Use the pull method and sticky notes to tackle work

Here’s how a team of IT professionals uses spare office walls and sticky notes to prevent individual team members from being overloaded, and how to move projects forward or kill them. Also: How can you do the same thing.

In his latest book, Low Productivity: The Lost Art of Achieving without BurnoutGeorgetown University computer science professor Cal Newport talks about his work on MIT Management Review. This is the story of a team of IT professionals tasked with building novel digital tools to help scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was immediately drawn to how they used a simulated approach to solving challenges – using sticky notes on the wall, another example of the power of this seemingly simple tool in a group setting.

In his latest book, Cal Newport discusses how readers can limit their productivity to sustainable levels.

This is what we often write about convene. Storycraft Lab’s Naomi Clare tells us that sticky notes convenegreat for brainstorming, forces us to “get out of our own heads—we might construct a more complex narrative—and break our logic down into small ideas.”

For example, organizers told us that during a “connection session” at Exponent Philanthropy’s annual conference, participants wrote responses to questions on sticky notes, such as recalling practices they had changed over the past year. convene. The notes were pinned to the wall and grouped into categories for all participants to see.

Prevent overload

But back to the Broad Institute example: The authors of the MIT case study wrote that the IT team “is considering many more technology development ideas than it can fully investigate, and has more ongoing projects than it is overloaded with. The operations team can implement more.” Sound familiar?

Engineers kept coming up with new ideas, and “the system soon became bogged down by its excessive ambition,” Newport wrote. “If a project is deemed particularly important, it is ‘rushed’, leaving the team to ‘drop everything and put out new fires.’ Individual engineers find themselves frantically juggling projects beyond their capabilities, new priorities keep emerging, and needs Their attention shifts unpredictably.”

Again: Sound familiar? In our recent salary survey, planner respondents frequently complained about having to manage changing priorities.

Newport said engineers “want to move from a system where new tasks can be pushed onto their plates at will to a system where new work is pulled in only when they are ready.”

To achieve this — and remember, I can imagine these are IT professionals who would be comfortable using an online task management platform — “they painted on some unused wall space in their office chart”. The diagram includes a box showing each step of its design process, from initial idea through testing and deployment.

“Specific projects are represented by post-it notes taped to the walls of the box, corresponding to the current stage of the process,” Newport explains. “Each note is labeled with the name of the engineer involved in that note, making it clear that each person is currently What are you doing?”

Newport, California

He writes in the book that the group meets once a week to discuss the status of each Post-it note low productivity. “If a project is ready to move to the next phase, the team leader will need to find engineers with enough spare capacity to take on the project. Their names will be added to the note and then moved to the next box.”

This approach makes it easy to identify once and for all if a project is stuck: its notes will stop moving to the next stage. Then decide if any member of the team is capable of moving forward with the project, or if the project should be canceled entirely.

The genius of this system, Newport points out, is that it prevents “an unlimited amount of work from being pushed onto any one individual’s plate” through group consensus. Team members can only complete new work if they have enough—this is easily seen by “surveying how often their names appear on the wall.”

Newport wrote that overloading became “impossible.” The pull strategy resulted in the technology development team’s total number of ongoing projects being cut in half, “while project completion rates increased significantly.”

Listen to Newport read this paragraph low productivity In the Next Big Idea Club.

Michelle Russell is the author of “ held.