Remote working can be challenging to say the least. With tons of distractions out there trying to pry your attention away from the screen, you’ll find that it gets much easier to play with your furry feline rather than working. I did mention about getting rid of the cat in my previous article, mostly dealing on a macro level of managing your environment. Now that you’re in a healthier work space, surely that would be enough to kick things into gear, right?
As it turns out, not quite. No matter how fancy you’ve got your triple monitor set up and built an entire private office in your shed, you may still find yourself spending more time wandering endlessly from tab to tab on Chrome or Mozilla (or Internet Explorer, no one’s judging!)
Ultimately, your machine still houses a lot of things to keep you entertained. It’s easy to get scatter-brained and feeling overwhelmed from all the tasks you’ll need to complete. You can say, it’s a form of inevitable chronic procrastination enabler (there’s your $10 phrase for the day) similar to that of your social media. It boils down to the nature of remote working that requires us to be online all the time – this would eventually cause distractions whether intentionally or not.
In software, we are always looking to architect our applications in a scalable manner. Finding long term solutions that lets us manage new changes in a simplified manner. The same can be applied to working productively. Whilst that short Todo list and keeping 15 tabs open are enough for some quick hit stuffs, managing a sprint or a product are a completely different beast. No, you don’t need another monitor… what you need is a good system to handle your micro processes!
Nail your system down
Let’s get one thing straight, we never set off to work to make our lives difficult. We tend to expend most of our energy endlessly organizing and reorganizing tasks. Followed by erratic jumping from one task to the next without actually accomplishing much. If you ever felt like it was a busy day but yet nothing is ever done – well I’d argue that’s one of the reasons why.
To first build your system, you’ll have to understand what it means. In laymen’s terms, it’s the process on how you do things. For example, every one of us has a morning routine – it can roughly include things like make the bed (don’t be lazy!), do your no.2, brush your teeth, take a shower and so on. Individually, these are your proverbial tasks. Collectively, it’s your morning routine – a system that you follow to execute your tasks almost automatically. As long as the system is in place and you don’t break from the routine, you won’t even have to think about it.
That’s the beauty of systems. Making things predictable and manageable with minimal effort. To each their own, we all have our own ways of handling our workload but some are objectively better than others. Personally, I use Kanban for almost all of my tasks be it at work or for mundane chores. It’s an incredibly easy concept to grasp and I’ll be sure to get you guys up to speed by the end of this read.
Everyone do the Kanban
The Kanban (literal translation Japanese translation for signboard) method originated in lean manufacturing, inspired by the Toyota Production System. It makes visualization of tasks much clearer with an added benefit of progress organization. It consists of a board with multiple columns – commonly Todo, Doing and Done. Tasks are written on sticky notes or virtual cards and moved from the Todo column to the Done column one at a time. The process is repeated until all Todos are completed.
Right off the bat, you could argue it looks just like a glorified Todo list. In some sense, it is BUT only if you’re not using it properly I’d always say. Let’s break down the board and its constituents:
The tasks or “tickets”
This is where you write your tasks to be done for the day or for the whole sprint. The ticket is titled with a descriptive but concise phrase. One that compounds the task as a whole. Inside it, you can write down further details + add mini checklists for breaking up massive tasks.
An example of how I would write my tickets would be something like “Send invoices to clients” as the title, “Web development projects are due for payment this 25th from the following clients” for the details, followed by a checklist of clients to send the invoices to by the end of the day.
It’s straight to the point, organized and as detailed as you want it to be!
The columns
No fancy names for them but essential nonetheless to dictate the flow of the tickets across the board. Most boards comes with 3 main columns and you can add as many subsidiaries as you want. Here are a few examples:
- Backlog – place tickets that are not ready (drafts) here. Moved them to the Todo column to begin work.
- Todo – set tickets that are ready for work here. You or any member of your team can select a ticket to work on.
- Doing – includes any tickets that are currently Work In Progress (WIP) by you or any team members. Ideally only one person should have one ticket in the Doing column at any given time.
- Review – a personal addition to my own boards, a separate column to house completed tickets but pending for review from supervisors, QA, etc.
- Done – place for tickets that are completed here. Archived every week to clear it out.
- Reminder – sometimes we just need a place to keep all of our non-task reminders. This column is just for that.
You can mix and match as many or as little columns as you want depending on how you want your system to run.
The golden rules
These are more of a guideline on how best to use your Kanban board once you’ve set up the previous two.
- Stick to one ticket at a time. Bring one ticket through all the columns first before moving onto the next one!
- Avoid premature completion. It may be rewarding to quickly move things to the Done column but you should only do so if you have thoroughly complete the ticket. Otherwise there won’t be any point in doing Kanban!
- Count on the amount of throughput. Getting as many tickets from Todo to Done is a better metric rather than counting on the number of tickets stuck in Doing. The goal is to get as many things done, not doing a lot of things (hence the apt naming conventions).
Just remember to keep things simple in handling your tasks and let the board handle the rest of the organizing for you!
Hello to Trello
Now that you’ve pretty much mastered the Kanban board, you may be wondering where best to set it up. Well you can either go the classic route of pen, paper and a whiteboard or if you wanna be as hip as the SynapseBN team – you can opt for Trello.
It’s simply a great tool that the team has used for over a year now to manage our client products. The main aspect that we absolutely love from Trello would be its simplicity over other software that tried to do too much at once.
It’s free to use with additional subscriptions to unlock cool features. I’d suggest to give it a go first to dabble with Kanban as a first timer. As an added bonus, you’ll also get to meet Taco the Siberian Husky that’ll take you on your first tutorial!
Not the silver bullet you’re looking for
Like every tool, it can’t automagically solve all your problems. It’s a gentle learning curve that I believe is an important investment to put into for anyone working, both remotely or in the office. Kanban is one of many other productivity techniques that exists. It may not suite your taste but then again, so does pineapple on pizza – it takes a few tries to truly know which technique will be right for you.
Till then, I’d implore everyone to try things out. Give it a go for a few weeks and let us know down in the comments how well it goes or if you find other tools better. We’re not familiar with other Kanban productivity tools and would be interesting to consider them based on your recommendations. Cheers!