In these last two weeks, I have been trying to implement my Kanban routine and self-reflect on it. Two major things come to my mind about this period: (1) I re-structured the Kanban design because the post-its kept falling and some of them were repeatable and had to jump around too much, so I transformed them into fixed statements in the whiteboard that I can check and erase as needed, and (2) my post-it-tasks, the not repeatable tasks, can be split into “real” work tasks and educational or social tasks. Overall, these distinctions are helping me visualize my work better but I am still struggling to control them since the work in progress is impaired by so many side tasks (such as meetings).
I had an opportunity to reflect more on the repeatable tasks, because of the ability to visualize my work. Visualizing my work has proven to be much more impactful and fruitful than I had expected at the beginning. I understand my routine better and my work is flowing better overall, which allows me to think about strategies to improve my work and my professional development more effectively. One of my main repeatable tasks is a “Week Re-cap”, which I do every Friday afternoon. That is when I erase the repeatable tasks and get rid of all the “done” post-its. I put the post-its on my archive and make comments, I also write down comments about the repeatable tasks. It was at this re-cap that I was able to identify the issue with the flow of post-its related to the repeated tasks and modified it as I mentioned above. This week, I am starting to see that the repeatable tasks not just flow differently but they also feel different and require different sorts of attention and mental energy from me. Most of them are book-keeping or managerial tasks that have to be done – which is good and bad. It is good to have the tasks that don’t require a lot of concentration because I can fit them into small time slots between meetings or when I have to wait for something. The bad part is that these tasks have this “set on stone” nature and I don’t have to “pull” them into my work in progress I feel more alienated to them, I feel a lack of ownership and no reward in completing or doing them. Nonetheless, recognizing the machinery aspect of performing these tasks also removed some of the burdens of actually doing them. Some of these tasks, however, require more effort – such as preparing for meetings. One strategy I am trying involves breaking the burdensome parts into other tasks, I can create active tasks related to preparing for them it became just a matter of prioritizing them in my pull requests into the working in progress. I also created a somewhat independent set of repeatable tasks related to learning: reading textbooks or papers. I record the tasks here to be able to reflect at the end of the week and visualize them as work, as well as to keep track of my progress regarding these tasks. I have clear goals for increasing my knowledge of specific or broad topics related to my work since I identified this as a weakness in my IDP. But I am still struggling to transfer the reading into actionable tasks. I hope that I can use the Week Re-cap and the creation of new tasks to support me in transferring the reading into tangible outcomes. The cycle of repeatable tasks has solidified a little better in my mind, but the non-repeatable tasks not as much.
About the non-repeatable tasks, or the “post-it” tasks, they involve a lot of social interactions as well as the experiments and analyses that will ultimately be transformed into publications and what I need to finish my degree and get a good post-doc position. I have been spending a significant amount of time on the non-work work (the social stuff), things like organizing seminars, preparing for and meeting invited speakers, the climate and diversity committee, etc. Even though fulfilling, these tasks are not really the reason I joined the graduate program and don’t contribute to any progress towards graduation. I am not sure how logical this conclusion is (I know networking is important, I know that developing a community and sense of belonging is important, etc), but that is how I feel now, like I am not prioritizing my time properly. I have been very stressed lately and thinking about home a good amount, which always makes me question all my choices up to now. Additionally, I have been here for 5 years already and I don’t really feel close to an end, which contributes to the feeling that I need to focus on the more concrete steps forward. Luckily, my week re-caps also show me that I have put a good amount of work into coding a script to curate my pictures and into extracting DNA for library prep. These are two small entries in my whiteboard and archive, which don’t reflect the amount of time I dedicate to them in comparison to the time dedicated to the other tasks. I know rationally that I did a lot of “work work” as well, but maybe I need a better way to have the number of hours dedicated to different tasks reflected on my archive and workflow. I will add that to my backlog.
I know the kanban isn’t a silver bullet to solve all my problems in graduate school, but I am glad it seems to be working very well so far.
The Memetic Basis of a Biologist 