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The inspiration for this series of articles comes from Jens Poder at KnowledgeCraft blog, where he discusses using Toyota’s LEAN methodology to introduce some new features into his GTD practice. Over the course of the next few days, I will introduce you to the basic concepts of LEAN and how I have implemented them into my own Weekly and Quarterly Review process.

How LEAN Works

The LEAN manufacturing concept was developed by Toyota in order to save money by eliminating as much waste as possible. This waste can be found in every step of the manufacturing process, from having too much (or too little) inventory on hand, to inefficient methods of transporting parts and finished products. In order to clean up the systems, it is necessary to follow 5 basic steps that identify waste and opportunities for improvement:

1. Define the Value to the Customer
2. Map the Value Stream
3. Introduce Flow
4. Introduce Pull
5. Perfection

Those of you who have been practicing GTD for any length of time can attest that as your methods mature you discover inefficiencies and weaknesses in your system. From reading the forums and comments at other blogs, I have seen that there are a lot of ways that things can go wrong.

Over the next few days, I will discuss how the GTD system can be improved and personalized by incorporating the LEAN principles.

Defining Customer Value

Obviously, in my own GTD practice, I am the customer. So, what are my needs, and how do I define the value of the system and its results? Speed and Transparency are at the top of the list. I also need to be assured of Capturing my ideas and tasks, Effectively accomplishing or assigning these tasks for completion, and have every portion of the system support my ultimate Purpose.

Mapping the Value Stream

The Workflow diagram is the basic structure of my GTD practice, with personalized features. This is the “official” workflow diagram:

I sat down and drew up how my own workflow really works, in order to be able to visualize where weaknesses and bottlenecks may occur. This was very illuminating. The diagram I drew is below:

This evaluation clearly identified that logging actionable inputs and capturing inspirations/ideas was happening in more than one place. Thus some of these items were out of the workflow and lost until the Weekly Review turned them up.

Introduce Flow

The concept of Flow is at the very heart of Getting Things Done. Inputs are supposed to enter the system at the Inbox (Collect), get identified (Process), directed to the proper place (Organize), get evaluated (Review), and completed (Do). This is designed to be a very simple and transparent system, but it can become very complicated and unwieldy very quickly. The idea of LEAN is to make the flow as smooth and uninterrupted as possible. The Flow also needs to support your values, in my case, the speed, transparency and efficiency are the most important parts of the flow.

Solutions

The weaknesses identified in this process include multiple capture devices and inboxes, which contributed to an interruption of flow.

Additionally, even though I had incorporated a system for tracking multi-part projects, I had stopped using it because I did not carry the tools with me all the time.

Finally, I found that I was abusing the speed value, in that I was working on doing things too fast, which was costing me in terms of efficiency. The transparency of my system was also given too high of a priority, as I was not using my collection devices properly.
Thus, the following changes:

1. Slow down and capture ideas, tasks, etc. in the proper place the first time. This means just one Inbox, and a slightly longer list of Contexts for identifying when this Next Action should be addressed.
2. Re-introduce the daily task list, with a tag to identify the context.
3. Set a daily appointment with myself to review upcoming events/tasks and then program my day.



4. Pack all of the tools that I need to use into my organizer: Smurfed index cards for the Circa-fied hPDA, smurfed mini-cards for multi-part projects, and a tag menu for reminding myself how to assign Context tags, and how to read them.
5. Add Context tags to the Waiting for list, which was not labelled correctly, causing extra time to be spent searching for the rest of the Next Action.

These changes are fairly simple, yet fundamental to the way that the workflow actually works. As you can see, your GTD practice will remain a work-in-progress as it develops, and as your own circumstances evolve. New responsibilities will bring new features to your system.

Tomorrow we will look at the concept of Pull, and how it can be introduced into the workflow to improve efficiency, and how to incorporate Perfection into your Quarterly Review in order to maintain your workflow at peak operation.

UPDATE: A link to a related post at Evomend. Be careful at the end…

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