Do you feel like you start a lot of things and never finish them?
Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Does this situation sound familiar to you?
This weekend I was working in my garden. I started by weeding my vegetable garden, when my son called me to revise his Dutch Course. After 10 minutes of revision, I remembered that I had to go to the hardware store before it closed. When I came back, I started mowing the lawn before before it rained. No time to finish (it started to rain), and I promised my daughter to play with her…
As a result, at 1pm, I was exhausted, my vegetable garden was not weeded, my son only half understood his Dutch, the lawn was not mowed, my daughter was frustrated because I only played 15 minutes with her and I did not even started to prepare the lunch…
How to get out of this?
In agility, there is a method called KANBAN that addresses this kind of problem.
With KANBAN, I will first visualize my workflow in the form of a table, because we can only act effectively on what we see. I’ll include my tasks, as well as any priorities.
My aim is to finish what I start. I don’t want to end up with 10 things half done. So, and this is where it gets interesting, I’m going to LIMIT MY WORK IN PROGRESS.
I should point out that I’m a man, over 40 by the way, so I can only do one thing at a time. So my limit is 1. In Kanban we call this Limit WIP.
This means that I won’t start anything new until my current task is finished. So I start Dutch with my son and tell my daughter that as soon as it is finished, we play together, as promised.
The end result is that at 1pm, my son is ready, my daughter is happy (me too because I had a really good time with her) and the meal is underway. It might be only three things, but they are finished and I can focus on the rest of my program for the afternoon.
Article originally published in French on https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vous-avez-le-sentiment-de-commencer-pleins-choses-et-ne-de-harlez/
