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

doing slots, constrained by a WIP limit of three. His done column
maintains the same color-coded value stream rows as his doing
column, allowing him, at a quick glance, to get a sense of how he has
recently been allocating his time.
8
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The success of Personal Kanban among productivity aficionados
underscores an important reality for anyone looking to escape the
hyperactive hive mind: task boards are not just effective for
coordinating work among teams, but can be incredibly effective in
making sense of your individual obligations—even if you don’t have
graduate-level training in supply chain management.
As I mentioned briefly before, I’ve embraced this idea in my own
professional life as a professor, where I use Trello boards to keep
track of my obligations during my time as the director of graduate
studies (DGS) for the computer science department at Georgetown.
Following Jim Benson’s basic structure, I have doing and done
columns. Following the lead of the Personal Kanban community, I
also deploy my own custom blend of columns for making sense of the
tasks I plan to work on but am not actively tackling at the moment
(more on this to follow). Every Monday, I review the board, updating
the positions of cards and deciding what I’m working on that week.
Throughout the days that follow, I reference the board to figure out
what I should do with any time put aside for my DGS duties. As new
tasks arrive—in the form of emails, or phone calls, or, as is also
common, students dropping by my office to ask questions I don’t
know how to answer—I immediately put them on cards that I drop
on my board to be dealt with later.
Without this task board system, I’d be dependent on the
hyperactive hive mind workflow to accomplish my work as DGS,
which would consign me to juggling an avalanche of simultaneous,
slow-moving email conversations throughout the day. I’d be that
guy, with his laptop open in every meeting, phone always in hand
while rushing across campus, keeping the proverbial plates spinning

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one frantic reply at a time. Without this system, in other words, my
job would be nearly unbearable. With it, the overhead of this position
is greatly reduced—obligations get dropped on a board, where they’re
organized, and I then methodically accomplish them in times set
aside for this purpose. Which is why, as you might expect, I’ve
become a big advocate of deploying task boards not just to organize
teams, but to organize your individual life as a knowledge worker as
well.
To aid in this effort, here are several best practices for making
individual task boards work well for you.
Individual Task Board Practice #1: Use More Than One Board
Many proponents of the Personal Kanban approach deploy a single
board to make sense of all the tasks in their professional life. I
recommend something slightly different: maintain a separate board
for every major role in your professional life. At the moment, I play
three largely distinct roles as a professor at my university:
researcher, teacher, and DGS. I deploy a different task board for each
of these roles, so when, for example, I’m thinking about teaching, I’m
not also confronted with unrelated tasks about research or the
graduate program. This reduces network switching and therefore
increases the speed with which I’m able to resolve issues.
Similarly, I’ve also found it useful to sometimes set up a
dedicated task board for large projects (say, any project that might
take more than a couple of weeks of effort). Not long ago, for
example, I was the general chair of a major academic conference. The
demands of this role were so numerous that I found it easier to
contain them on their own task board, isolated from other areas of
my academic life. Once that project ended, I discarded the board.
There is, of course, a limit to how many boards you can manage
before the upkeep becomes too arduous. This is why I think the rule
of one board per role, and one board per major project, is probably
about right. For most people this means two to four boards that run
your life, which works well. If you have ten boards, on the other
hand, the cost of switching between them will begin to swamp out
the advantages of separating the tasks.

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Individual Task Board Practice #2: Schedule Regular Solo Review
Meetings
When we discussed task boards for knowledge work teams, I argued
that regular review meetings were the best way to update these
boards. The same holds for your personal board. If you want to get
the most out of this tool, you need set times each week to review and
update your personal board. During these solo review meetings, go
over all the cards on the board, moving them between columns and
updating their statuses as needed. This shouldn’t take long: five to
ten minutes is usually sufficient if you’re doing this regularly. And
these sessions don’t have to be too frequent: I find once a week to
work well. But they shouldn’t be skipped. As soon as you believe that
a task board can no longer be trusted as a safe place to store your
obligations, you’ll revert to more frantic, hyperactive hive mind
messaging. Put your solo review meetings on your calendar and
protect them like any other meeting or appointment. Individual task
boards can significantly improve the quality of your life as a
knowledge worker, but only if you invest sufficient time in their
upkeep.
Individual Task Board Practice #3: Add a “To Discuss” Column
In my work as DGS, there are several colleagues with whom I
frequently need to discuss issues related to this role: my department
chair, the graduate program manager, and the two other professors
who make up the graduate committee I lead. For each of these three
categories of colleagues, I added a column to my DGS task board
labeled to discuss at next meeting. Whenever a task arises that
requires input from one of these individuals, I sidestep my instinct to
shoot them a quick email by instead moving the task to the
appropriate to discuss column.
I meet with my program manager weekly on a set schedule.
During each meeting, we go through all the tasks that built up in his
column since the last meeting. For my department chair and
graduate committee, I wait until their to discuss columns are
sufficiently crowded before I arrange our next meeting to review
these tasks in one big batch.

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This hack might seem straightforward, but its impact on my
work life has been profoundly positive. Imagine, for example, that a
stack of five cards builds up under the to discuss column for my
department chair during a given week. In a twenty-to-thirty-minute
meeting, the two of us can come up with a reasonable plan for each
of these cards. If I had to instead shoot off a quick email for each of
the tasks, the result would be five different conversations occurring
in my inbox that I’d have to tend throughout the week—leading to
dozens of extra inbox checks each day and frustratingly fractured
attention.
If you want to unlock the power of personal task boards to
minimize hive mind–style back-and-forth messaging, this hack is
probably the most important one you’ll encounter in this chapter. A
regular rhythm of efficient meetings can replace 90 percent of hive
mind messaging, if you have a way to keep track of what needs to be
discussed in these meetings. The task board makes this simple.
Individual Task Board Practice #4: Add a “Waiting to Hear Back”
Column
In collaborative knowledge work, it’s often necessary for progress on
a task to be halted while you wait for feedback, or for an answer to a
question, or for a key piece of information from someone else. If you
use an individual task board to organize your obligations, it’s easy to
keep track of these halted tasks by moving them to a column labeled
waiting to hear back. When you move a task to this column, note on
the card who you are waiting to hear back from and what the next
step will be when you do hear back. This prevents you from losing
track of efforts that have temporarily left your direct control, and
allows you to make efficient progress when you learn what you need.
Most important, these open obligations have a safe place to reside,
freeing you from that lurking worry in the back of your mind that
there are things being missed.