Product Life (2): From the "Kanban Method" to the "GTD Time Management Method"

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IT friends must have heard of or used Kanban, and today we are going to talk about how to find ideas for efficient time management from the Kanban method.

Kanban (meaning "bulletin board" or "bulletin board") is a visual management tool that promotes team collaboration and process transparency by showing the status and flow of work items through Kanban. In the field of Internet development, the Kanban method is also an agile development framework, a visual process management approach that emphasizes "mobility and continuous improvement".

The general steps of the Kanban method are as follows:

• Define the process: Define your team's workflow, split the process into phases, and create columns on the board to represent those phases.
• Visual workflow: Visualize all work items and their current status or stage through a visual presentation, so that team members can understand the progress of the overall project in real time.
• Pull system: "Pull" tasks from the upstream stage only when there is enough capacity in the downstream stage (manpower, hardware resources, etc.) to avoid over-production or piling up too much unfinished work.
• Limit WIP: Set a WIP limit "Work in Progress" to reduce the productivity drop caused by multitasking, forcing the team to focus on the task at hand before taking on a new task. (In agile development and project management, WIP typically refers to the number of work items that a team is working on but has not yet completed.) Including backlogs, tasks, requirements, defects, etc. ）
• Continuous improvement: As the team deepens their understanding of the process, the team continuously identifies problems and improvement points in the process by regularly reviewing and analyzing the Kanban data, and takes action to optimize the process.

In the above steps, we can see that the general idea of the Kanban method is as follows:

1. Capture: In the Kanban method, all pending work items (e.g. user stories, tasks, bug fixes, etc.) are recorded in the "Backlog" or "Requirements Pool" list in the Kanban system.
2. Clarify: In the Kanban method, before the task is extracted into the "To Deal" or "To be developed" column of the Kanban system, this step includes the clarification and refinement of the task, clarifying the goal of the task, the desired outcome, and the path to achieve it.
3. Organize: Visualize the stages of the workflow, such as To be developed, In Development, To be tested, Tested, To be deployed, and Completed through the Workflow Kanban board. Each stage represents a different status of a task, and team members can clearly see where each task is located and the number of tasks in each stage.
4. Do: Team members follow the instructions on the board and perform tasks one by one, starting from the column on the left, until the task is completed and moved to the "Completed" column on the right.
5. Reflect: Through regular retrospectives, team members can review the workflow over time, identify bottlenecks, identify issues, and propose improvement measures to ensure the continuous optimization and improvement of the Kanban system.

The same applies to our day-to-day time management, especially the GTD time management method, which has the same ideas in terms of thinking and execution.

The core idea of Getting Things Done is to empty your brain and turn everything in your life and work into clear next steps through a systematic process that reduces stress, increases productivity and achieves work-life balance. It advocates five steps to managing day-to-day tasks and projects: comprehensive capture, clear meaning, organization, timely review, and firm execution. The specific steps are as follows:

• Collect: Capture all ideas, tasks, projects, and more, whether it's ideas, tasks, meetings, emails, or phone calls, to make sure your brain isn't distracted or anxious by a large memory load.
• Process: The information collected is processed one by one to decide on the next step, such as whether immediate action is required, handed over to someone else for disposal, or whether it is temporarily shelved or discarded. For matters that require action, they are further translated into concrete action steps.
• Organize: Put action steps and items in a checklist, categorize and tag them separately.

1. The Next Actions List lists all the tasks that are clear and can be performed immediately.
2. 等待清单（Waiting For List）记录那些已经委派出去但仍需追踪的任务。
3. The Projects List summarizes all ongoing projects and their associated next steps.
4. A Someday/Maybe List is a record of ideas or plans that are not urgent for the time being but may be implemented in the future.

• Review: Regularly review and update the task list to make sure everything is under control, and review whether the project's progress is aligned with the long-term goals.
• Do: Choose the right action to complete based on context, time, effort, and priority, and keep the checklist synced and updated throughout the process.

Similar to the Kanban method, the GTD time management method only transforms the tasks of the project or team into individual tasks, and presents the individual in writing, whether it is specific actions or ideas in the mind, so as to reduce brain memory, and can propose corresponding solutions for specific ideas or tasks, or give up, transfer to others, etc., so as to ensure that every idea can be properly placed, and then make their time allocation more focused and not scattered.

Let's take an example of a programmer's life, which usually involves: code writing, bug fixing, requirements discussion, technical research, technical architecture, document writing, etc. They can apply GTD in the following ways:

• Collect: Capture all work tasks and ideas using online note-taking tools or project management software such as Trello, Jira, Notion, etc.
• Process: According to the goal of the current stage and the nature of the task, it is more appropriate to see how to deal with it, for example, some bugs have dependencies, you can wait for the collaborator to fix them first, and then arrange time to fix them, this task is to record first, and wait for follow-up. Some documents may be needed but not urgent, so they are left to work on later. For some large-scale module development, it can be broken down into subtasks, and then follow up on dependencies and importance to determine the priority of each subtask.
• Organize: Create different checklists to manage various tasks, such as programming task lists, documentation lists, etc., and mark the estimated completion time of the tasks, the resources required, etc.
• Review: Review the task list regularly on a weekly or daily basis, update the progress, and confirm which tasks have been completed, which need to be postponed, or if there are unexpected situations, and which need to be reprioritized.
• Do: During the work of the code, the task that is most suitable for completion at the moment is selected according to the context and priority. For example, while waiting for compilation, you can take care of bits and pieces that require less concentration, while you can focus on writing complex code or solving a technical problem during an entire block of work.

The thinking framework is roughly as above, and you can fill in the specific content separately.

In fact, many methods in the work can be tried to be applied to personal life, from improving the efficiency of the team to improving the efficiency of the individual.

In general, through the GTD time management method, programmers can effectively reduce the burden on the brain, let themselves focus more on the important things at the moment, and have visual content, so that they can focus more on things, so as to improve work efficiency and reduce the distress caused by too many tasks and too much pressure.

This article was originally published by @养心进行时 on Everyone is a Product Manager and is not allowed to be reproduced without permission

The title image is from Unsplash and is licensed under CC0

The views in this article only represent the author's own, everyone is a product manager, and the platform only provides information storage space services.