muri, and kaizen.
Simpler Evernote GTD
[Updated] New, Simpler Evernote GTD System, Part 3: Removing the Waste (Muri, Muda, Mura)
For Part 3 of this series, I intended to focus on the notebooks in my Evernote GTD system. However after reading a bit about muri, muda, and mura, I decided to take a fresh look to see how wasteful my system might be.
This led to all kinds of questions: how much value is there in anything I do? How wasteful is a design? A user experience? A conversation? A song?
Muri, muda, and mura are three traditional Japanese terms for wasteful activities. If you’re a Lean practitioner or familiar with Toyota’s praised just-in-time methodology, you’ve probably heard these terms before. For the sake of brevity, I recommend reading the summaries that Bob Hubbard has collected from Wikipedia on his blog.
For our purposes, muri, muda, and mura are things that are slowing productivity.
Muri, muda, and mura in my Evernote GTD system and beyond
The following are questions I asked myself as I worked at simplifying my system and analyzed how I’d been trying to get things done:
Muda of overproduction
Am I producing too much? I’d never considered that. I always want to do more. But how much value is there in my completed projects? Is doing so much getting me closer to reaching goals or just giving me short-term satisfaction? Perhaps a fresh 80/20 analysis is necessary.
Muda of waiting
Are my projects moving along smoothly or do they stop and start? Maybe I’m not processing things correctly or thoroughly enough? Is overproduction causing more important things to wait? Is simple procrastination a cause?
Muda of transportation
How far does an email have to travel before it’s in my system? How far do I have to reach to act on it? Could I reduce the distance between inbox and system, agenda and person, etc?
Muda of processing
Am I processing too much? For instance, how much of my daily or weekly reviews are needed, valuable? Am I over-organizing? With my project template for Evernote, I believe I was.
Muda of inventory
This concept was a little difficult to apply, but it got me thinking again about how much value there was in what I am producing. How is what I’m doing now – even this blog post – propelling my life and goals forward?
Muda of motion
How far am I having to move things within my system? How many moving parts are there? Could grouping differently be more efficient? Do I have to have notebooks that read like a how-to from a David Allen book in order to be applying GTD correctly?
My conclusion: what works, works. I don’t see much value in rethinking David Allen’s many years of trial and error so I stick with the principles, but I can name my notebooks anything and group my lists any way I choose.
Muda of rework
Bigger considerations here: how much quality is there in what I do? Am I rushing, cutting corners? Am I doing the same work several times instead of touching once?
Muri – overburdened
How difficult is my GTD system to maintain? Is there redundancy? (the answer was ‘yes’) Can we do more with less? (again the answer was ‘yes’)
Mura – unevenness
This exercise truly blew my mind. How much external need is there for my internal efforts? Am I meeting a demand that doesn’t exist? Where is the pull?
For instance with this blog, is there really such a demand for all these posts? Could a slow, more calculated pace produce better content, content that people are actually searching for? Should I be listening more and responding in kind?
While I’ve already taken steps to simplify my current Evernote + GTD system (see part 2), this is a matter of kaizen, “continuous improvement”. Small, calculated changes will give us the biggest results without slowing down the production line.
As I clear the way to put only those things I need along my path, I’m sure there will be further discoveries.
Further reading
- Mura, Muri, Muda
- What is Muda?
- Bob’s Lean Learning
- Practice your personal Kaizen (refers to GTD)
- Kaizen and Pareto working together with GTD
Updates
I’ve added some graphics to help make skimming the post easier. Too much text, not enough guideposts. I’ve also rewritten parts since my excitement to share was faster than clear writing.
Great angle on GTD and removing waste.
I work from the principle that you first must master your processes, then you can improve them and later redesign them. I find your posts very useful in helping me to think how I should design my own GTD processes.
Important in Lean Thinking is value creation. Lean inspects a process by analyzing each task or activity to determine whether it is value-added, is not value-added but necessary, or is not value-added. Tasks are value-added when the customer is willing to pay for them. In the GTD context I would define value added as something that does contribute to my focus areas. I would define value-added but necessary as (routine) tasks that belong to my areas of responsibility.
I have the following additions to your Muda analysis:
Overproduction
It is bad to plan for the future. It is wasteful to create anything before it is needed. This should be aligned to your horizons and projects lists.
Motion:
Unnecessary keyboard or mouse clicks. Is everything easy to find inside my tools? How many time do I waste trying to find what I need?
Have I deduplicated all my information? Practical example: contacts in LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Contacts, etc.
Inventory:
Do I have the bare minimum (of information) to proceed. Do I waste my time finding more information than actually needed?
Wow! Great additions, Robert. I love your feedback; I always walk away with a fresh perspective.
I love “it is bad to plan for the future. It is wasteful to create anything before it is needed”. I see this as overplanning, over-organizing. I’ve read forum comments from people who go into excruciating detail with their next actions week after week during their weekly reviews. I’m of the mind that you need enough to keep moving, but if the next steps are obvious, why bother documenting it all? I’d rather knock things out and put them behind me.
“Unnecessary keyboard or mouse clicks” – oh definitely. You’ve got me thinking about my contacts now, too… I bet I have some in one place, some in the other, no central repository.
I guess I touched a bit on inventory with my comments above, but I’ll rephrase it this way: how much do we really need to get moving? Isn’t movement forward better than sitting still in preparation?
Have any further thoughts on Lean Thinking in regards to projects, tasks, areas, and horizons? Admittedly I feel like an outsider looking in with Lean, Muda, and related methods. I’m inspired by my reading, but book knowledge and experience are never the same.
I couldn’t figure out how the weekly review worked. Why would you only once a week look at your project list and decide on next actions? For me the answer was in a podcast where David Allen mentioned that most next actions were too obvious, so why bother trying to process them before hand.
I decided that my processes needed a bit more processing. In my field of work many actions depend on the completion of other actions. I didn’t want to bother my psychic RAM thinking about the Next Action once the previous was finished. That’s why I only use a task manager in which I can manually order the actions for every project during my Weekly Review.
I think you’re doing great on applying Lean. I attended a one day course applying Lean, Six Sigma and Theory of Constraints with an expert trainer from the field. I’m also using Lean Thinking in my graduation paper.
The biggest challenge applying Lean is to translate the principles from a manufacturing environment like Toyota to knowledge work or service management. While locating resources on Lean Thinking I stumbled upon a podcast “Applying Lean Techniques for Personal Productivity” at http://bit.ly/pllAmr This lead me to the website http://leanonmyself.net/
“LeanOnMyself, a concept developed by Niklas Modig at the Stockholm School of Economics, is a holistic approach to personal efficiency and work-life balance.”
As you can see they almost use the same horizons you have posted.
My advice would be to listen to the podcast and visit the site to learn more about Lean on Myself.
If you want to know more about lean service management read John Suddon’s excellent article at http://www.superfactory.com/articles/featured/2007/pdf/0706-seddon-tool-heads.pdf
Your post has inspired me to write a blog post combining Muda principles on knowledge work. This requires a lot of effort, so it will take some time before I can complete this.
I stumbled onto not writing out obvious next actions a month or so ago when I heard about how dedicated and thorough some people were at creating next actions. They would plan every project down to the atomic level every week during their weekly review without fail.
The thought was simply exhausting.
If one maps out all next actions for all projects, then moves them all to their context lists, I’d expect to have lists I’d never want to work on! Besides if priorities changed, all those lists would suddenly be out of date and all that effort wasted.
So I’m keeping things more fluid and simple, which is part of the appeal of Lean to me.
Thanks for the Lean on Myself link. I’ll be looking reading through that site more thoroughly over the next week.
Also thanks for the other information and I look forward to your post on combining Muda principles on knowledge work!
Great to hear you liked my additions. I have some resources on this subject and will post them on a later date.
+1 like to your content ,May I share it with my friend. Thank for your valuable article.
Thank you! I’m looking through your blog, too, for more about Muda!