A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

particular update before moving on to the next. Kanban, by contrast,
emphasizes a more continuous flow of tasks through a fixed set of
phases, with a general goal of minimizing the current works in
progress at any one phase, preventing bottlenecks.
Which brings us back to boards. When you look past the low-
level details of their implementation, you’ll notice that what Scrum
and Kanban share is the use of a task board in which cards
corresponding to tasks are stacked vertically in columns
corresponding to phases of the software development process. In
Scrum, for example, there’s often a column called backlog for
features that have been identified as potentially important but have
not yet been tackled. There’s also a column for features currently
being worked on by a team of programmers engaged in a sprint, a
column for features that have been completed and are now being
tested, and a column for features that are complete, tested, and ready
for release.
It’s no coincidence that both these systems ended up using the
same means of organizing tasks. A key idea driving agile project
management is that humans are naturally pretty good at planning.
You don’t need complicated project management strategies to figure
out what to work on next; it’s usually sufficient to just have a group
of informed engineers get together and discuss what makes sense.
The key caveat in this belief, however, is that we’re able to effectively
apply our planning instinct only if we have a good grasp of all the
relevant information—what tasks are already being worked on, what
needs to be done, where there are bottlenecks, and so on. Cards
stacked on boards turn out to be an amazingly effective method for
quickly communicating this information.
This property of task boards makes them applicable to more than
just software development, which is why we see them show up
frequently in examples of forward-thinking knowledge work
organizations trying to become more systematic about their
processes. It’s also why I recommend them as something to consider
when developing processes for your own organization. To aid in this
task, I’ve collected several best practices for getting the most out of
task boards in the context of knowledge work.
Task Board Practice #1: Cards Should Be Clear and Informative

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At the core of the task board method is stacking cards in columns.
These cards typically correspond to specific work tasks. It’s
important that these tasks are clearly described: there shouldn’t be
ambiguity about what efforts each card represents.
Also critical to successfully deploying this approach is having a
clear method to assign cards to individuals. Digital systems such as
Flow provide assignment as a native feature, allowing you to see
small thumbnail headshots of the people associated with a task card.
But even in systems that don’t offer assignment functionality, it’s
easy to add this information to the card’s title. In some cases, the
assignments are implied by the columns; perhaps, for example, on a
small development team, there’s a certain person who’s always
responsible for the tasks in the testing column. What’s important is
that when a card gets moved to a column indicating that it should be
actively worked on, there’s no uncertainty about who is responsible
for this work.
Finally, there should be an easy method to associate relevant
information with each card. When using digital board tools such as
Flow or Trello, you can attach files and long text descriptions to the
virtual cards. This is immensely useful, as it organizes all the
information relevant to the task in one place. This was something
that struck me when I was studying the Trello boards used by
Devesh. One of the cards I encountered on his boards, for example,
corresponded to the task of writing up an analytics report for a client.
Attached to the card were the relevant files containing the data for
the report and some notes on how to format it. For the person
working on this task, there’s now no need to sift through cluttered
inboxes or chat archives to find these materials. When it comes time
to work on the report, everything that’s needed is all in one place.
If you’re using a physical board, then you obviously can’t directly
attach digital files or long descriptions to cards. But you can achieve
more or less the same effect by using a service like Dropbox to set up
a shared directory for the board, with a subdirectory for each
column. You can store information relevant to the cards in a given
column in the corresponding subdirectory—simplifying the task of
finding this information when the time comes.

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Task Board Practice #2: When in Doubt, Start with Kanban’s Default
Columns
Once you leave the comfort of the entrenched guidelines surrounding
the use of task boards in software development, it’s not necessarily
obvious how to set them up for your specific knowledge work
context. When in doubt, start with the default setup from the Kanban
methodology, which includes just three columns: to do, doing, and
done. You can then elaborate this foundation as needed.
On Devesh’s boards, for example, he had a column for design
tasks and a column for implementing client campaigns. This
modification to the Kanban defaults proved useful in the context of
his marketing firm because design and implementation work pull
from two different pools of employees. The Flow boards used at
Optimize Enterprises, by contrast, tended to deploy the simpler
setup of a single column dedicated to all tasks being executed for the
project at the moment.
Another useful expansion of the Kanban defaults is to include a
column for storing background notes and research generally relevant
to a project. This hack technically breaks the convention that every
card corresponds to a task, but when using digital boards it can be a
useful way of keeping information close to where it might be needed.
At Devesh’s marketing company, for example, a column of this type
was used to capture notes from client phone calls.
Task Board Practice #3: Hold Regular Review Meetings
As argued earlier, a key property for any knowledge work production
process is an effective system for deciding who is working on what.
In the context of task boards, these decisions are reflected by the
cards on the board and to whom they’re assigned. But how should
these decisions be made? A foundational idea in agile methodology is
that short meetings held on a regular schedule are by far the best way
to review and update task boards. Agile rejects the idea that you
should let these decisions unfold informally in asynchronous
conversations on email or instant messenger. When using task
boards for your own knowledge work production processes, you
should abide by this same rule.

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A standard format for these meetings is to have each person
briefly summarize what they’re working on, what they need from
other people to make progress for the rest of the day, and what
happened with the tasks they had committed to working on the day
before. It’s during these review meetings that new tasks can be
identified and new people assigned to them. The meetings also help
remove bottlenecks caused by one person waiting to hear from
another person, and they provide an important sense of
accountability: if you slack off on the task you committed to during
today’s meeting, you’ll have to reveal this lack of results publicly
during tomorrow’s review.
These regular review meetings work well in part because they’re
collaborative: everyone feels like they were part of deciding what
tasks they’re tackling. They also work well because they’re
unambiguous: everyone is present for the conversation that decides
current work assignments. Finally, as argued in part 1 of this book,
real-time communication is typically a much more effective means of
coordinating individuals than drawn-out back-and-forth messaging.
One ten-minute gathering can eliminate dozens of ambiguous
messages that would otherwise generate frequent interruptions
throughout the day.
Of course, many modern knowledge work organizations include
remote employees, making it impossible for everyone working with a
given task board to show up in person for these review meetings. The
standard solution is to use conferencing software such as Skype,
Zoom, or FaceTime (if the groups are small). The key is real-time
interaction.
Task Board Practice #4: Use Card Conversations to Replace Hive
Mind Chatter
One of the more powerful features of digital board systems is the
discussion function built into each virtual card. In Trello and Flow,
for example, in addition to attaching files and information to cards,
you’ll find tools for message board–style conversation stored directly
on each card. People can ask questions, and others can later chime in
with answers. In the knowledge work organizations I observed that
used digital task boards, these card conversations proved a critical

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