Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life Workshop

Gain the clarity and energy to focus on priorities

Published: Thursday, March 8, 2012 - 13:47

(Modus Cooperandi: Seattle) -- Personal Kanban is an effectiveness system built for our frenetic 21st century lives. More than ever it seems, we have more work than we can handle, more goals we never get around to realizing... and more sleepless nights because of it. Too often our mission-critical tasks, social obligations, as well as our aspirations are buried in to-do lists, embedded in e-mail programs, or worse yet, entangled in the promises in our heads.

Personal Kanban helps us visualize all that's on our plate, making our work tangible and engagable, while encouraging us to limit our work in progress (WIP) to promote its completion. With just these two simple rules Personal Kanban give us the clarity and energy we need to focus on our priorities so we can not just be productive, but more important—be more effective—doing the right work at the right time. With Personal Kanban we no longer focus on starting projects but instead, we can begin to revel in the fact that we are seeing them through to completion.

Without a lot of complex rules, convoluted steps, or prescriptive dogma, Personal Kanban is a simple, low-tech system that produces profound results. It has been adopted and written about globally by individuals, families, schools, startups, Fortune 10 companies, and world governments.

In this introductory workshop agile expert Gerry Kirk, along with the creator of Personal Kanban, Jim Benson, discuss not only the “whys” and “hows” of using the tool to manage our time more effectively, but also ways to employ Personal Kanban as a means to foster collaboration—both at home and at the workplace.

Event Details
The workshop will be held Monday, April 23, 2012 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM (ET) Washington, DC. Early bird discounts are available—for individuals and for groups of three or more from the same organization—through March 19, 2012. Early Bird attendees will receive a copy of the book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry, as well as a follow up meeting with instructors Jim and Gerry. Details can be found here

There are 36 total seats at this event. Contact Modus Cooperandi for event and ticket information.

What People Are Saying:
"Creative, engaging, productive."
"Personal Kanban changed the way I think about everything I do."
"The workshop is a fun ride through several Agile techniques that I can turn around and put to use right away!"
"Attend the workshop. It allows you to reflect on where you can make personal effectiveness improvements and teaches you how to do it."
"Now I can see better what I need to do and have a flexible means to manage my work."

About Our Instructors:

Jim Benson
Benson is the creator of “Personal Kanban,” a lean process used to manage knowledge workers. Knowledge work is a fundamentally tricky type of work to gain focus around, as those engaged in this type of work are by nature inventive. Invention and innovation are unpredictable, and related tasks are often amorphous. For the past two decades Benson has worked at uncovering ways for individuals and groups to communicate, collaborate, and find clarity in unpredictable and amorphous environments. He is also the CEO of Modus Cooperandi, a company focusing on collaborative management. He writes about and works with clients to achieve cultures of continuous improvement. These cultures actively seek out opportunities to improve job satisfaction and performance. Since starting Modus, Benson has helped clients as diverse as The World Bank, The United Nations, NBC Universal, The Library Corporation, and Comcast find collaborative solutions, identify and implement improvements, and create more innovative cultures.

Gerry Kirk
Kirk has more than fifteen years of industry experience and five years experience as a management consultant, assessing and guiding organizations to produce higher value, increase productivity and quality, delivered by a highly motivated, empowered workforce. Coaching and training ensure that transition plans to adopt agile (scrum, kanban, lean) are achieved. Kirk also speaks regularly at industry conferences as a recognized expert in agile methods, including the largest conference each year, Agile 2010 and 2011.

About The Author

Modus Cooperandi

Modus Cooperandi works with organizations to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, increase productivity, improve communication, and build and support highly functional teams. Its mission is to deliver performance through collaboration by deploying modern collaborative techniques such as agile practices and lean thinking coupled with insights in communication and collaboration from social media and social networking. Modus partners believe that the basic tenants of collaborative management are the reduction of waste, an increase in throughput, and an increase in quality.