The ‘personal kanban’ may be the solution to your productivity woes

CHECKING emails, Facebook, switching between browser tabs — multi-tasking is actually bad for your brain. But there’s a better way.

CHECKING emails, checking Facebook, switching between browser tabs, answering phone calls and text messages, chipping away at multiple tasks, a little bit at a time.

If you feel like you struggle to actually get anything done while supposedly “multi-tasking”, you’re not alone. According to researchers, when we attempt to multi-task, we’re actually just quickly switching between activities — which burns up the oxygenated glucose in our brains, making us exhausted.

“That switching comes with a biological cost that ends up making us feel tired much more quickly than if we sustain attention on one thing,” behavioural neuroscience professor Daniel Levitin told Quartz.

“People eat more, they take more caffeine. Often what you really need in that moment isn’t caffeine, but just a break. If you aren’t taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won’t benefit from that extra cup of coffee.”

Luckily, there are better ways to organise our lives that doesn’t involve fruitlessly flitting back and forth between distractions. One of the best methods is called “Personal Kanban”, named after a Japanese concept first developed by Toyota in the 1940s.

“A kanban is a tool to visualise, organise, and complete work,” writes productivity expert Jim Benson.

“The first official use of kanban can be traced to Taiichi Ohno’s work at Toyota. He needed a way to quickly communicate to all workers how much work was being done, in what state it was, and how the work was being done.”

To create a personal kanban, you simply need a whiteboard or other large surface on which you can attach and move around Post-It notes or cards. On your board, create three columns, from left to right: “options”, “doing” and “done”.

Write down all of the things you need to do on separate Post-It notes, and arrange them into the “options” column. As you start a task, move it into your “doing” column, and when each task is finished, move it into the “done” column.

As Benson explains, there are only two “rules” to a personal kanban: visualise your work, and limit your work-in-progress — never more than three things at once.

“You can only do as much work as you can handle,” he says. “You can’t overload yourself. Once you do, your ability to finish and your ability to focus starts to break down.”

Benson, whose system has been used in a wide range of organisations including government and private sector since it was first designed 10 years ago, told Quartz the appeal of the “done” category was the psychological boost we get from completing a task. “The act of completion is affirming in and of itself,” he said.

Originally published as The ‘personal kanban’ may be the solution to your productivity woes