A while ago in February, I started applying personal kanban with journaling to organize my days. The setup worked OK, but with some time passing, I’ve been making adjustments.
Focusing and Making Progress
One thing I was missing – although I did have focus areas – was seeing how I make progress over time and move the needle when it comes to big and important goals that take time…
A big goal is like eating an elephant, and there’s a famous saying about that:
It’s so simple and almost silly, but very real. A journey of a thousand miles and all that jazz… To make impact, you need to work your way one small step at a time. We underestimate how much we can achieve over longer periods of time if we are consistent (and usually overestimate how much we can do on a short timeline*).
The Two Stones
This is where the stones come in.
One of my former managers once told me that every I should pick 3 stones I want to move forward each day, and then forge ahead. Another one said he choses one single thing he would like to achieve, and that it’s a good day even if nothing else got done – you keep making progress step by step.
The exact number and metaphore doesn’t really matter – the focus is a point.
Putting Everything Together and Changes to My System
I ended up combining the three principles:
- choosing focus areas
- working in small increments
- working persistantly long-term
While experimenting with personal kanban, journaling, time tracking and navigating work and life, I made some relevant adjustments:
1. Limiting work in progress AND in focus
I started of with 9 areas I prioritize and focus on. This turned out to be too many. Hard to switch context and have an intuitive feeling of progress, where you are and what’s remaining. Now it is 7, max 8.
2. Having Two Stones
I decided that out of focus areas, I can choose 2 I find most important. In particular, I chose “PhD Studies” and “solvers.city” side project. [Obviously, the full-time job is a stone in and of itself, but it gets done and worked on by default, no need to call it out as a stone.
3. Sticking to the plan persistently
To make progress, I need to keep pushing forward, but also want to balance this with agility and responding to changes**.
A ‘measure’ I ended up with: the stones are chosen (set in stone?) for a period of 4 to 5 weeks.
I am visually tracking this on my personal kanban board***.
This is what I ended up with:
Try This Out?
How do you navigate your work and life? Maybe Two Stones can be a great “anti-anxiety” tool for people juggling multiple priorities and projects, and they make sure you keep progressing.
If you try and experiment with this – please let me know how it goes!
* ‘Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.’ Bill Gates
** ‘Responding to change over following a plan’ Agile Manifesto
*** Besides two main stones I will try to work on every day, I added a column for gym and Hebrew – but they have nothing to do with the stones, I just want to track if I do practice & exercise regularly.
**** Cover photo and the elephant illustration made with GenAI
Leave a Reply