Disclaimer: This post, like most of my posts, was written over the course of two weeks, in spurts between planned and prioritized tasks. Normally, disjointed timelines are edited out so you have a smoother read. I’m departing from that norm and keeping the disjointed time to help better illustrate the overall point of integrating serendipity into a controlled, planned work habit. For the curious, the post itself was developed from Nov 17th through Nov 28th in micro-spurts (as I explain below).

In this post, I explained that I recently started using a Kanban for organizing my personal life, not just work stuff.

What I wasn’t able to discuss in that post from fear of making too winding of a narrative is the nature of experimentation and it’s role (or “capacity”) in a somewhat rigid system like a Kanban.

When I wrote that post, it may not be clear that the Kanban is itself an experiment that I’m running to see how it affects productivity. After a month of using the Kanban to balance all my tasks (not just work), I’m happy with the decision to use it. The single complaint I have is that in the process of switching to the Kanban, I lost my “goals for November” list. I’m blaming the Kanban because it fundamentally lacks a capacity for understanding ‘goals’ in relation to ‘tasks.’ I was able to work out a workaround for December (yes, I am a control freak and plan for December in November.)

Also in that post, I wasn’t able to talk about how despite the rigidity of the Kanban and a process-oriented, organized life, there is still room for serendipitous moments. After organizing our lives, we will put the most important tasks on top, but that does not mean those are the only tasks we can do.

As proof of that, I’m writing this now. The post won’t likely see the light of the Internet for a couple of weeks because I tend to write far in advance of my publishing cycles but I should be putting the groceries away. That is, I went shopping and decided upon walking in the house that I had to drop everything (literally) and write a few ideas down.

Rather than worrying about thawing frozen fruit, I’m taking a quick moment to capture my thinking. I won’t develop this post now to full completion immediately but there will be a sufficient skeleton structure in place such that when I do plan on publishing it, most of the work will be done. Nonetheless, I’m working outside the normal confines of my plans. This segue is just a quick micro-distraction long enough to capture my idea—and that’s it.

There’s no real way to capture these moments in a Kanban (or any other project management process). And there’s no reason to even try. My stance is that we should simply embrace the distraction, follow it to a sufficient stopping point (that we can come back to easily) and then continue with the regularly planned schedule.

In many ways, this is procrastination. I know I have a really important task to do—in the grocery instance (Nov 17th-ish), it’s the fear of having to clean up melted fruit juice; as of Nov 28th, it’s a matter of shipping some Dragon’s Eggs to pre-order customers. But I’m putting “it” off to do something more interesting to me.

While I’m not going to argue that we should all procrastinate because (in my experience) procrastination is a really slippery slope, I do argue that procrastination doesn’t have to mean “not doing anything relevant or important.” Or that procrastination only means, “playing video games or Magic the Gathering instead of writing marketing plans or debugging code.”

Sometimes we can be equally (if not more) productive by using another lower priority task to procrastinate on a higher priority task.

In this instance, I’m procrastinating on putting the groceries away! (As of Nov 28th, I’m procrastinating on going to the post office because it’s raining like mad outside and the thought of the post office during the holiday rush on a rainy day sounds really crappy.) By using other tasks to procrastinate on other needs-to-be-done, you’re constantly getting things done. Doing this pseudo-procrastination will help you be more productive in a single day than many people you know. (Seriously. People waste a lot of time and the universe knows I’ve been guilty it.)

There are some people like Brian Tracy who will argue that you should only focus on “A-Tasks,” the tasks that will directly impact your finical or career success. While I do agree that roughly 90% of your time should be spent on high-value tasks, it doesn’t mean that we should allow this structure to rule our lives. Sometimes, we just have to do what we feel like doing.

It helps if those “right now” things feed into larger goals or create a cascading affect with other life priorities, but I wouldn’t argue that’s a necessity. (Coming back a week later) For example, though I’m not working on Nomicly right now (arguably the most important task I can do), I am working on something that is important to me (belching my ego to the rest of the world). Doing this task feeds into a sense of accomplishment, powering me up for a bigger, more difficult task (programing, refining a pitch deck, marketing plans, prep’ing for meetings, etc).

The point is that when we’re excited about a subject or task, we’ll often complete it really fast. We get into the zone. We have momentum going for us. We’re enjoying ourselves—and how cool is to actually enjoy ourselves while doing something important and meaningful?

The Kanban can help organize the microtasks that feed into our macro-goals, but it doesn’t allow for creative procrastination. So, while I’m a firm believer in doing the important tasks that make meaningful changes to our lives (and organizing ourselves so that we can identify those meaningful tasks), I also strongly believe that we need to allow ourselves to explore spontaneous hunches and desires without worry that we’re working outside the plan. Sometimes, I suppose, we just need a little break from the rigidity to excel in other areas of our lives.

Okay, procrastination done. Time to put the groceries away…(or in the case of today, go to the post office and ship Dragon’s Eggs…)

Over the last 10 years, I’ve become increasingly into processes. This is really surprising to me because I don’t like hierarchies or rules. Despite my instinctual resistance for rigid structures, I have found good process can save tons of time. I’ve seen this in businesses but I’ve experienced the impact on my own life too.

It sounds super boring but the affects of planning on your (or your organization’s) output is not to be marginalized as ‘nice to have.’ From my perspective, many small companies and people fail to meet their potential simply because they have a crummy process in place. Typically at these organizations (or homes), everything is led by instinct, one mini-crisis or spur of the moment interest at a time.

My wife is also fairly structured extremely organized. For example, she typically has a week’s worth of meals prepared in advance of the work week, so we won’t have to order take out because we’re both too tired to cook a healthy meal at the end of the day. Despite my thinking I was the uptight planner in the house, she’s taken my ideas to a new level: she created a Kanban board for our own personal projects and tasks.

I have no objection to this type of organization because just recently I was frustrated that I am not keeping track of *all* the tasks I’m responsible for: From my perspective, it’s really difficult to create a meaningful prioritized plan if that plan doesn’t account for (nearly) everything that needs to be done.¹ The personal Kanban is a good place to start because it gives me a place where I can dump my ideas/tasks/responsibilities as they occur to me, organize them in priority and then track progress on each. (Spreadsheets just don’t do it for me. Crufty, nasty spreadsheets…)

What prompted me to write about this is not just humor in using a project management technique developed to manage the Toyota manufacturing process for personal tasks, including the mundane “make dentist appointment”.

The interesting insight I’ve had is that I still write down my weekly and daily lists because there’s something special about connecting my hand to the output. Typing up digital tasks and moving digital cards around on a Kanban just isn’t as satisfying as writing something down and then later that day (or week) putting a fat checkmark next to it. When I move the task from ‘in progress’ to ‘done,’ I get no endorphin kick. And it’s the endorphin kick that I want because a) it feels good and b) it propels me toward the next task. I really do think people underestimate the value of momentum and personal satisfaction available from tracking progress over time. Probably because it’s pretty boring.

Aside: Life-hacking like using a personal Kanban can also feel really rigid. I plan to share a little bit on how to help make it a little less rigid feeling in future posts. Suffice it to say that I did not plan on writing this post today but I’m doing it anyway and my plan totally allows for it. I’d argue that my organization has be far enough in front of my work that I have time to spare. It also helps that 1/2 of this post was written well over a week ago.

Back on Point: I’ve read that people who contribute to abstract projects such as software often experience less satisfaction from their work than people who make physical goods. Moreover, it’s also been found that for this reason artists and craftsmen tend to receive more satisfaction from work than office workers.

This insight into work satisfaction is interesting because it indicates an alienation we’re experiencing by transferring our ideas to a screen, rather than a (semi-)permanent object like a piece of paper. The concept of “done” becomes too abstracted from reality.

Take software as a very simple example: it’s almost never “done”. Despite the valliant attempts of thousands of engineers, Facebook (not to pick on FB) has plenty of areas that can be improved upon. If we use Lean principles, then the product will never be done. If the project cannot be considered “done,” then how are people suppose to receive satisfaction from what they worked on?

From personal experience, I believe there is a difference between digital work and physical work. I’ve found that lists I create on paper tend to have a better completion rate than my lists on screens–and for that reason, my lists will typically start on paper even if I have to transfer them to a digital screen as needed for group planning. In a sense, I attempt to circumvent the alienating digital impact by writing lists and spending time writing in a physical journal. When I complete a task (typically something on a computer, not trying to kid anyone here), I have a physical representation of that task that I’m able to mark as complete. The Kanban we’re using is just a place to capture, organize and prioritize tasks.

Are there other ways you know of to connect our digital output with something physical?

Anyone else use business or project management principles to manage their personal lives?

¹ Luckily, most things can be completely ignored because they have no real bearing on life but capturing the idea allows you to expunge it from your mental space freeing up capacity for more important problems.

Have you ever see something up real close and thought you saw one thing and then saw the same something from further away and saw something completely different?

Technical traders are likely pretty familiar with this effect because they will typically flip between different time periods and units of measurement to test the technical readings.

What may appear to be a price floor on a 3 or 6 month chart could start looking a lot like a ceiling on a 3 or 5 year chart. And on the 1-week chart, it may look like an “obvious breakout.”

Understanding the relationship of time/distance to the perspective we have is important–not just for technical trading.

There are ways of seeing how the change in perspective can lead to a number of new insights and understandings.

Take coral as an example.

Here is a species that when alone appears fairly unimpressive. Other than being pretty, it’s some weird mutant half-rock, half-plant thingy. (That’s my purely scientific description of the species. If I were naming it, I would have labeled it Petra Planta)

An example of tree coral. Looks neat!

But when you step back, you can see that coral is responsible for the creation of this:

And it’s visible from space!

Our change in perspective needn’t be so abstract though. We can also do this with our own lives by simply finding our house in Google Maps/Earth and simply zooming in and out.

My point is that we shouldn’t ingrain ourselves in a habit of viewing the world from one perspective. We have to zoom in and zoom out. We have to do this over and over again to make sure we’re seeing the full picture.

It’s likely you know this already but maybe don’t have the time to do this perspective changing much. Or forget to. I certainly do.

Nonetheless, changing our worldview by orders of magnitude is particularly important when it comes to business/marketing, new products, politics/citizenship, and our personal relationships.

That problem that seems so stressful and worth yelling about while making everyone’s lives miserable?

Probably not that important in the grand scheme of things. Probably comical but we can’t see that until we zoom out.