A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (from the NYT bestselling productivity expert)

by Cal Newport

Scrum and Kanban,

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.

Finally, there should be an easy method to associate relevant information with each card. When using digital board tools such as Flow or Trello, you can attach files and long text descriptions to the virtual cards. This is immensely useful, as it organizes all the information relevant to the task in one place.

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.

Hold Regular Review Meetings As argued earlier, a key property for any knowledge work production process is an effective system for deciding who is working on what. In the context of task boards, these decisions are reflected by the cards on the board and to whom they’re assigned. But how should these decisions be made? 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. When using task boards for your own knowledge work production processes, you should abide by this same rule.

A standard format for these meetings is to have each person briefly summarize what they’re working on, what they need from other people to make progress for the rest of the day, and what happened with the...

It’s during these review meetings that new tasks can be identified and new people assigned to them. The meetings also help remove bottlenecks caused by one person waiting to hear from another person, and they provide an important sense of accountability: if you slack off on the task you committed to during today’s me...

There’s a slower pace and peacefulness that seems to accompany this shift of discussion toward card conversations. To avoid the need to wrangle an always-filling inbox is a benefit that shouldn’t be underestimated.

In Kanban-speak, this is called the works in progress (WIP) limit. In the video, Benson sets this limit to three.

A YouTube search reveals countless homemade videos from fans explaining their own takes on Benson’s approach to personal productivity.

Individual Task Board Practice #1: Use More Than One Board

For AMM preparation

Many proponents of the Personal Kanban approach deploy a single board to make sense of all the tasks in their professional life. I recommend something slightly different: maintain a separate board for every major role in your professional life. At the moment, I play three largely distinct roles as a professor at my university: researcher, teacher, and DGS. I deploy a different task board for each of these roles, so when, for example, I’m thinking about teaching, I’m not also confronted with unrelated tasks about research or the graduate program. This reduces network switching and therefore increases the speed with which I’m able to resolve issues.

Try with RAP and the AMM

(say, any project that might take more than a couple of weeks of effort).

Individual Task Board Practice #2: Schedule Regular Solo Review Meetings

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. And these sessions don’t have to be too frequent: I find once a week to work well. But they shouldn’t be skipped.

Put your solo review meetings on your calendar and protect them like any other meeting or appointment.

Individual Task Board Practice #3: Add a “To Discuss” Column

This hack might seem straightforward, but its impact on my work life has been profoundly positive. Imagine, for example, that a stack of five cards builds up under the to discuss column for my department chair during a given week. In a twenty-to-thirty-minute meeting, the two of us can come up with a reasonable plan for each of these cards.

Consider, for example, the task of putting together a quarterly budget for your team. This is probably something that can be reduced to a series of unambiguous steps that are executed the same way and in the same order each quarter, making the task a good candidate for automation.

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.

Acuity, ScheduleOnce, Calendly, and, of course, x.ai (to name a few examples among many) make it easy for other people to set up meetings with you during times when you’re available.

Days of energy-minimizing email ping-pong have now been reduced to a single message and some clicking on a scheduling website. If the meeting involves multiple people, then avoiding email ping-pong becomes even more urgent, as the number of messages required for scheduling often increases exponentially with the number of attendees. In these cases, it’s worth using a group polling service like Doodle.

There’s really no reason why anyone should still have to waste cognitive cycles in dragged-out scheduling conversations.