One of my clients, a physician in an academic medical center, has been struggling with her personal kanban. She avoided all the common pitfalls—she kept finished tasks in her Done column, limited her WIP, and used Super Sticky Post-It notes to ensure that she didn’t lose any work to evening janitorial services. But she wasn’t making a whole lot of progress, which left her was frustrated with the kanban—it wasn’t helping her manage her work.
A closer look at the Post-Its revealed the problem: giant tasks (projects, really) that had no chance of getting finished in anything less than a few months—in her case, “Work on R-01 Grant,” “Write New Oncology Paper,” “New Patient Intake Protocol,” among others. If you were to scale a note to the size of the task written on it, these should have been about the size of a Times Square billboard, not a 3x3 Post-It.
When you put projects of that size on a single Post-It, you’re setting yourself up for failure. It gets stale. It stays in the “Doing” column for so long that it turns into wallpaper, and eventually you stop seeing it. Alternatively, you ping-pong between “Doing” and “Backlog” every time you start working on the task, abandon it for other priorities, and then pick it up again a few weeks later.
Either way, it’s demoralizing and demotivating. As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer discovered in their book, The Progress Principle,
Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.
When you can march tasks through the kanban columns, you experience the progress that’s essential for motivation. But when you have a single, giant Post-It note sitting in your Doing column for longer than it takes to read Moby Dick, well, you’ve got a problem.
You need to size your kanban tasks so that you have a fighting chance to keep your important work moving forward. At the same time, you have to make them significant enough to avoid being caught in a quagmire of meaningless trivialities. Sure, you do need to return a phone call from your boss and an email from a customer, but that’s probably not the best use of your personal kanban. Try sizing the tasks to be larger than 30 minutes but smaller than a week, and see what happens.