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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
July 31 - August 5, 2023
Agile by itself is not an organizational system; it instead defines a general approach that is realized by multiple different specific systems. Two of the more popular systems at the moment are Scrum and Kanban,
however, is that we’re able to effectively apply our planning instinct only if we have a good grasp of all the relevant information—what tasks are already being worked on, what needs to be done, where there are bottlenecks, and so on.
Task Board Practice #1: Cards Should Be Clear and Informative
there shouldn’t be ambiguity about what efforts each card represents.
What’s important is that when a card gets moved to a column indicating that it should be actively worked on, there’s no uncertainty about who is responsible for this work.
Task Board Practice #2: When in Doubt, Start with Kanban’s Default Columns
When in doubt, start with the default setup from the Kanban methodology, which includes just three columns: to do, doing, and done. You can then elaborate this foundation as needed.
Another useful expansion of the Kanban defaults is to include a column for storing background notes and research generally relevant to a project. This hack technically breaks the convention that every card corresponds to a task, but when using digital boards it can be a useful way of keeping information close to where it might be needed. At Devesh’s marketing company, for example, a column of this type was used to capture notes from client phone calls.
Task Board Practice #3: Hold Regular Review Meetings
A foundational idea in agile methodology is that short meetings held on a regular schedule are by far the best way to review and update task boards. Agile rejects the idea that you should let these decisions unfold informally in asynchronous conversations on email or instant messenger.
they provide an important sense of accountability: if you slack off on the task you committed to during today’s meeting, you’ll have to reveal this lack of results publicly during tomorrow’s review.
they’re unambiguous: everyone is present for the conversation that decides current work assignments.
The key is real-time interaction.
Task Board Practice #4: Use Card Conversations to Replace Hive Mind Chatter
In the knowledge work organizations I observed that used digital task boards, these card conversations proved a critical part of coordinating work on specific tasks.
When you have a general email inbox through which all discussion flows, you’re forced to continually check this inbox, which then confronts you with discussions about many different projects. When you rely on card conversations, on the other hand, the only way to encounter the discussion surrounding a given project is to navigate to that project’s board. At this point, you’re encountering conversation about only this project.
Card conversations are also much more structured than hive mind chatter, as conversations are attached to specific tasks and are accompanied by all the relevant files for that task.
There’s a slower pace and peacefulness that seems to accompany this shift of discussion toward card conversations.
Benson is better known for a slim volume that he self-published back in 2011. It’s titled Personal Kanban, and it offers a seductive promise: the agile methodologies that help teams make sense of complex projects can be used to tame the complex mess of obligations in your individual professional life.
The key to this column—and a big part of the secret sauce of Kanban systems in general—is that you should maintain a strict limit on how many tasks you’re allowed to be doing at any given time. In Kanban-speak, this is called the works in progress (WIP) limit.
He convincingly argues that it’s better to do a small number of things at any one time: give them your full concentration, and only when you finish one should you replace it with something new.
task boards are not just effective for coordinating work among teams, but can be incredibly effective in making sense of your individual obligations—even if you don’t have graduate-level training in supply chain management.
Individual Task Board Practice #1: Use More Than One Board
maintain a separate board for every major role in your professional life.
Individual Task Board Practice #2: Schedule Regular Solo Review Meetings
If you want to get the most out of this tool, you need set times each week to review and update your personal board. During these solo review meetings, go over all the cards on the board, moving them between columns and updating their statuses as needed. This shouldn’t take long: five to ten minutes is usually sufficient if you’re doing this regularly.
I find once a week to work well. But they shouldn’t be skipped.
Individual Task Board Practice #3: Add a “To Discuss” Column
I added a column to my DGS task board labeled to discuss at next meeting.
A regular rhythm of efficient meetings can replace 90 percent of hive mind messaging, if you have a way to keep track of what needs to be discussed in these meetings.
Individual Task Board Practice #4: Add a “Waiting to Hear Back” Column
When you move a task to this column, note on the card who you are waiting to hear back from and what the next step will be when you do hear back.
if your team or organization produces a given type of result thirty times a year or more, and it’s possible to transform its production into an automatic process, the transformation is probably worth the effort.
The key was to reduce cognitive energy wasted on planning or decision making, allowing the student to focus simply on execution.
add set times on your calendar, which you can treat like meetings attended only by you, for the specific steps you know have to get done.
Then put in place some rules about how you execute these steps, searching for optimizations or hacks that can make each step a little easier to dispatch.
information theory
Underlying this framework is a simple but profound idea: by adding complexity to the rules we use to structure our communication, the actual amount of information required by the interactions can be reduced.
I’ll adapt this principle to workplace communication, arguing that by spending more time in advance setting up the rules by which we coordinate in the office (what I’ll call protocols), we can reduce the effort required to accomplish this coordination in the moment—allowing work to unfold much more efficiently.
a sender chooses a message from a well-known set of possible messages and transmits a sequence of zeros and ones over a channel monitored by the receiver, who then attempts to identify the message.
This was the central idea of Shannon’s information theory framework: clever protocols that take into account the structure of the information being communicated can perform much better than naïve approaches.
Whether implicit or formal, many office activities are structured by some manner of rules. In honor of Shannon, let’s call these collections of rules coordination protocols.
We might measure cost, for example, in terms of cognitive cycles, which describes the degree to which a protocol fragments your attention.
Another relevant cost when considering workplace coordination protocols is inconvenience. If a protocol induces a long delay for someone to receive critical information, or requires extra effort on the part of the sender or receiver, or leads to a missed opportunity, then this generates inconvenience.
Our instinct in the knowledge work setting is to obsess about factors like worst-case scenarios—how can we prevent bad things from ever happening?!—or to prefer the convenience of simple (but costly) protocols to more finicky (but optimized) alternatives. The information theory revolution tells us that these instincts shouldn’t be trusted. Take the time to build the protocol that has the best average cost, even if it’s not the most natural option in the moment, as the long-term performance gains can be substantial.
The Protocol Principle Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.
Meeting Scheduling Protocols
The standard protocol for setting up meetings is what I call energy-minimizing email ping-pong.
The cognitive cost of this protocol is large, as each one of these back-and-forth messages requires time spent in your inbox. To make matters worse, once a scheduling conversation is in progress, you have to check your inbox frequently while waiting for the next message to arrive, as it would be impolite to disappear for many hours in the middle of one of these quasi-synchronous back-and-forth interactions.
2017 Harvard Business Review article, dramatically titled “Stop the Meeting Madness,” the average executive now spends twenty-three hours a week in meetings.7 The sheer volume of the scheduling required to set up those meetings becomes a major driver of hyperactive inbox checking, and therefore induces a major cognitive cost.
