Dealing with sudden context change

As we know, Personal Kanban has two fundamental rules.

1. Visualize your work
2. Limit your work in progress

The first rule is easy to follow if you're using Personal Kanban. The second one takes a bit more effort but should be also rather simple. After all, it is easy to only deal with a set number of work items (the defined WIP limit) at the same time. Or is it not?

When checking the board in the start of the day, things usually are quite clear. The context gets defined, based on that the tasks get prioritized and wander into the Ready or Today columns and so far, everything looks pretty good and straightforward. Unfortunately, life is messy, and over the course of the next hours, a series of phone calls, incoming emails or letters try to change it all. Certainly, if the new tasks are not that important or urgent, it's easy to write new sticky notes and to put them into the Backlog where they wait until their due time. Sometimes though, the new work items appear to be quite urgent. The boss might want you to write a report, a customer might need your assistance, or something's broken and needs fixing. Annoyingly, no matter what kind of system one uses, these happenings have the tendency to really get into the way of doing things. So, what possibilities to react to these circumstances are there?

1. Ignore the changed context because the WIP limit is reached
2. Exceed the WIP limit temporarily
3. Find a way to stay within the WIP limit but still deal with the new tasks

Well, all these three options can make sense on their own, it mainly depends on what kind of tasks they are and how long it's going to take to finish them.

1.) Ignore the changed context
Many tasks one faces during a normal day are not that big and can be finished in short time. If the newly arrived tasks don't need immediate attention, it's better to take the time to finish the tasks you're currently working on, take a quick breath and then get your hands dirty with the new situation. Thinking about the cost of delay of a task can be a good guide to decide whether it can wait for a short while or not. That cost can be everything, ranging from money to the dissatisfaction of a customer or boss. To use a simple example, let's assume that the current task in progress is having lunch. If the report needs to be done in three hours, finishing lunch without stress is possible; if a server crashed and the company is losing money and you're the person who has to fix it, then it's most likely not.

2.) Exceed the WIP Limit temporarily
So, either the cost of delay is too high or the task you're currently working on would take too long, either way, something has to be done. In this case, it's a good idea to hit the pause button and put the current tasks on hold temporarily. For a short while - think of it as an emergency - the rules in place are suspended as well, so you can deal with the situation. For example, you could mark the emergency tasks with red colour and not count these to your WIP limit. As soon as these tasks are done, business as usual takes over again. Be warned though, if you use this approach, over time, more and more situations tend to be treated as emergencies and your organisation will make way to chaos.

3.) Find a way to deal with it
If the new tasks are not only very important but also are going to take a long time to deal with, postponing the things you were working on until now won't be a good idea for several reasons. For example, the task might become obsolete until the time you get back to working on it, or you can't even meaningfully resume it for one reason or another. In these cases, it's best to simply abandon these tasks.

Abandoning can mean simply deciding that you can live without doing it and cancelling it (and accepting the time worked on it as sunk cost). Alternatively, you could put it back into the backlog and restart it some other day. Some of the work you've already done might even still be used then so you'd have a head start in the second try. A third option would be to delegate the task, and get assistance from family members, team members or even external ressources. There are many good reasons though to not increase your work-in-progress for a longer period of time.

An excursion to Field theory
Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry already explained in their book Personal Kanban what negative consequences dealing with too many things at the same time can have. With too many things cluttering the mind, it becomes harder to stay clear and focused, more time gets wasted with what is called context-switching and even if a task is currently on hold, it comes back to the mind all the time. This is what is mentioned in the book as the Zeigarnik effect, named after the Russian student Bluma Zeigarnik, who described this effect in her thesis work under the supervision of Kurt Lewin.

Unfortunately, the suspense of remembering these open tasks is not all of the story. One year afterwards, another one of Lewin's staff, Maria Ovsiankina, discovered that we not only tend to remember unfinished business but also want to deal with it. The brain simply wants to get rid of the suspense and to work on these tasks. This so called Ovsiankina effect means that while you are working on one thing, you actually end up wanting to work on the other thing and vice versa. It quickly becomes apparent that this situation does not lead to joy or efficiency. Interestingly, Ovsiankina found out that this need to work on unfinished things arises even if there's no immediate reward connected to it. Ovsiankina's studies are available as PDF download (in German language).

Predict the future
I mentioned three approaches above how to deal with the situation if it arises. The best way to deal with it though is to keep it from happening. There will always be emergencies that can't be predicted but if there are things that tend to pop up as emergencies more than once, it is a wise idea to try and understand why it happened and if there's a way to know or act in advance. For example, this could be a good starting point for a retrospective or possible improvement of the way you organize things. If it's autumn, don't let the first snow surprise you (and cause the panic of trying to get an appointment to change to winter tyres) - the snow is going to come anyway, so get this done early enough - and save yourself the hassle.