Can You Navigate a WIP Storm?
As I write this, two large storms churn the Atlantic off the coast of Florida. Fortunately, Humberto and Imelda don’t plan to visit me according to the forecast. Yet, as a native Floridian, I am prepared. Hurricane season runs from June to November every year, and a lack of preparation means you may experience personal and financial harm.
It also had me thinking about the personal and financial harm we might experience from too much Work In Progress (WIP).
Are You Prepared For WIP Storms?
WIP storms occur when we have too much WIP. It may come from a single source or multiple sources. Let’s say you have two such WIP storms approaching you with a swirling mass of complexity, tasks, and dependencies to untangle. Let’s call them Project A and Project B as shown below.
How would it feel if you were:
Just hearing about these projects, but they are assigned to a colleague?
You know you are about to be assigned both these projects very soon?
You are in the middle of both these projects?
Let’s consider another variation: What if Project A represents a complex project at work and Project B results in replacing the roof on your house due to unexpected storm damage? (I faced this exact scenario in 2024 realizing our 20-year-old Florida roof probably would not withstand another hurricane passing nearby in 2025. Our roof was repaired after much wrangling with various vendors, one very good lawyer, and the insurance company.)
Have you faced these kinds of storms? I have … often. The one thing that helps me prepare and navigate these storms is visualization.
Can You See The Impact of Your WIP Storms?
With hurricanes, we track different kinds of information to determine how they will impact us: direction of storm, rotation, wind speed at different points, pressure changes, and more. All of this feeds into models that help predict the impact.
In the same manner, visualizing all your work in progress becomes the first step in building your visualization through a Personal Kanban. Yes, I mean ALL of it: all your work projects including your side projects, all your to-dos for family and friends, and your projects at home. Until you get everything out of your head and onto a board, you can’t really appreciate the approaching storms.
As an example, here are some of my current WIP storms (shown in the figure):
Multiple marketing efforts for my growing coaching business including two partner collaborations.
Some additional smaller efforts to nurture other revenue streams including four other partnerships (some short-term and some long-term)
Developing my coaching skills (as any professional would continue to add to their skills
All my fixes and maintenance tasks for our home
All the things to support my wife and her business (kids are mostly out of the house now, but they each had a board in the past)
All the things I do to maintain my health and well-being
Just to be clear, any of the six partners or my family or a close colleague might have some kind of emergency and request help. If that happens, it may quickly evolve into a new visualization (e.g., it’s own board).
But you cannot try to track all that detail all the time. As Brene’ Brown says, you want to distinguish between normal stress and overwhelm. With normal stress, we may feel excessive outside pressure, but we know what actions to take. We can handle it. Overwhelm happens when we can’t handle all the pressures and we cannot take action.
So let Personal Kanban hold the details for you and allow you to simplify your views so you can pay attention to what is important.
Can You Track the WIP Storm?
Those hurricane models provide a simplified view of the potential impact of the storm. These views help us pay attention to what is important about these storms.
In the same way, a Personal Kanban helps us pay attention to what is important with our WIP storms right now. Here is what I focused on today.
I may not get all of this “done” today, but it’s what I need to focus on to navigate my WIP storms.
How do you build your views of your WIP storms to navigate?
Hope this helps,
Mark
Footnotes:
Want to learn how to build better visualizations of your WIP storms? Join Dave Prior and me starting October 16 for Productivity Survival. For readers of this newsletter, use code MarksMarv75 for a deep discount. I’d really like you to join us.
If you are curious about Brene’ Brown’s take on “overwhelm,” you’ll be interested in Dan Harris’s recent interview with Brene' and this article.
Some folks are still overwhelmed by AI. If you have colleagues that haven’t really figured out what to do with large language models, you might be interested in my webinar next week with Melissa Francis. Details at: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/markkilby/1884157
Last week, I put out a survey to find out what themes you might want to hear more about. If you missed it, you can still submit until Friday, October 3: