Stop Starting and Start Finishing

I am terrible at coming up with new ideas and projects, by which I mean I do it way too much. I get distracted easily whenever I get a new idea for a project. By now this means I have accumulated an immense graveyard of half-finished projects.

As I have always felt the 'learning' was the goal half-finished projects in itself is not a problem. I have always said if you know how to do something there is no point in actually doing it.

Recently though I have decided that I would like to start finishing things. Hopefully reaping more benefits from them. I hope that by combining ideas from other different areas I can create something to help me gain more focus.

Limit WIP, from Kanban

Wanting to limit what I am working on I immediately thought of Kanban. In Kanban, we have a Work-In-Progress (WIP) limit meaning that each workstation can only work on a set number of items.

I figured that this would be pretty easy to adapt to my needs. A Kanban board traditionally has a column for each workstation including one for incoming work (To do), and outgoing work (Done). In my case I have only one workstation – myself – so I need only one column for that. I also don't need either incoming nor outgoing, so really what I want is just one column with a fixed number of places. I settled on 3 places.

I also need a very clear way to free up these spots again, although it shouldn't be too easy, as that would be the same as where I started. I decided to add a specific goal which when reached would allow me to free that place. In some cases, I might set my goal too high or lose interest. To make sure the WIP limit doesn't get deadlocked like that I also add a deadline to each goal. So if the goal is reached or the deadline is passed I am allowed to free up the spot.

Small Batches, from Lean

Having only three activities I can spend leisure time on encourages setting the goals low enough that you can still swap them out quickly. This is very similar to the 'small batches' preached in lean manufacturing. I very much like this property of the system, as smaller goals are more likely to yield successes.

While small goals is a nice side effect, it does get dangouresly close to just setting trivial goals, and then swapping them as quickly as I did without the system effectively not gaining any focus.

Themes, from CPG Grey

The final improvement I made to the system is to change the "activities" to "themes" in CPG Grey style. I am allowed to change these themes only every three months, so they should be broad.

The final system then has three themes changing at most every three months, each with one goal that I am currently allowed to work on. Each goal has a deadline and I am only allowed to change the goal when it is reached, or the deadline expires.

My Hobby Board

My current hobby board looks like this:

Theme	Goal	Deadline
Italian Cooking	Ravioli	April 25th
Writing	Write a book	January 1st
Medicine	Anatomy jigsaw puzzle	March 1st