Name: Personal Kanban
ISBN: 9781453802267

Jim Benson

Tonianne DeMaria Barry

"Productivity books focus on doing more. Jim and Tonianne want you to focus on doing better....Personal Kanban takes the same Lean principles from manufacturing that led the Japanese auto industry to become a global leader in quality, and applies them to individual and team work. Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work, and limit our work-in-progress."--Back cover.

Mapping Work, Navigating Life

Personal Kanban

Jeff Kelly

Mostly a rehash of how to use Kanban and lean thinking to limit work in progress, regularly reflect and improve your process, visualize flow, etc. Has a few novel tips for how to use it for yourself and tailor it as needed for your specific tasks and goals. Great complement to Trello.

Ivan Shiel

This book did not work for me. I had recently become interested in Kanban and read this book along with a selection of others on the subject. I like to immerse myself in a subject and get a well rounded view. Also, as a GTD user of over 10 years I could see that Personal Kanban could plug a few holes in GTD. so far so good. 

Unfortunately the execution of this book missed the mark for me. 

Firstly it seems bizarre that a book that constantly pushes the benefits of visualisation does so little to show us what the technique looks like. Early on there is a lot of philosophising but very little to show you what Kanban can and might look like. Theres a lot of sell, sell, sell but very little tell, tell, tell. Examples are shoved to the appendix and the illustration of one in particular is so small and useless (and badly explained) that I found it very frustrating. 

Secondly there’s the rather irritating instances where ideas are introduced only to be shot down. If you don’t think Covey’s Urgent/Important quadrant is useful then why are you wasting my time with it? If you think a study on students deadlines is nonsense (without a similar study to refute it, by the way) why are you talking about it? There is a place for this kind of thing, but how about getting me on board with your argument before shooting down other people’s work?

All the way through this I just kept thinking - why won’t you get to the point?

I think the technique is interesting, and I intend to use it. But coming out with a book with large amounts of padding and little in the way of practical advice isn’t helping anyone.

Lee Herman

Personal Kanban is a recognized productivity approach and one I'm experimenting with. I see great potential in Personal Kanban as a tool and technique but I was disappointed with the book, in spite of really wanting to like it. I felt too much time was spent extolling the virtues and benefits of the techniques and not nearly enough describing how to apply Personal Kanban to personal productivity. 

As a long time GTD (Getting Things Done) adherent and practitioner, the point where the authors suggested Personal Kanban as an adjunct approach to GTD resonated more for me than a lot of the rest of the book. I don't see how to make Personal Kanban work with the numbers of tasks and projects I have to deal with in personal and work life. How to scale the system and work with it were discussed only briefly. These were probably the most important issues to me after the basic description of the two rules and the cards that make up the system. 

Should you read this book? I don't want to discourage anyone since it is the seminal work on Personal Kanban. And my responses are only to the book as a reading experience. I have just begun to explore the system, so my response to the book might change on a future re-reading after I've actually used Personal Kanban as a system.

Others may find the approach less annoying than I did and it does introduce the system successfully. Less selling the benefits and more hands on discussion of the system and ways to use it would make this a much stronger book.

Personal Kanban Mapping Work, Navigating Life

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