Personal Kanban: Mapping Success for Independent Professionals with Tonianne DeMaria

Episode Transcript
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Nigel Rawlins (00:05):
Welcome to today's episode of the
Wisepreneurs podcast.
I'm joined by Tonianne DeMaria.
Co-author of an influential bookcalled Personal Kanban.
Tonianne has developed highlyeffective methods for helping
professionals balanceproductivity with personal
development.
Her work co-authored with JimBenson has transformed how

(00:25):
individuals and teams visualizetheir tasks, enabling them to
prioritize effectively andmanage their energy to achieve
personal and business success.
In this episode, Tonianne andexplains the power of visual
systems like Personal Kanban andhow shifting from focusing on
productivity to effectivenesstransforms our work.

(00:47):
By making tasks visible,Personal Kanban allows
professionals to prioritizethose that create real value
rather than simply checkingitems off a list.
Visualizing your tasks, bringsclarity, reduces overwhelm, and
ensures that your energy isdirected towards the most
impactful and valuable work.

(01:08):
Ultimately Personal Kanban.
Isn't just about doing more.
It's about doing the right workat the right time.
And on that note about personalproductivity and being
effective, I'm going to take acouple of weeks off to
reorganize myself.
So hopefully you have found thepodcast helpful to date, and

(01:29):
I'll see you in a couple ofweeks time.
Tonianne, welcome to theWisepreneurs podcast, could you
tell us something a little bitabout yourself and where you're
from

Tonianne DeMaria (01:38):
Absolutely, first, thank you for having me,
Nigel.
This is lovely.
I am originally from New YorkCity, spent 23 years there.
Uh, I cut my teeth in thefashion industry.
Um, I was a buyer for a while,for about six years I worked in
the industry, absolutely lovedit.
I got an opportunity to live ina little medieval farming town

(02:02):
in Germany, uh, whicheffectively put an end to my
fashion career.
But I jumped at the opportunityand I loved my time there.
I did a lot of traveling when Iwas in Europe and, about after a
year, I came back to the States,wound up in Washington, DC, and
I went back to school forsomething that I realized I
loved when I was in Europe andthat was history.

(02:23):
So I went back to school tobecome an historian.
So I did my undergraduate workand my graduate work in history.
And, um, I worked as a publichistorian.
I had my own gig.
I worked with monuments,memorials, and museums.
I was very interested in publicnarrative, how official
narratives occur.
And, I was actually working on anovel, an historical novel at

(02:44):
that point, and I received amessage from a mutual friend,
Jim Benson and myself, and theysaid this gentleman is working
on a book on social media, andhe needed some help with some
history background.
And so, this was probably about16, 17 years ago.
And so you didn't have a heck ofa lot, you didn't have the spate

(03:08):
of collaboration tools that youdo now, but I had never met him
in person.
I was living in DC.
And so what we would do everymorning is we would jump, we'd
jump online on Skype, we wouldjump into a shared Google doc.
And we, he had built thisrudimentary visual tool Sticky

(03:29):
notes, and it showed all thethings that we had to do in the
book, all the things we werecurrently working on, and then
all the things we had completed.
And we would just get into theshared doc.
Now, we didn't, we had never meteach other, so I bring that up
because you consider the needfor psychological safety with

(03:49):
somebody that you're writingwith, and I just want to put a
pin in that, and I'll get backto that in a little bit.
But we would just write, and wewould write for hours and hours
and hours, and And, um, youknow, I could see him in the
doc, he could see me in the doc,we'd be redlining, you know,
we'd have a little conversation.
And then one day he said to me,Sweetheart, don't you have to
cook dinner?
And I said, I just atebreakfast.

(04:10):
He's like, it's eight o'clockwhere you're at.
And I looked at the clock and Iwas like, holy smokes.
We were in such a state of flowthat we were working for 12
hours.
And it was because I had theclarity over the work that I was
doing.
Um, I had the agency to changethings if I needed to change
them.
He wasn't pushing work onto me.

(04:32):
I was able to pull work when Ihad the capacity to process it.
Um, I was able to seecompletion, which gave me that
amazing neuro reward, bothserotonin and dopamine.
And being able to pull ticketsinto'done', like physically pull
them into'done', like having thekinesthetic feedback in them, it

(04:54):
helped create a virtuous workcycle because I was being
rewarded for completion.
Not just getting the neuralreward for starting something
new and the, and the reward thatcomes with novelty.
So it really did help createthis virtuous cycle.
And that's pretty much how JimBenson and I started with the
whole Personal Kanban movement,I guess, after all this time.

That's probably very important because that's,
that's how I came across youhaving read your book, the
Personal Kanban, Mapping Workand Navigating Life.
And yet, that was written in2011.
Now I reread it this week beforeI spoke to you, and it is, just,
I don't even know how todescribe it, just blew my mind I

(05:39):
suppose.
I thought this is such afantastic way of working.
Now I did read it earlier and Idid try it and, and I do use
Trello now, um, but I realisedthat, I don't know whether it's
me, I, I can be all over theplace and I need a system to,
to, to really start controllingbecause I, I say look I want to

(05:59):
do this thing but I never get itdone.
So, tell us a bit more aboutthat experience turned into the
book.

So, we were writing blog posts about, so let
me back up a bit.
We were working on that onebook.
It was called Instant Karma.
Ten principles of social media.
This is the ascendance of thesocial media movement at that
point.
In fact, we had met over socialmedia, over this silly little
platform called Plurk at thattime.

(06:28):
And, we're writing this book andin the interim, Jim got a call
from a gentleman in Washington,D.
C.
where I had been living and hewanted him to do this project
management job with him.
And he asked me, he said, hey,would you like to, would you
like to collaborate on this?
And I said, sure.
So, um, Jim moves to Washington,D.

(06:49):
C.
for about six months, was, itwas a six month gig.
four months in, after we weresitting on the floor of his
apartment, not having gottenpaid the$80, 000 that we were
owed, we just started writingblog posts about how he had
moved, how he had closed hisoffice in Seattle and moved to

(07:10):
Washington DC, utilizing a boardwith sticky notes as a backlog.
So he had broken this board downinto three columns.
It was like options, doing anddone.
And he gave himself a WIP limit,work in progress limit, in that
middle column on, on, on doing,for no more, no more than three
tasks.

(07:30):
And so we were writing about howhe closed his business, how he,
you know, packed up his office,how he shipped things out here,
how he started to manage theprocess out here.
And we were doing this just,just through blogs.
And people were like, where'sthe book?
Like, what do you mean, where'sthe book?
It's just, it's, and this was adirect quote from us.
It's just sticky notes on awhiteboard.

(07:52):
And then we started hearing fromthe weirdest places.
We thought that, if anybody thiswould resonate with, it would be
software developers.
Yeah, we heard from teachers,and we heard from parents, we
heard from educators, we heardfrom homeschoolers, we heard
from scout leaders, and theywere telling us how their kids
were utilizing this to learn thealphabet, to help with violin

(08:16):
practice, and they were soexcited to move those tickets,
and that it was speeding uptheir progress, and we spoke
with a social scientist, whostarted to explain why this was,
why we were hearing fromdifferent generations, different
demographics, all around theworld, all different verticals.

(08:38):
They said, the Kanban ispredicated on the story arc.
So you have birth, conflict, andresolution.
And that pattern isunderstandable in any culture.
Right?
And, and that is what made it soaccessible and so compelling.
But we likewise started to delveinto the neuropsychology, the

(08:59):
behavior economics, and thepsychology about why this works.
We know that completionliterally feels good.
You get a neural reward fromcompletion.
But we also know that you get areward from the dopamine of
completion, and that makes youwant to pull more tickets into
doing.
Prior to having a visualization,we would start multiple projects

(09:22):
at one time because we'rechasing, we were chasing the
novelty, we're chasing that feelgood.
And we know social media isbased on novelty, right?
We want it.
We, we, we go into these rabbitholes because we're constantly
seeing something new and that'sexciting for us.
So how do we build systems thatreward us?
For keeping novelty at bay.

(09:42):
And that's what that WIP limitdoes.
It makes you focus and finish.
And so, the other reward that welearned about, If I were to ask
you, Nigel, You ever use a to dolist?
Okay.
Have you ever done somethingthat is not on your to do list?
And then what do you, and thenwhat do you do?

you just feel guilty because you've still got
to do that thing that you neverget around to doing.

Have you ever written down that thing that
you've already completed on yourto do list after you've
completed it?

I do sometimes, yes, I have in the past, yeah,

Could, may I

because I've done something, I'm glad, you

Exactly, and you want the kinesthetic
feedback of crossing it out,right?
So we all do that.
We all do that.
So that, so giving us, giving usa system by which we are
rewarded for completion, um,that feels really good.

I agree, I do have all the completions because
I use Trello.
It's, and I have the doing donethere.
Often I'll, um, do the jobstraight away.
Cause what in my business,people, send me something that
needs to be done on theirwebsite.
I do it and then I just drop itinto the done.
Now I don't always go and have alook, but it's in the done if I

(11:01):
need to tell them what I'vedone.
But most of my work gets in thatdone folder.
But as I said, I've got a Trelloboard for every one of my
clients.
And, uh, So I don't always getphysically see it, so I'd have
to have a massive great board ifI was going to do it physically.

Does your clients have insight into the
status?

They just see the job gets done.
They're quite happy.

So when you don't hear anything else, that's
really interesting.
So chasing work.
So one of the, one of thebenefits, especially since
lockdown and you know, theascendance of, or I should say
the normalization of hybridteams remote work.
What happens when we're notreceiving work from somebody?
We make an assumption, they'relazy, they don't care, they're

(11:49):
deprioritizing us.
We make it about us.
It's because we have no insightinto their capacity.
So, increasingly, we've beenworking with teams since COVID
that are predominantlydistributed.
And you and I have had aconversation about this in the
past.
We have a tendency to judgeother people by the outcome of

(12:10):
their actions, where we judgeour own selves by our
intentions.
And that's not, that's not fair.
So by giving, by giving teamsinsight into each other's
capacity, their workload, whatthey're working on, because if
I'm not hearing from you, and Iknow you owe me work, if we are
sharing a board, I could look atyour board and I could see where

(12:34):
my work is on your board, butthen I could also maybe see that
you have busted your whip.
You have busted that numberthree.
There may be 10 otheremergencies that I could see on
your board that are takingpriority, understandably, that
are taking priority over mywork.
But now I, I have insight intothat.
I am no longer calling you aslacker..

(12:55):
I am no longer personalizing whyI haven't received that book.
And that visualization is givingus a mechanism to have a
conversation about maybe whyyour work is late.
And so now, we can have aconversation about you have
these 10 other tickets in there.
Is there anything that somebodyelse can take?
Take ownership over.
How do we help you manage yourcapacity?

(13:18):
And prior to visualizing ourwork, how did we ever really
know we had a capacity?
You know, our capacity wasbasically, okay, have an eight
hour day.
Well, that's not, work doesn't,work should not fit into eight
hours.
Work should flow and we are notunconstrained resources.
We need a lot of slack.
We should not be processing, youknow, as knowledge workers, we

(13:39):
should not be sitting at ourdesk for eight hours and just
producing because where's thethinking, where's the
reflection.
So that's one of the elements ofKanban that we appreciate is
that at the end of the done, weoften say done is not the end
state of our work.
So we will add another columnperhaps after done that's
retrospective.

(14:00):
So after, you know, with someteams we'll have them put
subjective well being on aticket.
How did this piece of work makeyou feel?
And they will use these highlysophisticated metrics.
A smiley face.
This piece of work made me feelreally good.
Or they'll have a face with, youknow, just like a neutral line
across for the mouth and it'sambivalent.

(14:21):
It was fine, it was just work.
Or then we'll see tickets thathave unhappy faces on it.
And having that kind of feedbackfrom a team member is really
important because now you'relearning about the work, right?
It's a metacognitive tool, butnow you're learning about why
didn't this piece of work go theway that this person needed it

(14:43):
to?
And so you could have aconversation.
And so what we do is when we seethat final column, you know,
with a couple of sticky notesfrom a couple of members of the
team that are all unhappy, wewill essentially do what they
did at Toyota.
We will pull that proverbialAndon cord.
We will stop the line and wewill have a conversation with
those team members and say, whyall these unhappy faces?

(15:05):
What was it about the work didyou not enjoy?
Did you not appreciate?
Were you up against a too rigidof a deadline.
Did you not have the resources?
Did you not have the skill?
Um, And the reason that that isimportant, of course it's
important to make sure thatpeople are not being overtaxed
and people are doing work at ahumane pace.

(15:26):
But because when I see peoplethat are unhappy about the work
that they are producing, thattells me that that is a quality
problem.
Because if they continue to workin a manner that is not
comfortable for them asknowledge workers, that is going
to impede this, that is going toimpede the knowledge workers
toolkit, which is the prefrontalcortex, where all your executive

(15:48):
functions reside, right?
So we hire these people toprioritize, to make decisions,
to problem solve, and oncethey're in a state of fear, once
they are in a state ofoverwhelm, that is the part of
the body that is going to becompromised.
So their machinery will actuallyslow down.

(16:10):
So we want to make sure that weare building visual systems,
systems, I should say.
And in this case, visual systemsthat promote humane work
environments for people.
And by humane, I mean honoringthe people that are actually
doing the work and the needs ofthose people.

So, would I be right in saying that an awful
lot of knowledge workers whohave to work with ideas and
solve problems and figure thingsout, don't have a system in
place, they just have a mass ofwork possibly coming through,
they don't have any um, work inprogress limits, would that be
the normal state of world?

And they wear, and we wear, overwork like a
badge of honor.
I'm guilty of it, too.
I mean I fall off of my personalkanban wagon all the time.
It's it is a process.
But yes, there's a lot ofcognitive reasons for that.
I mean we have a bias towardsaction.
We feel we always have to beproducing and that's a problem.

(17:07):
So I In the book, we are verycareful to make a distinction
between between productivity,efficiency, and effectiveness.
And I, I recognize some peopleview that as semantics, and we
have, you know, the book hasbeen translated into several
languages, and we're verycareful to pay attention to the
nuance.
We want to make sure that peopleare doing the right work at the

(17:30):
right time, to the right degree,and that's, that's another thing
that visual systems will helpyou do because it shows you what
your priorities are.
It shows your options.
Options are really important andlanguage is really important.
So in the book, we talk aboutthe first column would be either
backlog or'To Do'.

(17:50):
We have since changed our stanceon the words to do.
So we were, revisiting a clientin Seattle, Washington.
Now the location is important.
And so we had spent a couple ofweeks working with this team and
we were going back for somethingcalled a boardwalk where we go
back and we look at their Kanbanand we walk through it.

(18:10):
And so we're doing a boardwalkand we're asking, we're asking
the folks on the team, okay, sowe see these blue sticky notes.
What are those representing?
And they're telling us the bluesticky notes.
And we asked them to go throughthe board and she's explaining
the red sticky notes.
Those suggest that those werefires and we're tracking those
so that we don't just put themout.
We actually could have a Kaizenevent and figure out how do we

(18:33):
prevent those from happening.
The green tickets, those are allthis particular client and as
you can see they're movingrelatively unimpeded through the
value stream, no problem there.
The orange tickets, they tend toget munged up because they rely
on a team in another country andwe don't have really good
communication established withthem yet and I'm like, okay, so

(18:54):
what is this?
What is it?
And I said, what is that whiteticket?
And they're like, what whiteticket?
I said, there's that whiteticket in your backlog.
That has no writing on it.
Is that, is that a placeholder?
And she says, what white ticket?
And I said, that white ticket.
And she said, Oh, that's notwhite.
That's yellow.
It's sun bleached.
This was Seattle.

(19:14):
It was sun bleached in arguablyone of the gloomiest places in
the United States in the middleof winter.
And, because the title of thatcolumn said, To Do this, this
was an empty sticky note.
There were no words visible onthe sticky note.
But because it looked like itwas a mandate, people did not
feel they had the agency totouch it.

(19:36):
And that's when Jim and I had ahuge conversation about, well,
we have to make sure that peoplehave the agency to recognize
when something is no longercontributing value.
You know, lean talks a lot aboutthe elimination of waste at
MODIS, we focus less on theelimination of waste for the

(19:56):
sake of eliminating waste andmore on the creation of value.
So if something is no longercreating value, then that is
wasteful, but just eliminatingwaste for eliminating waste
sake, and that ticket no longerby virtue of the fact that there
was nothing written on it,people should have felt
comfortable getting rid of it,but they did not.
And so that's why we changedthat first column to options.

(20:19):
We want people to have a triggerto be intentional about the work
that they pull.
Don't pull it just because itsays To Do.

Now that's really quite interesting.
Now you, you brought up thevalue stream.
So the people who work forthemselves, the independent
professionals that I'm trying toencourage, to understand that,
well, you're calling it options,it was, was the backlog or, or
ready to pull out into doing anddone.

(20:48):
You described that as a valuestream because I guess as
consultants or trainers orsomething, you start.
And when you're finished.
You should get paid.
We should talk about that, butwe didn't finish when you
mentioned that you were sittingon the floor writing those blogs
and you didn't get the$88, 000.
Did you ever get that money?

No, no, never.
We got a book, we got a book outof it instead.
That's, that's, that, that's theway I, that's, that's the way I
justify it.
You know, it was, um, how do Iwant to explain this?
When I, when, when he came toDC, we had lunch with this

(21:31):
gentleman and again, I didn'tknow Jim very well.
And we left lunch.
And he said, how do you thinkthat went?
And I said, that was the mostuncomfortable meal of my life.
And as I tell the story,$80, 000later that we didn't get paid, I
swore.
And another consultant gave me,this is not mine, but he told

(21:53):
me, Toni, if you can't breakbread together, you can't make
bread together.
And.
Yes, I recognize that I am awalking, talking Italian
stereotype, but I maintain thatif we do the human with each
other, that's the quickest wayto build trust.
And there is nothing more humanthan sharing a meal together,

(22:15):
right?
There's a, there's a, an Italiansaying that if you have, and I'm
sure it translates into otherlanguages as well.
We have two ears, we have twoeyes, but only one mouth and the
mouth gets lonely.
So we should always share a mealtogether.
And that's, that's a big partof, that's a big part of the
consulting that we actually dowith Modus Institutes.
Like when I, I just did a valuestream mapping exercise with a

(22:37):
new team yesterday, and that's afairly cognitively demanding
task exercise because you're,you're likewise envisioning a
future state.
And that relies on a lot moreheavy, heavy lifting for your
brain.
And I tell them, you're alladults.
Get up, walk around.

(22:58):
Get some fresh air, look out awindow, eat, drink, do whatever
you can to feel like yourmachinery is fully functioning.
I think we're going to belooking at the term
professionalism a littledifferently now than we did

(23:18):
prior to when we, when we wereall co located.
I think it's also because we're,we are more hybrid now, we are
inviting people, whetherintentional or not, but into our
homes now for work.
And also I think the newgeneration is just not going to
suffer through some of thethings like we suffer through,

(23:39):
like I'm starving and it's 10o'clock in the morning but I
can't dare leave my desk until12.
15 when it's my lunch break.
Now we know you're going to getnothing out of me for those two
hours if I am starving and Ihave to write a thoughtful
document for you.
So I think that the psychologyof work, the humanization of

(24:01):
work, or appreciation for thosethings, people are finally
paying attention to those postlockdown.
And I'm, I am there for that andI'm very excited about that.
And that's very much where I'vebeen spending my time is how do
we create healthy, humane,visual systems, utilizing things
like neuroscience, behavioral,behavioral economics, the

(24:24):
psychology of work.
And we learned all about thatfrom the feedback we got from
Personal Kanban and people whowere finding value in Personal
Kanban in very strange ways.

The fabulous thing we're talking about there
is, is being real about yourwork.
And obviously if you're workingfor yourself as an independent
consultant, you have got agency.
You can get up and go and make acup of coffee, which I will be
doing after this talk.
It's early morning here.
So coming back to this valuestream, that's one thing that
really hit me because I suddenlyrealized you've got to start a

(24:59):
job and finish your job to getpaid.
So the value stream's really,really important.
So that's another thing aboutthe personal Kanban.
Helping you visualize that andget your handle on it.
And I think we were talkingbeforehand about people who may
have ADHD yes ADHD.

It was ADHD and Asperger's.

Is it normal nowadays that we're easily
distracted?
So a system like this isprobably brilliant for people,
because they can visually see,well, if I've got 55, 000 things
on that board, which I mustadmit the first time I did, I
did have, because for somestrange reason, I've signed up
for 20 different courses, andI've got 15 books I want to

(25:39):
read, and I've got 18 clientsI've got to look after, plus my
stuff, so you can getoverwhelmed.
If you're working for yourself,that value stream is what pays
for it all.
It gets lost.

Exactly.
But how, how many of your tasksare actually value add tasks?
So we have a tendency, let letme explain it like this.
When we are working from a To-Dolist, we optimize to cross off
as many things on that to dolist as possible.
Okay.

(26:14):
Because we get a reward.
So, I may come in on a Mondaymorning, come in, come into my
own office, and I'm like, Oh, Ihave, I have pay taxes.
I have, um, um, write a blogpost.
I have get back to Nigel aboutthe recording.
I have, you know, take my cat tothe vet.

(26:38):
I have get nail, makeappointment, make hair
appointment.
I know.
Making my hair and my nailappointment are going to take me
two minutes, but I get toscratch those off first.
Now, are they the most valuabletask?
Arguably, they are the leastvaluable task, but my current
system is rewarding me forquantity, not for quality of

(26:59):
tasks.
With the Kanban, you're able tosee in your options, what are
the options that are going toyield the most value.
And I'm not saying that youshould prioritize, always
prioritize.
You are, there's a lot of,there's a lot of understanding
your context.
So I'm not saying you alwayshave to pull your highest

(27:19):
priority task.
I am saying you have to payattention that you do have tasks
that are more, that, that yieldmore value.
But here's the thing, I'm biginto telling people I don't want
you to manage your time.
I want you to manage yourenergy.
So sure, it's Monday morning.
I should not be making a hairand nail appointment first
thing.
I should be doing the mostimportant thing, probably maybe

(27:42):
the most, the most difficultthing, because I am freshest in
the morning, and that's probablywhere I should do the most
cognitively demanding tasks.
However, When it comes toprioritization, we know that
prioritization is one of themost highly cognitively
demanding tasks because itenvisions a future state, which
is much more difficult.
And there's an element of riskin that, right?

(28:02):
We don't know the outcome.
Um, so I might prioritize mytasks for the day.
But we may get to like oneo'clock in the afternoon and
I've just eaten lunch and I seewhat my other big hairy
audacious, my b hag is, my bighairy audacious goal is.
I just don't have the energy forthat.

(28:22):
I know probably by two o'clockwhen I have my coffee that will
kick in but at one o'clock, Ijust don't have it.
That's when I pull, make thehair appointment task.
You don't always have to pullthe highest priority task if
your capacity, your cognitivecapacity, your emotional
capacity.
You know, I'm not gonna pull themost important task at 445 on a
Friday afternoon.

(28:43):
I'm gonna pull the task I couldprobably complete.
So, having different sized tasksin your backlog, having levels
of difficulty, levels ofenjoyment, those are, those are
other ways that I will set up mysystem so that it's giving me
what I need.
It's meeting me where I am inthe day, my emotional state, my

(29:08):
digestive state, what tasks aregood for right after work, right
after lunch.
And like my writing tasks.
So my business partner, he getsup super early in the morning
and we'll just write.
I can't do that.
I have to get a lot ofadministration, administrative
stuff.
When I write, I joke that I keepSinatra hours.
So give me between 10 and 2, 10a.

(29:30):
m., 10 p.
m.
and 2, 2 in the morning, my bestwriting because the rest of the
country is asleep.
I'm not answering emails.
My Slack isn't going off.
Nobody needs anything from mebetween 10 and 2 in the morning.
The Kanban has showed me, basedupon when I'm pulling tasks, how
many tasks I'm pulling, it haslikewise shown me when I'm most

(29:51):
effective for doingadministrative tasks, when I'm
most effective doing creativework, when I'm most effective
just doing writing.
So it really does function as ametacognitive tool.
It teaches you a lot about theway that you work.
And we're learning this.
I mentioned at the top of thecall that we thought we would be
hearing from software developersand instead we heard from

(30:12):
teachers and educators and kids.
One of the most profound storiesthat I share, we were on a
client site and, um, duringlunch, a woman who was a mother
came up to me and explained thather son was a slacker.

(30:32):
Her son was about 10 years old.
They had moved, it was just herand her son, they had moved from
the Ukraine to Canada.
The client was in Canada.
And he just didn't want to getany of his work done.
And do you think, do you thinkthat Kanban, And so what I did
was, I said, let's set up hisboard.
So I said, on each sticky note,tell me what course he had to

(30:53):
do, how many times a week.
And as we set up his backlog forjust one week, she looked at me
and she started to cry.
And I looked at her and I didn'tsay a word.
There was, there were not enoughhours in the day for us to move
these tickets, and that did notinclude things like play,

(31:14):
because he was a child.
And she started to cry and shesaid, I don't believe I'm doing
this to my son.
I get choked up thinking aboutit.
And it was because she didn'tsee what his capacity looked
like.
None of us really know what ourcapacity is, right?
I mean, Hofstadter's PlanningFallacy, you know, we will
underestimate how long it takesus to do any, any, any task.

(31:38):
Even if we've done that taskbefore, we make a lot of
assumptions about our work.
Cognitive biases kick in.
And so we don't have a good readon what can we actually
accomplish in a day and whythat's important Is because so
many of us get to the end of ourdays And we haven't stopped and
then we look at our prioritiesfor the day and we haven't
touched one.

(31:58):
And that doesn't mean that wewere not effective during the
day It's just that we don't havea mechanism to visualize the
value that we did create andmaybe if we are visualizing the
value we created beyond thethings that we planned would
become better at planningbecause we would know throughout
the course of every day, I tendto only get two things planned

(32:21):
that I wanted to get donebecause there's all this other
emergent work, which iscompletely acceptable.
It doesn't necessarily have tobe fires, but in knowledge work,
we know so much of our work isinventive.
And at the end of the day,especially with people who are
now working from home, we haveto, we have to build in these
rewards for people so thatthey're not working 24 hours and

(32:44):
so that they're not, they're notexisting.
Ultimately, any visual system Icreate for people at work, it's
not for them at work.
I want to create it for them asa human so that they can have a
more fulfilling life at the endof the

I think that's incredibly important.
So knowing that your day hasn'tbeen wasted and that's an awful
thing to say, wasted, because,you know, if I go out for a
walk, I don't have any pets, butoften, often meet dogs with
their owners when I go walking,and it's a wonderful feeling.
So that, that's part of beinghuman.
So let's go back to it.
So one of the problems aboutbeing in an office, I guess, and

(33:22):
working from home, even ifyou're working remotely, or
you've decided to work foryourself, is you do have to
organize yourself.
And, and the Kanban board, Isone way of doing it.
So could you go through aprocess that maybe somebody
who's going to work forthemselves, and you work for
yourself so you have to organizeyourself as well.

(33:44):
And running a business, thereare several things you have to
do.
You've actually got to, well,you've got to get client work,
so you've got to do somemarketing.
You've, uh, you know, if you doget client work, you've got to
do their work, so you get paid.
Then you've got all your admins,right?
And then you've got to have alife.
So how would you suggest tosomebody who's suddenly got to

(34:05):
the point and said, well, look,I've got to have a better
system.
Where would they start?

One of the benefits of a visual system is
that you are able to surfacepatterns and through those
patterns you learn about the waythat you work.
So for me, I use color, I useshape, I use avatar.

(34:29):
So the way that I would dosomething like that is I would
color code marketing I wouldcolor code business development,
social media.
We have an online school calledModus Institute.
I would color code facultyresponsibilities.
I would color code coursecreation.
So that I understood, based uponthe tickets that I pull into

(34:51):
DONE, in their color, where aremy efforts focusing?
That's one way I would do it.
Size as well, you know, smallertasks, smaller ticket.
Maybe I can, now I'm verycareful not to, I know in
software development, T shirtsizing, estimating, I'm very

(35:13):
careful with not reallyestimating the amount of time a
task is going to take me becauseanybody who has ever said, Oh, I
will be at the meeting in fiveminutes, I just need to go get
this printed out.
Knows that there is no suchthing as a just five minute
task, especially when somethingas innocuous as a printer is
involved.
Something is going to happen.

(35:34):
So I would probably start withthat.
I would likewise start with thesimplest value stream.
So we spoke about value stream.
All a value stream is, are thesteps you take to create value.
And you tend to work backwardswhen you're creating a value
stream.
So what is, what is your done?
What is your definition of done?
And so for people starting out,I would start out with the most

(35:58):
simple value stream, which isyour options.
You're doing a pen and thendone.
And then what the pen is, is forwork that maybe you've done some
work on it.
Maybe you had to make anappointment, you know, you
schedule dentist appointment.
Well, you call the dentist, youleft them a message, but now
you're waiting back.
If you were to leave that ticketin doing, then you're creating a

(36:20):
bottleneck.
You can't pull another ticket inthere.
So what I would do is I wouldmove that into the pen.
So simplest value streamoptions, DOING, PEN and DONE.
Where a real value stream comesinto play is when, let's say you
have a project, and you utilizeat the top of your Kanban the
steps for that particularproject.
So it could be your salesfunnel, it could be, you know,

(36:44):
getting out a blog post, itcould be creating a class.
And so that's what you would putat the top and you would have
the different stages in that.
So right now, Jim Benson and Iare in the process of, um, in a
week or so, we're going to beteaching a class on Obeya.
When Obeya is, it's Japanese forlarge room or great room.
And it's a visualization thatteams could use.

(37:05):
It's an actual room where allthe information they need for
their team, their project,whatever resides.
And we're going to be teaching aclass in that.
In order to ensure that we'renot having meetings, status
meetings, we never have statusmeetings cause the Kanban always
tells me who's working on what,where they're at.
So instead of status meetings,we utilize that time for working
sessions where we'll actuallywork together.

(37:28):
So what Jim and I would do is wecreate a value stream for class.
What does done look like on thatclass?
All right, is done, when it'sdelivered to the student, or is
done when the student is happywith it, or is done when
students evangelize that classand tell other people.
So the first thing you have toagree on is what is your
definition of done.

(37:49):
For now, I would say it's justrelease the class.
Well, what is the step rightbefore that?
Well, maybe some marketing.
Step right before that.
Okay, maybe working with my techfolk to get the class up onto
our LMS.
What is the step before that?
Well, it's to Let my faculty doa dry run of the class to make
sure they're happy with it.
What is the step before thatit's me completing the class so

(38:11):
we would work backwards One ofthe reasons we work backwards is

we want to work from (38:14):
what is the value that the client will
be pulling from it or the enduser will be?
We also do it backwards becauseit's very difficult to lie
backwards I like telling peopleif you've got teenagers at home
and you want to know where theholes in their story are, have
them tell you their storybackwards.
You will spot the lie.
And so it's very difficult forit's it's when we do value

(38:37):
stream mapping exercises withpeople or we help them value
stream for their kanban and wehave them work backwards it also
trips them up and makes themrealize that they're ingesting
so many assumptions into the waythat they're working.
And why that's important forteams is because if you and I
are on the same team creatingthe same product, but we're

(39:01):
working in two different ways.
There's probably going to beduplication of effort.
There's going to beinconsistencies in quality.
There's going to be, we're goingto be working over each other.
There's, we're going to belosing money.
We're going to be losing time.
So this is another way ofaligning the way that you are
working and I am working.
And if we bring a third personin now, everybody's working in

(39:23):
the same way.
One of the exercises we givepeople is, um, you're inviting
us over for dinner.
And you're making us ahamburger.
Give us a value stream for that.
And what's fascinating is howmany people are like, okay,
first I go out and I kill thecow.
And then somebody's like, okay,I pulled the meat from the
freezer.

(39:44):
Another person is like, I'mgoing to go to some fast food
restaurant, and we asked them,we're like, well, what is your
end point?
And some people the end point isjust, you've made the sandwich.
Another people the end point is,we're going to have coffee and
dessert afterwards.
For another person the end pointis going to be that, Jim and
Tony can't wait to come back tomy house because I served them.
And so we show them through thatexercise, how we all have very

(40:07):
different assumptions about notjust the steps that we are all
taking in a project, but whatdoes the end state look like?
So until we visualize, until wehave an exercise where all of us
are agreeing on what this endstate is, and I think it was
Covey who talked about green andclean, I haven't read that book
in years, but he talks abouttelling his son, I need you to

(40:29):
go clean the garden.
Son cleans the garden, comes in,father looks outside the window
and sees nothing has changed.
Is the son a slacker?
No, the son cleans it to theextent that he thought it needed
to be cleaned.
So instead, he said, okay, thisis, this is my standard.
I want it green.
I don't want any leaves on thegrass.

(40:51):
I don't want there to be anytoys around or anything.
And I want it clean.
I want, you know, I want thetrash picked up.
Articulating or agreeing upon,having a team agree upon, what
is our definition of done?
It avoids so many quality issuesat the end of the day.

So where would they start with that?
Cause I'm thinking, do you needa great big whiteboard or you
can have a little whiteboard?
How do you manage thatphysically?

For an individual or for a

for an individual

Okay, you know, for an individual, there's
so many great tools out there.
Currently, I'm using a toolcalled Kanban Zone, which I love
because there's so many dropdowns that you can put
individual tasks, you can putimages in it.
Um, so I'm using, I'm usingKanban Zone currently.
You can do it on a Miro board.
I don't know how many people areusing Miro or Mural, creating a,

(41:44):
utilizing a whiteboard.
You could use it just, you know,I have, in as much as I can, I
utilize online tools.
I will then break down my taskseven further and they're on my
wall over here.
And it's just, or I'll have themon my desk.
You know, I'll pull like threetickets off my wall, slap them
on the left hand of my desk.
Hopefully they'll wind up on theright hand of my desk at the end

(42:05):
of the day.
And so what I will do is I willhave people say, Take everything
out of your head, all the thingsyou need to do.
One thing per post it note, putthem in a backlog.
Put them in your options, putthem in a backlog, whatever you
want to call it.
That's your first column.
Your middle column is going tobe your doing.
You're going to give that a WIPlimit.
We like to use three as a WIPlimit.

(42:27):
It's not a rule.
There's only two rules topersonal Kanban.
It's visualize all your work andlimit your work in progress.
What you limit to, limited to,is ultimately up to you.
We feel three is a comfortablenumber.
And then your final column, thenyou have that PEN and then you
have DONE.
And then I will look at mybacklog and I say, okay, what
are the three most importanttasks I should do today?

(42:48):
And I will pull those intodoing, and I will start working
on them.
And then if I, I'm dependentupon somebody else or have to
collaborate with somebody elseand I'm waiting on I'll put that
in the PEN and then as I work onsomething, I will pull it into
DONE, pull something else intoDOING, do a little work, pull it
into DONE.

(43:09):
A tool that has always helped meextend the value of my personal
Kanban.
Francesco Cirillo came up withthis years ago.
It's called the Pomodorotechnique and Pomodoro relates
to the tomato timer.
And what he does when you can'tget enough focus, when
everything is going on, I willturn.

(43:30):
My Slack status, I will put alittle tomato next to my name,
which everybody in myorganization knows Toni's gonna
do a pomodoro, don't bother for25 minutes.
I will turn the kitchen timer onfor 25 minutes, you could do it
on your, on your desktop.
And for 25 minutes I will donothing but that task.
I will not get up and get a cupof coffee.
I will not flip through tabs onmy desktop.

(43:51):
And it is amazing what just 25minutes of intense focus can do
for your effectiveness.
And so I try to keep my ticketsTo about 25 minutes, if I can,
simply because I like to know atthe end of the day, I have a lot
of completed tickets.
And when people ask me, how bigshould my ticket be?

(44:15):
I often joke that for thelongest time, Jim and I had
write book in our, on our board,which is just write book.
Well, you're not seeing anyaction on that ticket, so it's
going to be the mostdemotivating ticket ever.
So I tell people, break downyour tickets, your tasks, such
that you see tickets in yourdone column at the end of every

(44:36):
day.
Gamify it.
Do what you need to beeffective, and to see that
you're being effective.
Because that will create thatvirtuous cycle.

That's the thing I was thinking about is, if
you've got a fairly big projectwith multiple parts to it,
you're saying it needs to bebroken down.
So your, um, your options boardcould be full of tickets.
So how do you manage a projectin Kanban?

So you talk about big, that's really
interesting.
So, um, they've done studiesthat has showed that there is a
crossover in the brain betweenthe part of the brain that
processes physical pain and thepart of the brain that processes
social pain.
So what are social pain?
So Dr.
David Rock of theNeuroleadership Institute came
up with this concept called theSCARF Method, and SCARF is an

(45:23):
acronym for Status, Certainty,Autonomy, Relatedness, and
Fairness.
SCARF is arguably an alternativeto Maslow.
These are elements that triggereither risk or reward in humans.
So when we are building visualor human systems, we should be
aware of these things because asI mentioned to you earlier,

(45:45):
they've discovered that there isa crossover in the brain that
processes physical pain andsocial pain.
So if I were to ask a group ofpeople, tell me about a time,
where you broke a leg or youbroke an appendage or you know,
you were sick.
People would probably tell me,but if I were to say, now tell
me a time where you had yourheart ripped out.
I would pay attention to thepeople I'm asking and you could

(46:06):
see viscerally, it is a verydifferent experience.
We process that social pain inthe same part of our brain as we
do physical.
Because of that, we know thatthat will likewise, impede our
prefrontal cortex, our brainCEO.
So we want to be very carefulnot to trigger those risks.
So what are those risks?

(46:28):
Overwhelm.
Fear.
So when you have a big projectand you have a sticky note that
says, you know, do taxes orwrite a book.
It's going to engage yourbrain's fight or flight
mechanism.
It's too big.
It's too risky.
There's too many unknownvariables.
And the brain does not likerisk.

(46:48):
The brain optimizes for twothings to minimize risk,
maximize reward.
So what is it going to do?
It might shut down.
It's going to fight or flight.
So what we want to do with ourtickets, with big jobs is we
want to bypass the amygdala.
We want to make it soimperceptible, so it's just
another thing that we have todo.
This is essentially the elementyou've heard the word Kaizen.

(47:11):
Japanese for small incrementalimprovements.
Why are incremental improvementsfar more sustainable than
wholesale transformations?
Well, because they're not asrisky and they probably cost
less.
And because if they fail, youcan look at it as an experiment.
So we want to keep things,tasks, small, manageable chunks.

(47:33):
So the bigger the project, justbreak it down into chunks
because you do want to be ableto get the kinesthetic and
neural feedback, a neural rewardthat you're achieving completion
towards your goal.
So again, you have a big, a bigproject.
Let's say it's a book.
Currently I am working with thetranslator for personal Kanban
in Italian.

(47:54):
If I were to have a sticky notethat just says, You know,
Italian translation, that's justtoo big.
So I needed to break that down.
So the way that I'm bringing itdown is by chapter.
So each ticket would be achapter.
And so I'm working on a chapter,but then I would break the
chapter down into either 10pages each or five pages each so

(48:14):
that I am not just working onone chapter a day so that I do
see that I've got three ticketsin doing and that likewise helps
me, with novelty.
The brain loves novelty.
It's not necessarily alwaysgreat for us though, I mean,
we're in the middle of writingsomething and then we get an
alert on our phone.
That's novelty and novelty canbe risk.

(48:39):
So the reason that the brainpays attention for novelty is
because when we were living, onon the plains, and we heard a
rustle in a bush.
That's novelty.
That's something out of theordinary.
That could very well be meaningto kill us.
So we had to pay attention fornovelty.

(49:00):
We're always scanning ourenvironment for risks.
Now we scan our environment forrisks that are not going to kill
us, but that novelty Is thatalert on our phone?
And so I was teaching a classone day, and it was on something
pretty, pretty intense, prettycerebral.
And there were about five peopleat this table, and this

(49:20):
gentleman's phone kept going.
He kept getting alerts, socialmedia alerts, and they just were
nonstop.
And you could see it was clearlyupsetting everybody else at the
table.
And he said, Oh, it's okay.
I'll just handle it.
He takes his phone and he turnsit over.
And I, um, I said to him, well,what does that do?
And he's like, Oh, I, you know,it won't distract us anymore.
And I, I looked at him, I said,is that really not distracting

(49:41):
you?
Are you really not wondering whois trying to contact you?
What is so important on yourphone?
And he looked at me, he's like,well, yeah, but I could just run
out and do it.
I said, but, between now andwhen you run out to do it,
that's going to be hangingaround in your short term
memory, and that is going to becompromising your focus, your
attention, your ability tolearn, your ability to remember.

(50:05):
So keeping novelty at bay isvery useful when it comes to us
being productive and effective.
And again, that WIP limit helpsus with that seeing how close we
are to the endpoint helps uswith that.

Now, isn't that interesting?
Because, in a manufacturing job,or a job where you had to use
your hands, it was prettyobvious what you had to do.
But in knowledge work, it's not.
And I don't know if we've everbeen taught to actually do
knowledge work.

That's the problem So so many people are
enamored with the idea of TPSToyota Production System.
Arguably what put Toyota on themap as this fledgling loom
company prior to World War two,right?
And they see that itrevolutionized, and they want to
superimpose it on theirmarketing firm.

(50:56):
And that, it makes me, it makesme sad that I believe the reason
people are doing that is becausethey are not given the time to
think about the work they'redoing at work.
They just have to do.
So of course it makes sense thatthey're going to, this worked
for Toyota, perfect.
We're going to do it here.

(51:17):
You're not a fledglingautomobile manufacturer in the
post war era.
You're just not, and you'renever going to be.
And you're likewise not Spotify,and you're likewise not Valve,
and you're likewise not allthese other amazing
organizations that have taken amethodology.
And utilized it to good effect.
So being intentional about theway that you are adapting.

(51:39):
We did not take Kanban fromToyota and apply it to knowledge
work without tweaking it.
I mean, I understand the needfor recipes.
I understand the need forreligions.
It gives people a sense ofsecurity and safety.
So the thing about knowledgework versus manufacturing,
People on the, on the factoryfloor probably understood how

(52:01):
the machinery worked.
Do we understand how themachinery of a knowledge worker
works?
So I mentioned, I mentionedSCARF, Dr.
David Rock's model that standsfor Status Certainty Autonomy
Relatedness and Fairness.
This is one of my favoritemodels ever.
If we're building visual systemsfor people.

(52:21):
We need to make sure thatcognitively they're getting
everything that they need.
So status, the S in Scarf.
We need to make sure that theyare not threatened by either
their lack of status, bysomebody having more status,
more power.
So how do we do that?
Well, we can do that with Kanbanby they're able to pull work

(52:43):
when they have capacity.
They do not, they are notbeholden to somebody with a
director or, you know, a highertitle, pushing work onto them.
There is enough respect thatthey have agreed on that is
ingested into the system thatpeople, no matter who they are
in the organization, only pullwork when they have capacity for

(53:05):
it.
There is no such thing as apeon.
Everybody's a human.
All right, so that's status.
Certainty.
You have certainty when you'relooking at the Kanban because
you know everything that youhave to do at a glance.
There are no surprises in that.
Now, sure, things are go,emergent work is going to
surface, but at least you knowyou can stop one thing.
You don't have to accomplisheverything at once that we know

(53:26):
that that's, that's a priority.
Autonomy.
Again, you have agency andautonomy over pulling your own
tickets and nobody pushingthings on you, not acknowledging
that you have a capacity.
Relatedness is huge.
You now see that you are notalone.
You now see where you fit intothe overall creation of that end

(53:46):
product.
That feels good.
And then fairness.
You won't have, Nigel, you willnot have, Okay, we know that
we're going to give Nigel a WIPlimit of 1 and we're going to
give Tony a WIP limit of 6.
That just doesn't happen.
So you have that, you have thatbalancing.
So there are a lot of elementsof SCARF that visual, visual
systems just by virtue of beingvisual help you with.

(54:10):
Um, the fact that we processvisual information so much
quicker than we do, writteninformation right there is going
to help with cognitive capacity.
It's going to free up somecognitive capacity.
The fact that we have theability to show you instead of
telling you I'm overwhelmed.
Prior to visualizing ourworkload, if you came into my

(54:32):
office and said to me, I don'tsee you working, why are you not
working?
Then I look like I'm a slacker.
But if you see my board and yousee what I'm working on right
now, you could clearly see I'mthinking about what I'm doing.
It likewise gives me amechanism.
If you are, if you are mymanager and you walk into my
office and say, Hey, I have thisfive minute task, you know, you

(54:54):
come at me with status.
So right there and then I'mprobably gonna not even question
it because you, you come with,with some political authority,
with some clout.
But now that I have my board, Ican look at my things that are
already agreed upon that we'veprioritized.
I can look at my board and say,this is great.
I love this ticket.
Should this supersede theseother tickets?

(55:17):
And invariably that's aconversation that you can now
have.
So it's not that Tony doesn'twant to do the work.
Now it's a negotiation betweenme and leadership and they could
say, Oh no, you know, this couldwait or yeah, this is way more
important than that.
But in the absence of thevisualization, I was stopping
everything regardless of whetheror not this was really

(55:40):
important.
So yeah, understanding the needsof the humans doing the work is
so important, especially now.
You know, we're, we're confinedto these 32 inch monitors now.
You know, we don't know who'smarried, we don't know people's
dogs names, we don't know, youknow, what somebody did over the
weekends anymore.

(56:00):
So giving people the opportunityto not make assumptions that
you're them and I'm in us and,you know, that we are working on
different projects when we'rejust working on different parts
of the project.
We have a program in our onlineschool called LAVM, Lean Agile
Visual Management.
And we offer it as either acohort or individually at your

(56:24):
own pace.
And so currently we're puttingthrough a cohort of about 10
people all around the world.
These people have never met.
And we put up an Obeya.
So basically a, a room for allof them in, in Miro, that all
the information they need tocollaborate, to communicate, all
the information about what thedefinition of done for each of

(56:46):
the sections of this programlooks like.
And the first visualization Iput up in there was getting to
know you.
It's just a silly visualizationlike name, where you work, what
are you reading, what do youenjoy, what are your hobbies,
what do you hope to get out ofthis class.
And people filled this in.
And then I started noticinglittle sticky notes.

(57:06):
Hey, you ride horses?
I ride horses too.
Or, oh, I love that book.
If you've loved that book, youshould do this.
This was all before we ever gottogether for our first meeting.
These people were all differentages.
All different demographics from,I think, four continents.
You have to, and now they arerequired to self organize as a

(57:27):
team to get through this course.
Do the exercises together, do,and there's so many different
time zones.
These people make me want tocry.
The very first time we all gottogether, Like, hey, Ahmed, it's
so nice to meet you.
They knew each other.
People were having conversationsand I didn't even need to be

(57:48):
there.
They came up with a name fortheir team.
They became an us, and it wasthe visualization that kicked it
off.
And now I have these beautifulartifacts from, I think we're on
our, we're on our fourth cohortof this Lean Agile Visual
Management.
And I get a note from,Genevieve, a couple of months

(58:10):
ago, who was heading over toSpain, and was going to go meet
two of the people from her, theywere in the first cohort, they
actually became friends.
I have other people from aprevious cohort, who are now
teaching together.
And it was the visualizationthat did that, because we didn't
have the benefit of sitting downand literally breaking bread
together.
So we had to figure out a way tofast track psychological safety,

(58:32):
and the visualization we founddid that.

This sounds so fantastic, all of it.
So we're probably coming to theend now, how are people going to
learn more about this?
You have an organization thathelps train that and you run
camps as well

Yes, so our company, our consulting company
is called Modus Cooperandi for areason, because we believe that
everything is the result in oneform or another of
collaboration.
Jim, my business partners and cofounders latest book is called
The Collaboration Equation.
Individuals and teams createvalue, and so that is very much

(59:06):
our MODIS, if you will.
The extension of that is MODISInstitute, which is our online
school, and we also have anonline community, so anybody can
join.
It's free to join, and we haveconversations about exactly what
we're talking about today, um,human ways to work.
For the individual, for thesolopreneur, the entrepreneur,

(59:27):
um, for people starting out.
We have, we have a fairly largecommunity there of people who
are white knuckling.
They don't want to leave workbecause they don't know what's
going to come next, but they'rewell beyond retirement age, but
they just, they just, they getas jazzed about this as we do.
And we talk about things likevisualization of work, tools,

(59:50):
methodologies, but more so wetalk a lot about the humanity
behind why these things work.
So the class that we have comingup, the class about OBEA, how to
build an OBEA, there's a largecomponent about the psychology
of work.
That's very much a part of MODISInstitute as well.
And so they can absolutely comethere.
They can reach out to me.
I can, I'm always happy to haveconversations with folks, giving

(01:00:13):
them options for where to start.
But I think at the end of theday, the easiest thing to do is
take everything out of yourhead, put one thing per post it
note, slap it on your wall, giveyourself, three things at any
given time.
Pull things into doing, andstart working like that.

(01:00:33):
And I tell people, don't even doit at work.
Do it for home.
You know, do it for, if you haveto, if you have a project at
home.
If you have to, if you have a todo list for your household, you
know, just maintaining yourhousehold, I do that.
I have, you know, groceryshopping, clean, clean kitchen,
you know, empty fridge, throwout trash.
And it's just those littlethings during the course of the

(01:00:55):
day that I'm able to pull intodone.
It doesn't become onerousanymore.
But, we tend to fetishize thecomplex.
This could not be a simplersystem.
As is evidenced by the fact thatwe have three year olds.
So, one of my favorite stories,and I'll end with this, is we

(01:01:16):
had heard from a single mom ofthree little ones who had read
the book and she said it was anightmare getting her little
ones out of the house in themorning.
And so what she did is shecreated a Kanban on the wall and
it was low.
It was really low on the wall.
So the little ones could reachit.
She used like masking tape or,and just like sticky notes and,
and she would put, Um, make bedfor each of them and, uh, brush

(01:01:40):
teeth and make sure backpack,you know, was ready for school.
Make sure your lunch was packed.
And for the littlest one whocouldn't read, she had images.
So there was an image of atoothbrush.
It was an image of a bed.
And she said, When the littlestone was having difficulty doing
stuff and the other kids werefinished, they would swarm and
help the littlest one, becausenow it wasn't, they were

(01:02:03):
competing with each other, butthey were also competing with
themselves, but now they werethis group.
And she said they were showingup at the front door 10 minutes
before school every morning,because they were so proud that
they had pulled all theirtickets It became a game.
became a game of work.
So, you know, that's, it's assimple as it gets.
Give yourself a system thatrewards you for the work that

(01:02:27):
you're hiding and acknowledgethat, as, as I, I recently saw
this on a needle point, we arenot human doings, we are human
beings.
So if there's anything I wantPersonal Kanban to help people
do better.
It's that you enjoy your lifeand you actually live.

(01:02:47):
Because if there's anything thepast couple of years have taught
us, is that life is very, veryprecious.
And so if you're notaccomplishing the things you
want, like date night, put it onthe list.
If you want to join a bookgroup, put it on your kanban.
If you want to start a habit,put it on your kanban.

(01:03:07):
You want to start meditating,put three meditation tickets on
your board.
At the end of the week, ifyou've pulled one into done,
congratulations, you nowmeditate.
Use the board to be kinder toyourself and to start living.
And that's, that's the bestadvice I could give anybody.
Be kind to yourself.

Nigel Rawlins (01:03:27):
I think that's brilliant.
I will put all these links inthe show notes.
So Tonianne, thank you very muchfor being my guest.
It's been a wonderfulconversation.
It's really a reinforced,Personal Kanban for me, and I do
recommend people read the book.
Again, I'll, I'll put all thedetails in the show notes.
So thank you for being my guest.

Tonianne DeMaria (01:03:47):
Thank you so much.
I really enjoyed this.
Appreciate you.

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Personal Kanban: Mapping Success for Independent Professionals with Tonianne DeMaria

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