Everyday we wake up there’s something to do, even if it’s not so important, there’s still stuff to do. There are the routines, like get up and stretch, maybe do a few quickie exercises to get the blood flowing and the knees greased.
After a visit to the pottie, we might put on some minimal attire, a robe, slippers and such and make our way to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Maybe you’re not into coffee, so you boil some water or stick a tea bag in a cup, add water and shove it into the microwave and nuke it.
You might turn on the radio or TV, check your phone for notifications…email, social media, your schedule. You orientate yourself to the coming day. In your mind you’re thinking about the things to do, and roughly set your priorities. You tidy up, get dressed, still thinking and organizing and planning what your actions are going to be, mentally prepping yourself.
Some of you go for a run, or go to the gym first thing, others take some time to make some quick hits and process any important emails or messages, maybe check the news.
If it’s a work day, you’re about to do a major context shift from your personal world to your business world. If it’s not then you do a mental check of a whole different set of priorities, things to get done. Or, maybe this is you-time, and the number one priority is to find something to do that you enjoy, something relaxing.
But wait, there might be a whole different set of routines you need to cycle through. Is it garbage day, do you have any plans with friends, are there projects to do around the house?
If you’ve got your shit together then you’ve probably got all this stuff down pat. You never miss a beat, everyone marvels at your punctuality and efficiency. You’re universally recognized as a tower of virtue and a credit to the human race.
If you’ve got a simple life and your routines are perfect, there’s never an interrupt, and few choices to make, you just do A, B, C and 1, 2, 3, then go to bed and start the whole thing over again. If that’s you then you have got to get another life…seriously. Unless you’re in prison, nobody has it that simple, unless your life is like a prison, then either you resign to that fact, or you resolve to change, which is going to require a plan.
The reality is that most of us have an incredibly complex life, with things to do, and seemingly never enough time to do them. There were probably 5 or 6 things that happened yesterday that need to be attended to today, but you can only remember 2 of them. You get distracted by a phone call, there’s an emergency…shit, there goes all those things you were planning to do while you were in the shower.
Now you have to totally reorient yourself, make some calls, cancel some meetings, blow off some people because you just can’t deal with that right now. You forget you were supposed to pick up a package for your friend, it gets returned, your friend loses an opportunity, they say it’s okay but they’re getting pissed because this is the 3rd time something like this has happened with you this past month. There goes your tower of virtue.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Dealing with Things To Do
Everyday there’s a list of things to do, there are responsibilities, priorities, and routines that you need to go through to keep everything else stable. The list isn’t stagnant, it’s constantly growing and shrinking, with changing priorities and interrupts. Managing it in your head steals brain cycles from the more creative things you want to do, or clouds you when you’re trying to have quality time with someone.
The ideal thing to do would be to take all those lists and get them out of your head and write them down, maybe in a note book or index card, preferably a list manager that could do your bidding and feed you the appropriate prompts at optimized times so that you could manage your time, and devote more time to the creative aspects of your life.
Besides, that’s what we’re meant to do, that’s what our brains are best at, being creative, inventing things, devising strategies, solve problems, make beautiful things, focus on relationships, and not drag all that stuff to bed with you so you can get a restful night sleep.
So, if you had a system where you could offload the management of all those things to do, so simple it would radically improve your visibility of the scope, and simultaneously eliminate the possibility of bottlenecks and gain the ability to process more things than you ever thought possible, would that interest you? It’s a rhetorical question, because if you said no, then I would know you a ready for an insane asylum.
That system is called Kanban. You can learn it in an afternoon, it won’t cost anything, and it will deliver enormous value to your life. You wanna hear more? Ok then…
Kanban is two things, it’s a way to manage list of work to do, and a simple optimization process to do that work. It can be applied to the simplest of needs, or scaled to the most demanding of tasks, such as building an automobile. What I’m referring to is the Toyota Production System, which was and is based on Kanban.
In future videos and articles I’m going to describe something called personal Kanban. The simplest form of the method, where you’ll surely want to know more. So sign up so that your notified whenever there’s new content published, which will be most week days.
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