In previous posts, I shared the Personal Kanban approach for getting the most out of your constraint – the 86,400 seconds you are limited to each day – and also some free web based approaches for automating your Kanban board.  This post share’s my approach to integrating  Kanban into my planning, calendar, and follow-up systems.

Almost immediately after creating my Kanban, I realized there was a potential for duplication and even conflict with my Outlook calendar and tasks   After all, managing tasks in two places is a missed deadline waiting to happen. The same is true whether you’re using Google Calendar, Palm Desktop or some other App.

To minimize conflicts, I primarily use calendar items to remind me about events that occur at a specific times and dates such as meetings, phone conferences, flights, Bears’ games., etc.  I also use my calendar for blocking out time, such as my morning workout, and recurring reminders like checking email at 9:00 and 4:00 or my planning for the next day.

I try not to put calendar items on my Kanban.  However, if a calendar item requires significant preparation, I will add the prep to my Kanban.  For instance, if I’m giving a talk, I create a card called “Prep for XYZ Talk” which would have the following subtasks:

• Interview sample of attendees to understand needs
• Develop new or modify previous slides
• Practice presentation
• Prepare note-taking handouts
• Pack everything needed for presentation
• Give presentation
• Follow-up with attendees that request more info

Since speaking is a regular activity, I can recycle the card when I’m done. Previously, I recommended using a Recurring column to store these tasks, but since then I’ve  found it easier to just put them in the Backlog and set a new deadline for the next occurrence.

For items that repeat regularly but take up a chunk of time, I block time on my calendar, but also create a Kanban card to help me stay focused on getting that task done.  An example would be blocking a few hours every Monday for writing and posting that week’s blog.

Sometimes there are activities that need to start on a specific day but not a specific time such as circling back with a potential client that has asked me to call back next month.  For these types of activities, I create a card and place it in  Backlog including the due date in the description (e.g. Call Bob (9/21) and setting the deadline for the Friday prior.  That way it will turn red and remind me to move it to an active column when I do my Friday planning for the next week.  Agile Zen also allows you to record notes or attach files that you may need for the task.

Another helpful feature of the software is the blocked function.  Let’s say that I have a client proposal to develop and I’ve done so, but need to get another colleagues input.  I can put the task as blocked with a note saying that its waiting for input from Dave. After sending the finished proposal I can either create a new task called proposal follow-up or just mark the task blocked again with a note saying its waiting for client feedback.  If this is a regular part of your work flow, Benson suggests a waiting pen for these tasks.

So these are really just intended to be some ideas to get you started, but like the ads say, your mileage may vary.   One of the reasons they call it Personal Kanban is because we all work differently, and you’re going to want to modify it to work for you instead of the other way around.  If you find other approaches that work for you, please share them as comments so others can try them out.

Thanks to everyone for their great feedback on the series so far.  Special thanks to Jim Benson who, after reading my first post, was kind enough to reach out and share some of the initial chapters of his forthcoming book Mapping Work – Navigating Life .  I look forward to providing a review of the entire book here after it comes out next month.

In Part I, you saw how Personal Kanban can be applied to managing your personal constraint – the 10,080 minutes you have available each and every week. This second installment will share some free web based tools so you can automate your Kanban and take it with you.

I’ve tried the free web-based versions of two tools, Kanbanery and Agile Zen.  Agile Zen is free as a single user tool, but also available for multi-user environments.  Kanbanery is free while in beta.  Both are intuitive and easy to use, but I recently moved over to Agile Zen because it has a deadline function and print out of the tasks. Kanbanery is in beta and will probably add those functions over time.

Agile Zen comes configured  with five columns – Backlog, Ready, Working, Complete,  and Archive.  Backlog and Archive are not part of the main board, so they sit at the edges and can be expanded as needed.   Here’s my suggestion for reconfiguring it. Just click on the process tab to edit the column headings.  There you can rename Backlog to Idea Bucket and add a new Backlog column on the main board. I also suggest modifying the board to delete ready and add columns for This week, Today and Recurring.  The setup looks like this:

Then all you have to do is click on Add on the Zen menu bar to begin creating tasks (Agile Zen calls them stories). You name the task, select a color to match your categories (Mine are Marketing, Selling, Client Work, Writing, Infrastructure,  Learning, Household, and Personal) and then click to either drop it in the Idea Bucket or hang it on the board.  If you hang it on the board it always starts in the first column – the one I named Backlog.

To return to your board, Simply click Board , and then you can begin managing your tasks using drag and drop to move them through the process.  Here’s what mine looks like below.  You can click on it to see a bigger version:

As a web application, any changes you make take effect immediately, and you can also access it anyplace you have  internet access.  Plus, you can also print out your board and take it with you wherever you go.

Next week in the final installation, I’ll share some approaches for integrating Personal Kanban with your Outlook or other calendar systems.

Each of has the same 1,440 minutes every day, 7 days a week, but what we accomplish with them varies dramatically. For most of us, time is our constraint, and how we choose to exploit the time available will drive the results we see.

My last post on singletasking gave some tips for managing your constrained time more effectively. In these  next two posts,  I’ll share a system that I’ve personally found very helpful for maintaining the focus necessary to get the really important stuff done.

Over the years, I’ve tried numerous different time management systems from do-it-yourself approaches like Outlook reminders and Excel spreadsheets to commercial systems like Franklin Covey Planner and Getting Things Done (GTD). Each had its useful elements, but none of them ever really worked the way I needed.

Then a few months ago, I ran across Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban approach for managing your personal workload and have been hooked ever since. For those of you unfamiliar with Kanban, it’s a Lean tool for visualizing your workflow and minimizing your work in process. In its simplest incarnation, a Kanban board has columns for each stage of workflow and then tasks are are moved from column to column as work progresses.

In Personal Kanban, post it notes are written for each task. You color code them for different categories. Mine are Marketing, Selling, Client Work, Writing, Infrastructure,  Learning, Household, and Personal. Yours will depend on how you earn a living and the way you organize yourself, but notice that the same system helps you manage both work related and personal tasks which for many of us are a blurry line anyway.

Benson suggests a very simple three column board—Backlog, Doing, Done that looks something like this:

The Backlog column is tasks that you are committed to doing, the Doing column is whatever you are working on right now (e.g. Write this week’s blog post), and Done is hopefully a column packed with everything you’ve completed.

You then keep an options list (idea bucket) of all the things you’d like to do. Then once you’ve committed to doing one of them, you move it onto Backlog sometime before you need to start it in order to finish on time. After finishing one task, you pull the next most important task out of Backlog and into Doing.

Benson likes to limit Doing to five items. Personally, I keep mine at one to limit my tendency to switchtask. For me that’s part of what works so well with this approach. It’s a visual reminder of the one thing I’m committed to finish right now.

After using Personal Kanban for a while, I’ve found it more convenient to add some columns. After Backlog, I added This Week and Today. My Personal Kanban board then becomes both a weekly planning tool to decide what should have priority for the week as well as a daily tool for deciding what I need to work on today to accomplish everything I’ve committed to finish. If you’re familiar with GTD, you’ll recognize how important this step is. I’m also considering adding Month and Quarter columns.

Up until now, we’ve been talking about a big flip chart size sheet of paper with post it notes being moved across it. Very visual and, at least for me, just the kind of in your face approach I need to stay focused. However, it’s not exactly handy if you spend lots of time out of your office.

In my next posts , I’ll show you how you can take your Kanban with you using free web based tools and how I integrate Personal Kanban with my Outlook calendar.

One final caveat about managing your time – experts in TOC will correctly point out that if everyone inside a company maximizes their own personal productivity or efficiency, the overall results will suffer. For this reason, it’s important to realize that your Personal Kanban may need to subordinate your work time to the efficient use of the company constraint.

As a simple example, consider a doctor’s office where the system constraint is the doctor’s time. If the office receptionist maximizes their own efficiency by limiting interruptions, that means less efficient use of the doctor’s time and less sales throughput. In short cycle time situations like this, an office Kanban would be more useful in maximizing the flow of patients through the practice. Of course, our receptionist could still use their own Personal Kanban to manage the remaining 75% of their time.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post asking “Is multitasking getting us anywhere?“  It created quite a bit of activity in my LinkedIn groups and one kind reader reminded me about the  The 4 hour work week.

I had read Ferris’ book a few years ago and while his internet entrepreneur shtick is  definitely not my cup of tea, he still makes some useful suggestions for ridding ourselves of the scourge of multitasking. Ferris reminds us that 20% of our efforts deliver 80% of our results.  That’s what Richard Koch, author of  The 80/20 Principle and others have called the Critical Few.

So singletasking is about focusing our efforts on those critical few things that deliver and increase results. Of course, you also have to figure out what area is going to give you those results. And no surprise, that’s where I suggest the theory of constraints (TOC) should play s a big part. That’s because improvements in how you operate your systems constraint (your bottleneck) are going to deliver almost 100% of the increase in your results.

Without specifically referencing TOC, Ferris also recommends outsourcing as many tasks as you can.  While the economics he shares don’t always appply, this is still great advice for any business person because no matter your job, you are the system constraint in being able to get more productive work out of your efforts – however you define productive whether that’s more income or more time with family.

By eliminating or outsourcing low value tasks, you save your constrained time for working on the things that you are strongest at – what Richard Koch calls your 80/20 spike.

For work that can’t be outsourced, Ferris also suggests strategies for staying focused.  One of those is limiting the number of times you check email to specific times of day. That’s something I recommend for almost everyone unless it’s your job to answer emails – and for most of us that’s just not the case even though we often let email pose as real work.

Next time, I’ll share some of the tools I use to manage my own time and prevent myself from multitasking – and believe me, in my business, that’s not easy.  In the meantime, you can check out a quick video from Tim Ferris below:

Several posts back, I talked about three steps to jolt your innovation.  One of the suggestions was getting into the customer’s environment to find unmet customer needs and unmet market needs.  This post continues to build on the customer value lens approach by outlining six of the essential elements to conducting customer visits in B2B markets – although many of these concepts apply in B2C as well.

1. Focus on the problems – the unmet customer needs
Customer visits must be focused on finding unmet market needs. This includes both finding problems that you might later be able to solve and also identifying the value that can be created by doing so. Think Mary Leakey the archaeologist there to unearth clues—maybe even a little Sherlock Holmes and Stanley Livingston. Remember, you’re there to study the indigenous peoples, not change them – at least not yet.

2. Find the pain
It’s best if you can observe people at work. What part of the customer’s operation is inconvenient, time consuming, costly, inefficient, dangerous, dirty, messy, frustrating, infuriating, embarrassing, or otherwise holding them back from achieving their goals or desires? That pain is where you need to dig, but don’t feel bad. You’re there to find the places where you’ll eventually be able to help.

3. Dig below the surface
You have to get below the surface of the problem. Continue asking why until you get to the root cause and then if necessary go deeper to find the part of the problem where you might be able to eventually develop a profitable solution.

4. Be prepared to cover the economics
B2B product success depends on helping customers sell more, spend less, or free up working capital. Your interview guide needs to include these questions and the team needs to include someone capable of discussing them at a detailed level with clients.

5. Keep information flowing
The detailed kinds of information mentioned above only comes out if the customer feels you need the information in order to decide if you can develop a win-win solution. Develop being the operative word. Any premature solution discussion shuts down the information flow because they suspect you’re trying to price the solution. So if possible, I recommend not involving your sales force for this activity as it can be quite a challenge for them not to jump to solutions. It’s not impossible, but not recommended without specialized training.

6. Never enter the jungle unprepared
Cross-functional teams, consisting of marketing, technical, manufacturing, and sometimes other functions must prepare before making any visits. They need to develop an interview guide and determine what role each will play in the interview (lead, scribe, observer). You can read a previous article to learn more on managing the different roles in customer visits.

The author originally posted this article on Blogging Innovation

Chief Executive Magazine recently took leaders to task in an article that hits one of the problems of multitasking on the head. What message does multitasking send to those around us?

Multitasking, whether as an organization or individually kills focus and reduces productivity and innovation and among other areas the development of new products.  The real underlying issue is that we delude ourselves into thinking that activity is what’s important when it’s results that really count. That and showing those around us that we’re interested in what they have to say at least as much as catching up on emails!

In Simplifying Innovation, I refer to the electronic distractions as DADS or Device Deficit Attention Syndrome.  That’s when people don’t think there’s anything wrong with stopping in mid-conversation to pick up their mobile phone to see who was calling or texting them. The implicit message being that if it was someone more important, they might take the call. Even worse, during meetings they constantly check email on their laptops or phones, and even pause to send replies–the false economy of multitasking, like heroin to an activity junkie.

One simple solution is a box where these devices are surrendered and kept during meetings. I know, it might seem too much like a teacher taking away toys, but it achieves two important things:

1. It eliminates the distraction.
2. It makes the meeting leader aware that the meeting is taking people away from something else they’d just as soon be doing so they must work to keep the meeting focused, relevant, and productive.

Here’s another article on multitasking that you might find interesting

It’s rare to see Apple make a mistake, and while the press is having a field day with the  current iPhone 4 issues, it’s unlikely this will be any more than a tiny little bump in the road for Mr. Jobs and company.

But for the rest of us, the most interesting part could be identifying what mistakes Apple made and what their experience can teach us about managing innovation and the development of new products.

As a recent WSJ article details, there’s still some he-said she-said around what really happened, but it’s clear that the problem could have been avoided. Here are a few of the mistakes they made:

Mistake #1 – Falling in love with our own solutions

Also referred to as drinking your own Kool-aid.  Reportedly, Mr. Jobs liked the new design so much that the message around reception problems was either not received or was ignored as much as a year earlier.

Mistake #2 – Not getting into the customers’ environment

Evidently, for secrecy reasons, Apple kept the iPhone 4 out of the hands of its network partners (AT&T etc.) until late in the development cycle. They kept it secret until pretty late in the process, but at what cost.

Mistake #3 – Taking bad risks

If you never fail, you’re not taking enough risks.  True on the surface, but in Apple’s case this was a problem that could have been tested early on and in that way avoided with some design changes vs. the after the fact solution they are now offering.  Why take the risks that you can predict will fail?  Here’s another article on avoiding predictable risks.

Mistake #4 – That’s up to you

Let us know how you view it and what other lessons you think we can learn from Apple’s experience.

Looking for a way to accelerate your new product results and get more from your new product processes? Here are three steps you can take to caffeinate your innovation.

1.    Narrow your focus

While concentrating too hard on one thing can cause you to mistake the forest for the trees, that’s hardly the problems in companies today. No, people are normally spread to thin – dealing with anywhere between five and ten projects at the same time.

The so-called multi-tasking required to survive this situation puts people in a constant state of distraction (beta brainwave state) as they switch back and forth between tasks. It also means that they spend a higher percentage (greater than 70% by some estimates) of their time on the non-value added activity of juggling tasks.

Instead, determine the number of projects you can do with people assigned to only one project at a time. You’ll find people more effective and more engaged because a much higher percentage of their time is spent in a productive flow or focused performance state (alpha brain wave) instead of managing multiple priorities.

With this approach, you’ll run far fewer projects at any given time, but get them done much faster. While this may seem counter-intuitive, you’ll also get far more projects done in the same period of time. You can learn more about the benefits of this pipelining approach in this article.

2.    Get out of your environment and into theirs

Yes, an aesthetically pleasing work environment, one with wide-open spaces, natural light, and great views can be inspiring. But that’s missing the point when it comes to innovation.

The environment that is the source of innovation is out in the marketplace with customers, economic-buyers and end-users. That’s where the unmet needs are. Where you can observe customers in action and understand all the things in their work or home lives that are complex, inconvenient, dirty, boring or costly – the unmet need that you can develop products or services to address.

3.    Never stop asking why

And while you are out in the customer’s environment, the single most powerful question you can ask is why. Because asking why leads you to the real problem – the source of their real needs.

When interviewing customers and digging into their problems, the first answers you get might be superficial—often highlighting what they want rather than what they need and will buy. But continue to ask why, five or more times, until you get to the actionable root cause and you’ll have the basis for a solution or at least a direction for developing one. You can read more about the “5 Why’s” in this article.

This article originally appeared at Blogging Innovation.

You may have the greatest new product or service in the world, but if you can’t get buyers’ attention and communicate in their language, you will struggle with accelerating new product development.

Here are four levels that your marketing and sales must follow to effectively capture customers’ attention and lead them through the buying process.

1. Strong Benefit
Research shows that multiple benefits weaken the effectiveness of a benefit statement. A single strong benefit is always more compelling.

What is the primary way your product or service benefits the customer? What problem does it solve? Does it helps them sell more, free up working capital, or reduce operating expenses?

In consumer markets, convenience and stress reduction are hot benefits.  What can you do to free up time for your customers?

2. Unique Advantages
Why is your product or service able to deliver those benefits better than the competitive alternatives? How is it both different and better than everything else out there?

If your product creates a new category, you must also explain how your product relates to the old way of doing things and what”s different that makes it better. For instance, a smartphone is like a cellphone but more convenient because it integrates your calendar, contact manager and email.

3. Features
What creates the advantages of your product? Features drill down into the advantages showing how they are achieved. Customers buy benefits, but features help them understand how you achieve an advantage in delivering the benefits.

4. Functions
How do users interact with the features of your product?  What will it be like to do their job using your product.

You can tell them, but it’s always better to show them.  This is the role of demonstrations, pilots, or test drives. Social media is becoming increasingly important here as more and more users share their experience.

How all 4 of these relate to the buyer’s problems

It’s critical that you articulate any of these 4 levels in a way that resonates with what the buyer is paid to manage and the problems they experience in doing it. So if you are selling at the executive level, that means problem/benefit statements must be related to corporate measures like net profit, earnings and shareholder value.  Start talking to them about reducing cost per unit and you’ve lost their interest.

On the other hand, middle managers’ pain is focused on the line items in their budgets.  Start talking about increase in earnings per share and you won’t connect with them either.  It’s all about tailoring the message to the audience.

As a rule of thumb, the higher your product is sold in the organization, the less deeply your marketing should go into features and functions. That doesn’t mean the information shouldn’t be communicated. You just shouldn’t lead with it.

Simple Bottom Line

For maximum impact, build your marketing message around customer benefits and then offer the ability to drill down layer by layer into advantages, then features, and finally functions.  Also, speak in the buyers language meaning that benefits might be at an executive or middle management level, but features and functions should be directed towards the users and other functional experts that will interact with your product.

In his new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains , Nicholas Carr, outlines several ways that the always on, 24/7 nature of the internet is a double-edged sword – providing us with unprecedented access to information while at the same time slashing our attention span, re-wiring our brains, and slowing intellectual development.

A diet of social media isn’t exactly conducive to the contemplative life lived by the great thinkers of previous ages.  In fact, it’s closer to that of cavemen hunting for their next meal while trying to avoid being eaten by another predator.

On balance, I don’t actually believe that the internet hurts innovation, but there are downsides.  Carr alludes to one that I wrote about in Simplifying Innovation- something I call Device Attention Deficit Syndrome (DADS).  We use the phone, email, texting, and even  Facebook and Twitter as substitutes for real interpersonal communication and we allow the devices that deliver them to become a constant distraction when we are actually communicating with each other.

How many of you have had someone check their crack-berry messages or take  a cell phone call during a conversation?  How about typing away, doing email during a meeting. And how many of you may have even done so yourself? I know I have.  What kind of message did that send the people I was meeting with?  Not exactly the way to build bridges is it?

From an innovation perspective, these constant interruptions have an insidious effect of productivity.  They prevent our brains from getting to  that productive alpha state, where the creative juices are flowing, where problems are more-easily solved, and where we are at our intellectual peak.  And when we do get the 10 – 20 minute of focus necessary to reach that state, the next interruption sends us right back to beta again.

Several solutions for avoiding DADS:

• When you need to concentrate, turn off your cellphone and send your office phone to voicemail.
• Limit checking voice-mail and email to 2 or 3 scheduled times per day.
• Ban laptops, cellphones, smartphones, iPads, and any other electronic communications devices from meetings.
• Forget the open door policy unless it’s an emergency.  For those of you that don’t have doors buy a few traffic cones or get some of that yellow emergency scene tape to let folks know you’re trying to concentrate.

What do you think?  Share your strategies for overcoming electronic distraction.