Last week, Jabe Bloom (@cyetain) came up with an interesting implementation of using Personal Kanban to visualize his reading tasks to avoid losing track of what books, magazines and newspaper articles he reads or has to read. When I told Sven, a friend of mine, who I had introduced to Personal Kanban to help mapping his study tasks, I was quite surprised when he explained that he had already been using a small Kanban for his reading tasks for quite a while. Naturally, I asked Sven about it and after some insisting he finally caved in and took a picture of his Book-Kanban (I don't really like the term BookBan, getting all the wrong associations there).
Sven's Book-Kanban is based on two swimlanes with each swimlane being represented by one column. Therefore, his WIP-Limit regarding reading is 2. The Ready column also contains the date when the respective item was started. From Ready, the item flows through Today, Reading, Done for Today until it arrives in Finished.
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| Picture of Sven's Book-Kanban |
Usually, I let my habits and environment limit my reading WIP. I usually have a book lying around at my office, I use my Kindle on public transport, I have a book on the window sill next to my bed and I have some books and magazines around my couch table. And yes, I am usually simply too lazy to walk around and transport the book I want to read to the place I am, so whatever's accessible is up next.
So, mapping the books I'm currently reading was quite easy but a quick glance at the pile of books I had already purchased and not started reading yet, all the notes and lists with articles, blogs and more books to order from Amazon quickly told me that having in the same bucket of backlog would not portray correctly the items from which I'd pull next. In my mind, there was already a certain preselection taking place, so I put these things I want to read next into a Ready column and denoted a huge area for the Backlog and everything that would pop up during my reading, from references to other books or the urge to read more by the same author.
I also noticed that while reading, I would sometimes stop and make notes for things I'd have to look up, ask someone about or check for validity. For these tasks I created a Gather Information column, limiting it though, to make sure I'd not lose myself in the jungle of references. After finishing, the books would go into the Done Reading column, although for me, they'd not be completely done by then. Usually, after reading a book, it takes me an unspecified amount of time that can range from a few days up to one or two months to think about what I've read, to slowly digest it, and to understand its meaning or importance. When I finally experienced the "aha!" of sudden understanding, the book goes into the final column, Understood.
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| Illustration of my personal Book Kanban, Post-It graphics by Disk Depot |
Frankly, I don't think so. Of course, visualizing my work is important to me, and a Book Kanban would certainly fulfill that requirement. What I'd be missing though is flow. With my current reading speed and the fact that my reading time per day is quite limited it becomes clear that there will be only a movement on the board about once every week. I'd even predict that most of the movement would be more additions to the Backlog / Spin-Offs and the ever growing amount of books and things I really, really want to read. Maybe I could increase the flow by introducing separate chapters although my gut feeling tells me that this would produce significant overhead that is not worth it. Nevertheless, I also learnt a big lesson from this experiment (and after all, isn't this what we're here for?) - I absolutely needed to consolidate the places where I'd put down reading-related notes, so they wouldn't get lost in the chaos.
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