Comments on: My Merge of GTD and Kanban

By: Derek Huether

Derek Huether — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:58:38 +0000

Jim, thank you for giving me some feedback. I certainly don’t put every little thing on the board. I follow the GTD rule whereby if the task takes less than 2 minutes, do it. I think this post was mostly about when my tasks wind up in the blocked column of my board. I need that visual queue that will give me enough data to unblocked the task and get it moving again. If you think this post was interesting, you should see my New Years Resolution board. If you see some value in it, perhaps I could visit the Personal Kanban blog and write a guest post?

Best Regards,
Derek

By: Jim Benson

Jim Benson — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:51:32 +0000

I have been mulling this over since you wrote it. And think I’ve finally come to an agreement with myself.

Personal Kanban for a five minute task – you don’t need to document everything ever, just what you need to remember. if someone calls on the phone, you don’t need to quickly run to the board and do an “answer phone” card. Just do what makes sense. maybe a 5 minute card for a task that will take place next week does make sense. It’s context.

But second, the User Story idea. I like it for focus. People who are starting to ask themselves “Why am I doing this?” could get a lot of context out of doing quick user stories for larger tasks. Like painting the fence or building something.

So, I see a lot of value in its judicious application.

Jim
Jim Benson´s last blog ..Am I Productive, Efficient, or Effective?

By: Derek Huether

Derek Huether — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:43:56 +0000

I agree this may be overkill, if your tasks are only 5 minutes in length. With GTD, anything under 2 minutes gets done right then and there. The items appearing on my board fall outside that realm. How I diverge from traditional GTD is I add items to my Kanban board in the backlog column, rather than putting the new item in an inbox or file. For me, it's all about visualizing the work to be done. Because I have a lot of stakeholders to deal with, I use the "Blocked" columns heavily. In my guest post on the Personal Kanban website, I admit that I have both a virtual and a physical Kanban board. With my physical board, I'm a heavy user of sticky notes. Yes, I do love those sticky notes.

By: Pawel Brodzinski

Pawel Brodzinski — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:37:21 +0000

To be honest for me it looks like overkill. I mean our tasks are often 5-minute long and of course we can throw them in onto our personal Kanban Board but I guess that's exactly non-value-added process. At the same time we can just do what we have to do and forget about them. Another situation is with big tasks which take some time to complete them. But it's rare situation when I can't instantly say which state the task is in. And my "in development" list is really my inbox plus some sticky notes at desk.