just the fact that I am used to capturing and recording to-do items means that I am instantly more aware of everything that I’ve got to do and less likely to forget things. Additionally, just because I can capture and record my items efficiently now is all very well, but the fun does not end there. After all the organising and writing tasks in Omnifocus, the most important bit is still yet to come – actually DOING the tasks! Whilst entering it all into Omnifocus will make you feel really great and productive, you have to be able to cross the tasks off when you need to as well.

I hope this in-depth look into the features of Omnifocus and how it helps me as been helpful. For more information, check out the Omnifocus website.