Apersonal kanban is considered a productivity tool because it gives us the power to produce more. It’s also said to increase our efficiency by limiting work in progress (WIP) and increasing focus, which means we expend less energy to get results. This in turn boosts our effectiveness by providing the information necessary to make better decisions and act on them.

I will not be accused of burying the lead here, and say right up front: Your value stream is wrong. And it always will be. This is a good thing because as we work from day to day, the steps we take to complete our work can subtly or even violently change. When we move from home to work to a special project, there are subtle and important differences to how we do what we do.

Parkinson’s Law is: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” People misconstrue it all the time.

Logic plays funny tricks on our brains sometimes. People look at Parkinson’s Law and think that it’s telling us that work will expand (or contract) to fill the time to the deadline. So if I give you a project that will take you two weeks to do, and give you an eight-week deadline, you will not complete it for eight weeks.