This is the second post in the Scrumfamily Report Back Series on how some of these contextual kanbans have worked out for us. In each post, I look at the specific challenge we are trying to address, the original experiment, how it has evolved and what we have gained as a family along the way.

The Challenge – Sticking to an Exercise Program

Ever since leaving university, I have struggled to establish and maintain a regular and sustained exercise routine.  Although I’m not a top sportswoman by any stretch of the imagination, I do enjoy being active.  In my school and university years it was easy to get enough exercise what with organized team sports and plenty of people around for regular games of tennis and badminton. At university, I also spent many an hour in the swimming pool improving my self-taught strokes.

But when you’re a working mom with two boys and a household to run, finding time for yourself is already difficult. Keeping to a regular exercise routine then becomes a special challenge all of its own.  After seeing how well Personal Kanban has helped us in other areas of our lives, I sincerely thought that visualizing my Exercise-In-Progress would help me to do that.  And it has – but not in the way you might expect. And certainly not in the way I expected it to.

The Experiments – Checklist and Small-scale Kanban

The first exercise kanban I tried in 2010 didn’t work well for me at all as a visual tracker of exercise. In hindsight, I had been too ambitious and set myself up for failure by creating a checklist kanban for a whole 12-week exercise program. Although there were extenuating circumstances, I only got as far as Week 6 before the wheels came off.

Exercise Kanban

This “failed” experiment did, however, suggest to me that I needed a more structured form of exercise and I took up Shotokan karate in January 2011 as a way to provide that. But by June, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to do more to improve my general fitness levels if I was serious about karate.

In a moment of inspiration one morning, I came up with my second Personal Kanban exercise experiment. This time, I was convinced it would work since the new visual focused on the results of only two workout sessions – a much smaller scale than I had used before. The anticipated gradual increase in repetitions over time would be a measurable way to monitor incremental improvement.

Scale-adjusted Personal Kanban for exercise

I give you one guess what happened. Indeed. Like before, I started enthusiastically and managed to keep with it until the middle of July. But this time, instead of trying yet another visual indicator, I realized that the issue was more fundamental than that, and that no matter what scale or visual mechanism I used, I was likely to have the same result.

A contextual personal kanban just didn’t appear to be the solution to this particular challenge. At least, not if used on its own.

The Learning – Community and Cadence are Key

Although it communicates information, a kanban itself does not force you to take action on what you see. That requires a response to the information. In a team (or family) context, the trigger for response  is usually a regular conversation about the visible information. Because everybody is affected by the progress (or lack thereof) action is more likely to follow.

But when you’re going it alone with kanban, you need to add external triggers for action.  These triggers should provide a regular cadence (like the Pomodoro technique provides for desk-bound activities) or involve other people (keeping your personal kanban where others can see it and ask questions). Better yet, incorporate both!

And it dawned on me, that I already had both in my karate classes. Following a set schedule of classes twice a week, with my family and fellow karateka providing community support, I had already managed to grade to my green belt in one year. And on the advice of our sensei, I had also started doing push ups every time before I shower. Following this advice, I had already been able to switch from lady push ups to being able to manage about 20 proper push ups without really thinking about it or adding a lot of gym time to my life.

At last, the penny had dropped!

I have now added two other cadence-based activities to my exercise to add variety and address different training needs. I have found a great body conditioning class at my local gym that I can go to every Sunday morning to further improve my muscle tone. And to lose weight and increase stamina, I’ve started running as well. But instead of relying solely on my own self-discipline, I’m tying my runs to specific race events on the annual calendar and finding running friends to help keep me motivated. Recently, I did my first 10 km race event where I ran more than walked.  I’m pretty happy with that! And tomorrow morning, my son and I are doing a 5 km fun run together.

I no longer use a visual kanban to track my exercise. The continuous feedback I’m getting from my body through the various activities I do is giving me enough information.  But thanks to my experiments, and the principles of cadence and community, I am now well on my way to making a long-term lifestyle change.

Other Posts in the Report Back Series

Using Personal Kanban? Finding it a challenge to stay on top of your life? Or just want to share your thoughts about the way I’m using agile and lean thinking? Leave a comment below, or find me on Twitter to connect.

If you’re new to the concept of Personal Kanban and my blog, use the Getting Started page to find your way around the site. It also has links to other excellent Personal Kanban material to help you on your way.

This is the first post in the Scrumfamily Report Back Series on how some of these contextual kanbans have worked out for us. In each post, I’ll be looking at the specific challenge we are trying to address, the original experiment, how it has evolved and what we have gained as a family along the way.

The Challenge – Not Being Late for School

Punctuality has always been a challenge for our family. You know those people who are always 15 minutes early for an appointment? Well, that’s not us. For us, it’s a major achievement just to be on time consistently.  With four family members all to be found somewhere on the distractibility and hyperfocus spectrum, being time-challenged really is a given in our family.

The biggest of our punctuality challenges has turned out to be getting to school in the mornings. It’s one thing when one of us has to be on time somewhere. It’s an entirely different matter when all of us need to get ready for the day and out the door within the space of two hours.

In time for school. Without forgetting anything.

The Experiment – Our Weasley Kidzban Clock

In June 2011, I wrote about our Kizban Clock. The clock was inspired by the Harry Potter universe and the idea that a circular kanban mapped to their daily activities, with avatars as tokens, could help us to teach the kids the importance of staying on track and doing things within a certain timeframe.

Kidzban-Weasley Clock

This fun approach worked really well, for the most part.  The boys enjoyed moving their avatars and jockeying to see who is ahead. More importantly, school mornings were running increasingly more smoothly. In fact, by the start of the last school term (three months after we started using the clock) I felt confident enough in our improvement that I challenged the boys to a goal:

No more than 10 late days for the new term, as counted in the school register. We made it with 1 day spare!

The Evolution –  Introducing the TimeTurner

But I knew that our Kidzban Clock needed to change. Some aspects of the clock had turned out not to be that useful after all and were not being used. We had also started using other time games and techniques to augment the clock, and I started thinking about ways to combine them into a single visual indicator.

Notably, the original clock was designed to be subtle and had no explicit time links. With both boys now older and more time-conscious, I thought it was time to make the time link more explicit.

By making some changes to the existing Kidzban Clock, I was able to capture our changed context quite well, and we have been using our new TimeTurner since January 2012. Naturally, the name is inspired by Harry Potter, but also by the TimeTimer that we used for a while until it fell and broke.

The TimeTurner - Revised Kidzban-Clock

There are significant changes to the way our revised visual kanban clock works:

• Focus on Mornings Only. The new clock zooms in on the time between 6 am and 8 am, with the other 22 hours of the day visualized in broad segments only. The sections of the original clock dealing with afternoon and evening activities were hardly ever used, and as the main challenge is the morning with its “hard stop” at 8 am, it made sense for our visual clock to focus on that period. At some point, we may want to do something similar for the evening period between 6 pm and 8 pm, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet.

• Use of Game Concepts. During 2011, while still using the original Kidzban Clock, I starting referring to certain times in the morning as Go Time (7.20), Injury Time (7.30) and Penalty Time (7.40). Both boys like motor sport, and our eldest is a big soccer fan. Connecting our departure times to their interests, in the same way time runs out in a match or in a car chase game, has helped to raise awareness of time running out, while still keeping things fun and (mostly) light. Very recently, I’ve also given our eldest a whistle to blow if we ever hit Penalty Time. He loves making lots of noise in the morning. Instead of trying to get him to quiet down and becoming frustrated, I have made his behaviour part of the game. It makes him very happy, and reduces my stress levels remarkably.

• Integrated Traffic Light System. I strongly believe in colour to convey information indirectly. As a Product Owner, I’ve often used a simple traffic light system to show release progress.  I extended the usual three-colour system to tie different colours to the phases in our morning routine. Late!! is naturally red …

• Different Use of Avatars. The clock arm is now a real clock arm, so the boys’ avatars are now placed next to the clock next to the Up & Go phase to show it relates to them.  To keep the boys involved with moving the arm, we now have an assigned Timekeeper job that the boys can choose to swop from time to time. So far, it’s mainly fallen to our youngest, since he gets up a lot easier in the mornings. The incidental benefit of this has been that it’s helped him to read analog time a lot better.

Using Personal Kanban? Finding it a challenge to stay on top of your life? Or just want to share your thoughts about the way I’m using agile and lean thinking? Leave a comment below, or find me on Twitter to connect.

If you’re new to the concept of Personal Kanban and my blog, use the Getting Started page to find your way around the site. It also has links to other excellent Personal Kanban material to help you on your way.

Our family tends to use Personal Kanban in two very distinct ways. The one is to map general family activities, chores and tasks in a typical linear value stream approach. The other is to address specific challenges that we experience in our lives, like staying in touch with our extended family or being more punctual. These contextual kanbans are typically not linear and tend to be more creative and innovative.

As I was writing the  page, I thought it may be interesting to revisit some of our contextual kanban experiments to show how they have worked out for us, and in most cases, how they have continued to evolve as we inspect and adapt.

Of course not everything we’ve tried has worked – at least not the way I expected them to – and considering whether such an experiment can be considered a “failure” or “success” is an interesting question in itself. Is anything in life ever really a failure if you learnt something  by doing it? I believe not.

So join me as I report back on teaching kids timekeeping, establishing an exercise routine and visualizing family ties  - all by using some variant of Personal Kanban or Kidzban. And if there’s a specific experiment that you’d like me to report back on, please let me know in the comments below.

Watch this space!

Posts in the Report Back Series

Report Back: Teaching Kids Timekeeping with Kanban

Report Back: Personal Kanban for Exercise

Other Series on the Scrumfamily Blog

A series on knowing when to pull the line in your personal kanban, and dealing with the subsequent line stop.

Care to Share?

Using Personal Kanban? Finding it a challenge to stay on top of your life? Or just want to share your thoughts about the way I’m using agile and lean thinking? Leave a comment below, or find me on Twitter to connect.

If you’re new to the concept of Personal Kanban and my blog, use the Getting Started page to find your way around the site. It also has links to other excellent Personal Kanban material to help you on your way.

When I first started using Scrum and later Personal Kanban, it was in fact an idea triggered by yet another of these “what if” moments. But the idea was very much born out of dire necessity. Ten years into being Married With Children I found myself with two very active boys, a demanding full-time job and a household to run. My last-minute style of  life management was getting me into trouble more often than not and I was floundering from one school logistics crisis to another. I had to do something.

Two years down the line, I look back with great satisfaction at the progress we have made as a family. We have brought the wild horse ride that we used to call our life firmly under control. Oh, we’re busier than ever, but we’re generally on top of things now, rather than being driven to distraction by the many balls we have in the air. We’re so on top of things, in fact, that we now start our weekends with a planning meeting and end it with a retrospective …

Too Much of a Good Thing

But somewhere along the line, that creative animal inside of me has become dissatisfied with all this imposed order and structure. Like a wild beast, caged somewhere far from its natural habitat, it has started gnawing quietly at the shackles of swimlanes and stickies. Increasingly, I have been finding myself mildly resenting our weekend Kanban in particular, sometimes even petulantly ignoring it for an entire Saturday, until Sunday rolls around and reminds me that if we don’t get back on track,  we’re setting ourselves up for a disastrous week.

I had to find a way, and quick, to satisfy the hungry beast within – without our family falling back into the darkness of a life unplanned. I needed spaces in my togetherness (with apologies to Kahlil Gibran). I needed breathing room.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

In Kanban terms we call this Slack, and it’s something you have to plan for. In a production Kanban system, you usually don’t run your system at full capacity all the time, you allow for a small amount of slack in the system – an explicit agreed underutilization of capacity – that allows for system improvements and repairs if necessary. It’s creative time. Free time. Google 20% time. Me time.

In my use of Personal Kanban at home, I had neglected to explicitly build in Slack. Although our weekend Kanban also has Happy Cards – things we want to do in the weekend that are just fun, and not chore-related – they’re still structured and planned activities.  And this is what my inner voice was whispering in my ear. It was saying: Let me do whatever comes to mind, won’t you! 

A Little Bit Goes a Long Way

The answer turned out to be deceptively simple. I now take time out over weekends to feed the beast. Instead of a specific task on our family board, I add a Freewheel card. While the Freewheel card is on the board, I can use the time to my disposal freely. If I feel like lying in bed reading a book, I can. If I’d rather potter in the garden pulling out some weeds, that’s okay too. And if halfway through pulling weeds I remember I still wanted to read up on some children’s books I’d heard about, I can do that. Right away. No stickie needed. And I can come back to the garden afterwards, or simply leave it until later. Whatever.

Of course, if I do this for a whole weekend, those boring things like checking up on homework or preparing school bags and menus for the week will never happen. So there has to be a limit to how much freewheeling I can do. Right now, that limit is not explicit like a Work In Progress limit, but rather dynamic. It’s based on how much time I need to feel connected to myself again. That in itself can depend on the kind of week I’ve had. The tougher the week, the more freewheel time is usually required.

Generally, though, freewheeling is working out to be anywhere between a couple of hours to a full morning or afternoon. It also moves around between Sundays and Saturdays, depending on where it best fits in between our other planned family activities.

It’s not always a whole lot of time, but right now it’s enough for me to feel that I’ve achieved a better balance between productivity and organization, and embracing the creative energy that fundamentally makes me who I am.

The Moral of The Story

Personal Kanban is not (yet another) stick that you should beat yourself with. It should help you map work and navigate life, but it should never start feeling like a strait-jacket. Always make room for yourself inside the process. Personal Kanban has built-in mechanisms to make sure you do just that – use them!

Care to Share?

Using Personal Kanban? Finding it a challenge to stay on top of your life? Or just want to share your thoughts about the way I’m using agile and lean thinking? Leave a comment below, or find me on Twitter to connect.

If you’re new to the concept of Personal Kanban, the Personal Kanban site is a good place to start. Or join the conversation in the Personal Kanban Facebook community.

Last year this time I wrote about not feeling any need to make New Year’s resolutions since embracing the power of continuous improvement in my life. That has not changed. In fact, I feel even stronger about that this year, looking back at the numerous small changes that have combined to help our family build a better and happier life on many fronts. But with all the resolution talk going around again, I started pondering why New Year’s resolutions fail so many.

Is it because people are simply not disciplined enough to follow through and stick to their good intentions? There is something in that, I believe. We humans, for all our noble endeavours to improve ourselves, are not very consistent in acting on our dreams and plans.

Fundamentally, however, I believe New Year’s resolutions set us up for disappointment by trying to force change in an unnatural and unsustainable way. They are inherently flawed in that they often reflect an idealized reality – goals set far beyond the realities of now. They are often made in a split second, with no clear course of action tied to them to help us achieve these remarkable goals we set ourselves.

But that is not how you create lasting change in your life. Change comes slowly, creeping –  the way dusk gently settles at the end of the day to suddenly cloak the world in darkness, surprising everyone that the light has gone. Change is the product of a series of conscious and principled decisions and actions over time. Some changes take weeks, some months and others yet take many years to play out fully in our lives.

So instead of setting yourself unattainable goals for the coming year, why not commit to one thing only? Commit to seeking and embracing change in those areas of your life where you think it’s needed. Commit to learning from every action and decision in your life, and to applying that learning to positive growth in yourself, your family and the world around you.  And although change may not come as fast as human impatience insists it should – it will come.

As surely as the sun will set tonight, change will come.