The Strange Lesson My Whiteboard Taught Me

Jan 20, 2019

By chris danilo on Jan 19, 2019 05:00 am
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I walked into my office today and saw some brainstorming I had done over a week ago.

It was all over my whiteboard.

It was a map that helped me see some of the dependencies and workflows in my team—visibility here is critical for making improvements.

But then I realized that if I wiped it away to make room for the new problem I needed to solve right then, I would lose a lot of my progress.

Sure I can take a photo, but those so easily get tucked away into the bottomless digital pile.

It’s so easy to do some of the work without doing all of it. If you don’t do all of it, it’s easy to waste all the work you did do.

You will develop an incredible amount of work waste unless you’re careful not to do some of the work without doing all of it.

You will move faster if your work progress is documented or if a decision is made at the end of the time you’ve set aside to work.

Get all of your “to-dos” into a single pile. Pull them all in from everywhere you keep them.

Your notepad. Your inbox. Your sticky notes.

Get them all in a list and prioritize them. Each one must fight for its life to stay on the list.

You are much less likely to have work waste when you have a single place to store tasks and review projects.

Nothing gets lost.

The work you’ve done so far gets recorded in the same place as everything’s else.