Personal Kanban Quotes

“When you master the art of the retrospective, you are honing in on kaizen.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“In this context, “focus” doesn’t mean locking our office door, selecting a task to process, and tuning out the world around us until that task is complete. That kind of self-exile is a productivity (fear) reaction—not a kaizen (growth) reaction—to a stressful workload.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“To-do lists: the last bastion for the organizationally damned. They’re the embodiment of evil. They possess us and torment us, controlling what we do, highlighting what we haven’t. They make us feel inadequate, and dismiss our achievements as if they were waste. These insomnia-producing, check-boxing Beelzebubs have intimidated us for too long.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“If you want to know your past, look into your present conditions. If you want to know your future, look into your present actions. ~ Buddhist Saying”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Japanese industrialist and founder of Toyota Industries Sakichi Toyoda understood that problems often have nested causes. He wanted people to get past their preconceptions and “with a blank mind” get to the heart of the issue.7 He didn’t ask Why? once, or even twice. Repeat ‘why’ five times to every matter, he instructed, until you arrive at something with real context.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Regular retrospectives enable us to identify and act on opportunities for positive change. Whether we hold them on our own, with our families, or with our team at work, retrospectives are an essential tool for reflection.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Real-time flexiblity beats rigid up-front planning.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“cannot make informed decisions or create a quality product without first understanding why we are doing what we are doing. Lack of context creates waste,”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“In the beginning, it’s advisable to focus on the flow of your work and the idea that your work actually has a “shape.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“     You can observe a lot by just watching. ~ Yogi Berra”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Much of this waste reduction comes from Lean’s goal of a “kaizen” culture. Kaizen is a state of continuous improvement where people naturally look for ways to improve poorly performing practices.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“     May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far. ~ Irish Saying”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Professional life. Personal life. Social life. They are often treated as separate entities, but our lives and insights cannot be segregated. Work / life balance is a false dichotomy; compartmentalization is not sustainable. It forces life’s professional, personal, and social elements to vie for attention, bringing with them seemingly competing expectations and goals. When we compartmentalize our lives, these elements become pathological, pushing us from one task to the next in an effort to satisfy their own jealous needs.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Lots of productivity tools recommend breaking work into small chunks. Smaller tasks are easier to comprehend and complete. When you take on smaller tasks, you’ve invested less time in the product, reducing the cost of change and failure. On its own, controlling task size serves as a poor man’s WIP limit. Simply making tasks smaller isn’t enough; small, unmanaged tasks can accumulate and overwhelm. Reducing task size is only truly effective when coupled with limiting WIP: tasks are completed sooner, results become measurable, and existential overhead is kept to a minimum. Therefore, we should focus on limiting WIP and completing tasks first, and make task size reduction a secondary concern.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions
~ Dalai Lama”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Revisiting the freeway analogy, consider what makes the roadway flow. Is it the cars, or the space between the cars? If there were no cars, there would be nothing to flow. If there was no space, the cars could not move. It’s that balance between cars and open space that gives us flowing traffic. That open space is called “slack.” We need slack in our workflow, we need space to adjust. Without slack, we will overload. Too many notes, critiqued an overwhelmed emperor.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Personal Kanban depicts a wealth of information. It shows you: What you want. What you do. How you do it. Who you do it with. What you complete. What you leave unfinished. How quickly you do things. What causes your bottlenecks. When and why you procrastinate. When and why certain activities make you anxious. What you can promise. What you can say No to. Mapping our work allows us to navigate our life. It makes obvious not only the course we need to take to reach our destination, but also the terrain—revealing the amenities at our disposal and the roadblocks along the way. It plots our work’s context (the people, the places, the conditions, the effort, the trade-offs), helping us to envision our real options.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Let me do and I understand. ~Confucius The”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“I”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Capacity: How much stuff will fit Throughput: How much stuff will flow They are not synonymous. All”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“As you watch work flow through your value stream, you’ll see where work moves smoothly, where work is slowing down, or where work comes to a standstill. Two”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Personal Kanban is an information radiator for your work.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“We shouldn’t view our work as a series of isolated events. Static. Unique. Only vaguely related. The fact is, those presumably isolated events combine to build the story of our lives. A”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“If there are two takeaways from this book, we hope they are: Work unseen is work uncontrolled and We can’t (and shouldn’t!) do more work than we can handle.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Reliance on heroes undermines daily operations.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“As Socrates shows us, so many of the assumptions we operate under are intellectual waste. They cause us to react to symptoms, blame prematurely, and stop before we ever reach a solution.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Celebrate victories. Learn from defeats.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“A-list artistry is not born of technical prowess, but of clarity of purpose.1”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Planning should occur with minimal waste; it shouldn’t become overhead.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“Educated guesswork is no substitute for thoughtful observation.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life